Monster Island, Protestant Christianity Edition

[Note: I worked on this post for awhile last week, but then got distracted and never really finished it to my satisfaction. And let's face it, that's a pretty low hurdle to get over. But here's most of what I wrote.]

More great stuff on the great faith debate. Link.

Rebecca: faith, it seems to me, has nothing necessarily to do with God. that is, my first point is that the discussion is waaay too focused on the Mediterranean religious episteme, which in turn is then used to filter other epistemes such as 'polytheism' (aka Hinduism, a 'religion' which is a recent historical construction joining together a whole raft of belief systems which, in some forms, are not even polytheistic). this is a problem because it assumes a unity to faith that doesn't exist, and it reads all religions as fundamentally similar, which they are not.

I agree that any discussion b/w TMcD and me will be focused on Christianity, one of the offshoots, if you will, of "the Mediterranean religious episteme." (Btw, I love that phrase and promise to use it in the future.) My first point is, to be fair to TMcD and me, that when that particular episteme was being originated, our ancestors were hitting each other with clubs and worshipping the pagan gods. Second, both TMcD and me are, alas, stuck within Christianity . . . stuck within Protestant Christianity, even. That's where we fight out our battles. Just like Godzilla and Mothra on Monster Island (with guest appearances in Tokyo and in horrible American remakes, New York), we just can't fight this thing out anywhere else. In our favor, I think that I can speak for TMcD that we are both (painfully) aware that this is the ground on which we can duel; for my part, I admit my ignorance of non-Mediterranean epistemes. Oh, yeah.

But to return to the point (as much as I ever do), here, on Monster Island, faith has everything to do with God.