Introduction to Religious Studies

Today I was introduced to Religious Studies.
Please note that I was inducted into a specific religion once many years ago and this was nothing like that at all—this was far more fun.

The painting below is titled Out of the Dark. It is a visual representation of what I experienced from 9 am this morning until 1 pm this afternoon during said introduction to Religious Studies.

I felt an ascension from my preconceived dark notions about what I believed to be "Religion" into a cloudy potential of new ideas and exciting opportunities to restructure my thinking methods.

Out of the Dark

Today Sam Gill and I have a lot in common. 

His attempt to define a structure for the study of religion in his article The Academic Study of Religion is much like my attempt to create rules for my own apotropaic tendencies and magical thinking to ward off religion and it's followers. 

By the way, that word, apotropaic, yeah, well I just learned that today when the wiley instructor tossed it out there like a shiny bone for me to run home and chew on (meaning that I had to look it up).

I am not an academic like Sam Gill but I do understand the need for structure. I, too, want to design an outline that may help me communicate about abstractions more effectively.

What I learned today is that I am not the only person throughout history attempting to create tangibilities out of subjective intangibilities and metaphors. Poor Sam Gill. He had an academic audience for an irrational concept. 

But the exciting part is, like the above painting; the abstract nature of it all. 

I am excited to explore this class, the characters, and the new approach to defining things differently—with a structure. 

What I learned on my Friday Vacation in Religious Studies:

• Apotropaic tendencies can be magical.
• Sam Gill lived in a time when being wishy-washy and apologetic was a source of academic survival
• I have ideas about religion that may need revision
• There's a dude in my class that went to Bali
• Richard Dawkins may think a bit like Nietzsche in regard to the life of God
• J.Z. Smith is not the creator of religion
• My dictionary does not have the word, Primatism in it
• There's a woman named Emily Durkheim
• You cannot find Jonic Velibor by Googling "Vabor" because that's what you thought the instructor said after she said Freud
• Greco Roman concepts and monotheism may piss me off, but I am totally into this class