Traditions and religions

I wasn't too sure what to write about today. I'm not actually an endless pit of ideas nor do I always feel like writing long monologues. But this morning, whilst enjoying a nice coffee with Mente Inquieta (Restless Mind, someone who commented several times in my spanish-version blog), we touched a subject with can generate lots of thoughts: traditions and religions.

Specifically, we spoke about how women are in this area (generalizing, of course) and what their points of view are with respect to couples. For various reasons I will not go into details on this in this post. Maybe some other day.

It's funny, however, to think of the amount of decisions and actions with are decided upon with the simple basis of tradition and religion. Parents teach their children their moral values thus perpetuating them. But, of course, those values get mixed up as families combine their members. And even in our "equalitarian" society (I'll go into that one some other time...) boys are not taught the same as girls.

But what is really a "tradition"? A tradition is something that we do because "it is always been done like that", though obviously the term "always" is relative. Sometimes it means a couple of years, sometimes centuries.

Some traditions, even evolve. Others, however "de-volve". In a society like ours there are traditions whose meaning is long lost or distorted, as there are also traditions which completely lack any sense.

Family values are not what they used to be. But neither is everything that surrounds a family. The "traditional family" is still plagued with concepts that, applied to today's society can even cause more harm than good.

This is also true with religions. Religious traditions, and I don't just mean rituals but also dogmas and concepts, are also distorted through time. As an example there is the well known phrase that describes a difficult situation: (...) as trying to pass a camel through the eye of a needle. Apparently, the original sentence, which appears in the Scriptures, said something along the lines of "(...) like passing a rope through the eye of a needle" (the type of rope to tie boats with) which naturally makes much more sense. There was apparently some confusion when it was translated since the words "camel" and "rope to tie boats with" (khamelos) were similar. A simple translation mistake that gave birth to an almost senseless saying.

Imagine, then, how many other traditions have been misinterpreted. After all, most religions were based on the idea of mutual comprehension and were created, in the beginning, with good intentions. There have been, however, uncountable wars, conflicts and fights even to this day because of them. All for tradition.

Yes, resentment also become a tradition.

But not all traditions nor all religions are negative. It all depends on the colour of the glass you look through, as it often is. Even though the meaning of traditions are lost, some can remain. We still give each other presents on Christmas with the intention of showing affection, even if that has degraded to the materialism Christmas seems to be based on now and that we are flooded with advertisements from october and evern earlier.

There are, however, traditions and religions I still find very hard to comprehend. I will never understand how a religion will give someone rights over someone else, for example. Nor how, by tradition, someone is erected above someone else (that should surely only come through merit, if anything!).