The Features of Religion

[sman]

I noticed that some muslim friends I work with wash themselves in the bathroom at every break - their hands and their faces. Upon asking (they are accustomed to these kind of annoying questions from me by now) I learned that muslims wash themselves 5 times a day in this way as a ritual of the faith. This may strike a secular person as just one of those weird things about religion, but it also occurs to me that Islam requires running water, or comparable facilities. This seems like a beneficial feature of Islam.

 

It’s important that I mean benefit here in a strict sense: Beneficial to Islam meaning Maximizing the Occurrence of Islam - in this case, by way of benefiting its practitioners through hygiene. But I imagine not every feature that is beneficial to the religion also happens to be beneficial to the host. It’s not an obvious requirement.

 

For example, another feature: Muslims must undergo a period of fasting before Ramadan. Now, fasting certainly does not promote the health of humans - in fact, I would say it is harmful to humans - but we may assume that this is in some way beneficial to the belief system itself, even if its not obvious how. Compare with the ritual gorging that christians undergo around Christmas. I’m not sure how fasting/gorging could benefit a religion, but I think it’s a good idea to ask the question.

 

The mormons, among many christian divisions, refer to one another by kinship terms: brother Marcus, sister Kirsten.... Catholics (among others) refer to members of their priestly class as “father”. I think this is appealing to, or co-opting, an already existing system of kinship relations and emotions among humans. It may also be exploiting the in-group/out-group propensities of these kinds of primates.

 

This may be an exercise in idle speculation, and it may turn out that this is just the wrong way to look at these things, but I see no harm in entertaining the idea. We can, if only in this thread, discuss the features of religion from the point of view of the religion. Though that may seem audacious, it may help us better understand these systems. :D