Conreligions Checklist III: Scripture, Language, Sex

•  Scripture
• What function does it have?
• Laws?
• Moral guidance?
• Ritual praxis?
  
• Just-so stories?
• Philosophical consideration?
• Philosophical speculation?
• Explaining "historical" causes?
  
• Devotional praxis?
• Beliefs?
• A record of agreements?
• Who are the parties?
• Supernatural beings?
• Tribes?
• Families, dynasties, states?
• Individuals?
• Religious parties?
  
• Local records of families and recent history?
• Scripture whose physical form has a ritual function
• The Torah scrolls in the synagogue service
• The small Torah verses in the mezuzah and tefillin
• Scripture whose physical form has a borderline magic function
  
• Swearing oaths "on the Bible"
• Carrying the Bible as some form of talisman
• Opening the Bible at random and parsing the first verse you see as providing the answer to your quandary
• The mezuzah, again, can be seen as borderline magic in some of its claimed effects among orthodox Jews
  
• Scripture as a sufficient "blueprint" to the religion vs. as only a part  of the blueprint
• In protestantism, sola scriptura has sometimes been an important principle, but it's also a principle that has always been curtailed in various ways. I think the standard now is "sola scriptura is sufficient for salvation, but church tradition is important for the actual day-to-day life of the church", even in churches that deny the existence of a church tradition.
  
• How is it read?
• Is it read in the vernacular, or in a specific language?
• Are there especially respected translations (e.g. Jewish targumim, periphrastic translations into aramaic)
  
• Read in public?
• ... in private?
• ... in study sessions?
• ... with a friend?
  
• ... carefully and deliberately while thinking deeply?
• ... meditatively?
• ... to ascertain its meaning?
• ... just to hear its words (as a form of music, almost)?
• ... is it read in a singing manner?
• ... as prayer?
  
• ... is its surface meaning held to be the only meaning? How much meaning can a creative reader insert?
• How uniform is it?
• ... as far as genre goes?
• ... linguistically?
• ... are the authors even adherents of a single religion, or do they vary strongly in beliefs?
• ... is it a compilation of books? Of even shorter texts? Of poems? Of sermons?
• Are the authors necessarily considered supernaturally inspired? All of them?
• Symbolic language
• Do the authors use symbolic language to encode meanings? E.g. numerology, etc.
• Is it canonized?
• Is there multiple levels of scripture of differing levels of sacredness/authoritativeness?

In Islam, the Quran is accepted in its entirety; however, it is permissible to question the authenticity of hadiths, and different schools (madhhab) accept different hadiths as authentic. The compilations of hadiths are so important for islam that they undoubtedly can be considered a type of scripture.

In Judaism, the Torah is clearly the crown of scripture. The Mishnah, the Gemara, the Tosefta, the Talmud, the siddurs, the various midrashes, the Zohar form a somewhat nebulous family of texts of some level of sacredness.

 

In some forms of Christianity, not only the Bible, but also the hymnal has been ascribed almost magical powers. Same goes for the catechismus.

• Are believers expected to read or at least be familiar with the content?
• Is some content only meant for some members?
• Is it even feasible for a member to read all the scripture? (In times before the printing press and industrial paper mills, this might not only be an issue due to lack of time.)
•  How is it produced?
• Printed? 
• Copied by hand?
• In monasteries?
• By a specialist caste?
• By professional scribes?
• Haphazardly, and in secret? (In case of a very persecuted religion)
• Here, scribal mistakes become a very real and interesting factor.
• The Jewish scribal tradition has a lot of interesting ways of mitigating scribal mistakes over time (imperfect ways, but nevertheless, ways). I have seen the claim that scribal traditions are among the most "esoteric" in all of Judaism.
  
• Language
• To what extent has the religion affected the language?
• Names! Especially when a religion is imported into a culture it easily can bring a lot of names along.
  
• In countries of Christian culture, several plants may have names from the religion, here are those I know of:
  
• parsley (Petersilie, Persilja, etc - named for Saint Peter)
• carob is known as "John's bread" in several languages, due to a story of John the Baptist living off carob.
• Saint John's wort
• Aron's rod, Jacob's ladder
  
•  holidays serve well as waypoints in time, which of course affects language. Not to mention that our names of months as well as weekdays originate in religions that either are extinct or are very small minorities today.
• Religious terminology may go through semantic shifts
  
