zlacker

>>arbesm+(OP)
Author of the post here - happy to discuss and get feedback from HN readers. The examples I gave here are all using GPT-3.5 but Claude now seems to work at least as well using the same prompts.

>>benbre+jl
Fascinating.

One surface level comment. As a non-religious person, I have always found the distinction between buildings for different types of religions as being somewhat artificial. Sure, they have different architectural styles, but they all have a similar purpose in my mind.

So a mosque is a church is a temple, on some level.

>>ilaksh+En
Not really. They all serve very different purposes, especially when you get outside of the Abrahamic religions. Even then, a traditional mosque serves a very different purpose from a church and is organized in quite different ways.

>>keifer+jp
I am not an expert in mosques or churches but apparently you are. So can you explain the different purposes? Also two of my examples were Abrahamic so let's just focus on those for now. A mosque, a church, Jewish "temple" or synagogue, are all according to you, for quite different purposes.

Are you sure they don't have a number of similarities?

>>ilaksh+Nq
Not sure where I claimed to be an expert?

They are different religions with different beliefs and practices. The architectural differences are vast and mostly obvious the minute you walk in. Mosques and churches both have a number of unique elements like the mihrab, confessional booths, pews, floor carpets, altars, and so on and so forth. These all translate into vastly different experiences both during worship and in everyday life. For example, Catholic churches have confessional booths facilitating confessions to priests. Mosques don’t, as (as far as I know) Muslims believe more in direct confession to God, not to an intermediary. You can see how this would result in a different social structure.

The experience of attending mosque on Friday is quite different from Sunday mass. This is intra-religion as well; compare a New England church with St. Peter’s in Rome, for example.

Sure, there are some similarities, but this is such a broad distinction that I question its usefulness, and dividing the world into secular and religious (architecture) is a very recent phenomenon. Saying they all are basically the same is to miss millennia of culture.

Anyway I don’t mean to be hostile or critical here, I just think religious architecture is pretty fascinating and has a much bigger effect on culture, even supposedly secular culture, than people realize. I encourage anyone interested to read more about it.

>>keifer+Ns
The substantive culture that I think I know about in a mosque, church, synagogue, or temple, is ethical guidance and community aid. The other substantive cultural element, although this is not always the case, is a lack of tolerance for groups that strongly hold one of the other sets of beliefs.

They definitely have variations in the nonsense that they use to justify themselves, although it could be argued that there as many similarities as differences.

Whether they sit in the floor or not or what types of songs they sing and when are surface level details to me.

My takeaway from history, geography etc. has always been functional.

>>ilaksh+nv
There is no virtue or happiness in being Too-Smart-to-Care about the lives, beliefs, or histories of other people in the world. Its certainly ok not too care, but to feel the need to signal this and imply some kind of superiority with it is a short road to a bitter solipsism.