• in my dialect of Swedish, "välsigna sig" (to bless oneself) has come to mean 'to relax a moment', mostly in idioms along the line of "didn't have time to bless himself".
• religious buildings may figure frequently in sayings ("så jä ä jir i världen millan tjörtjon å kvärnen" - thus it is here in the world between the church and the mill")
• religious functionaries, books, etc may figure in figures of speech as well
• Religions easily bring along a lot of terminology when a population changes language, or a religion is spread to a new language - c.f. how Germanic languages adopted a lot of religious, latin terminology in medieval times (here, the population converted), or how Yiddish conserves a lot of hebraisms and aramaisms (and there, the population changed language but kept the religion).
• Cussing often has a religious component, likewise greetings, insults and other formalized utterance types.
• Linguistic taboos may also be religiously informed.
• In a religion with scripture (or memorized narratives), the understanding of the meaning of the text may change as the language changes. I have encountered people whose understanding of the Bible is far from the understanding that the translators of it expressed in the language of their time, yet these people believe their understanding is the sole acceptable understanding - this due to the language having changed since their translations were made.
• The other way around, a religion may hold a certain language to be somehow "closer to reality" than other languages. I.e. the language has the true names of things (or whatever). In such a case, that language may be the main language used in ritual and in magic, even non-sanctioned such. The idea that language and reality have a much closer relationship than most modern people would hold was very common all the way to the 18th century.
• In such a world view, puns can be significant indicators of the nature of things.
• Sex
• Religion isn't only anti-sex, and it isn't only modern religions that are pro-sex. However, sex and religion does deserve some attention, and the various attitudes towards sex also deserve being considered in the light of historical health concerns.
  
• Restricting sex isn't all that dumb in a context where pregnancy very often leads to death.
• Control of sex is sensible in a context where resources are scant.
•  Restrictions on what types of sex, or even what kinds of positions are common.
• E.g. the Catholic church, orthodox churches, some protestants, most (all orthodox?) muslims ban anal sex. Bans on oral sex exist in several Christian movements.
  
• Some rabbis in the Talmud considered anal sex banned for non-Jews, but permissible for Jews.
•  Ethnoreligions need sex. Ethnicities go extinct if they don't have sex.
• The skoptsi considered the breasts and the testicles to be the forbidden fruit, which Adam and Eve had grafted onto their bodies. Devoted skoptsi would get castrated (or surgically remove the breasts and the labia). Various levels of extreme removal of genitals took place. The sect survived for over a century, potentially even 200 years. Somehow this says something about Russia, and I am not sure what.
  
• E.g. Jewish law mandates that the husband satisfy his wife's sexual needs, and some such demands are also expressed in the ketubah - the wedding contract.
• Rabbinic Judaism considers the sabbath especially good for sex; some movements of Christianity have considered children born on sunday to be proof that the parents were sinful (by having sex on sunday - the assumption being that a child always would be born on the same weekday as it was sired. Yes, people have believed that kind of thing). At least some karaite Jews forbid sex on the sabbath.
  
• Orthodox Judaism and Islam ban sex during (and for a while after) menstruation; a cleansing ritual is undergone after the time has passed. Some modern, liberal feminist Jewish thinkers have adopted this tradition for interesting reasons, e.g. the sexlessness for a couple of weeks (followed by two weeks with sex) can apparently be healthy for a relationship. Others, of course, see this as misogynistic and anti-female.
  
• I don't think there's much reason to write much about religious views on homosexuality here - there's variation there as well, although the pagan religions of antiquity probably didn't conceive of homosexuality as any kind of "romantic partnership" either. However, certainly a religion could have a modern view.
  
• I have seen the claim that in the Talmud, the rabbis are a bit unsure if a wife who is unfaithful with a woman actually has committed adultery. I have tried finding this discussion, but to no avail.
• Interestingly enough, even religions whose traditions and ethics basically leave the question open (or even can be construed with little to no effort to be decidedly pro-LGBTQ) seem to tend to have conservative groups who will be negative. Sikhism is one example. There's also a fair share of anti-LGBTQ Hindus, despite the fact that Hindu gods are pretty much omnisexual.
• In many shamanic religions, the shamans are somewhat intersex. Chukchi shamans use the female phonology. It is common for shamans throughout Siberia to dress femininely. I think I've seen similar claims re: American shamans as well.
  
• Celibacy, either temporary or permanent, for a variety of groups. Various possible causes!
• Fear that clergy would distribute church property among offspring / as inheritance.
• A way of avoiding priestly dynasties.
• This might reduce the risk of secular rulers finding the church a threat?
• This might reduce the risk for upper echelons in the church w.r.t. lower echelons.
• Various possible effects!
• People whose sexual identity is slightly unusual might find the celibate role attractive, and therefore pursue becoming a priest/monk/nun.
• There's also dark possibilities here, very much realized in the real world as well.
  
• The celibate priest also is somewhat "outside" of the gender norms, and thus in some sense also similar to the shamans mentioned above.
• Ritualized sex
• Ritualization also generally entails some kind of "sacredness" of whatever you ritualize, and sacred things generally have restrictions on them.
• Now, "ritual sex" might sound naughty and all, but might be something as simple as a married couple, when having sex, doing some minor boring ritual before or after (e.g. saying a blessing or lighting a candle - or blowing out a candle)
• It might also, however, be a ritual where sex is part of the ritual and done in order to achieve some supernatural effect.