The Concept of Religion
The Concept of Religion is a new article in SEP.
But what held my attention was the careful, expansive discussion of the problems of definition. I raised similar issues in a previous thread. It is apparent that it is not possible to set out what it is to be a religion, any more than for what it is to be a game.
Also of interest is the account of the changes in the use of the term over time, and how mooted definitions were used to denigrate certain cultures.
Does the term "religion" refer to nothing?
But what held my attention was the careful, expansive discussion of the problems of definition. I raised similar issues in a previous thread. It is apparent that it is not possible to set out what it is to be a religion, any more than for what it is to be a game.
Also of interest is the account of the changes in the use of the term over time, and how mooted definitions were used to denigrate certain cultures.
Does the term "religion" refer to nothing?
Comments (778)
(I did not read the article. My bad.)
I don't mind getting shot down, because it was I who did not read the article.
Also see Karen Armstrong's OPMetaphysical Mistake
The OP article is explaining why that opposition isnt what it's often assumed to be, since religion, broadly speaking, doesn't have a specific opposite.
So then, to what does it refer?
Depends who you talk to.
polythetic approaches to definitions. Monothetic definitions are the sort that sets out a rule for inclusion or exclusion, one principle to determine meaning. Polythetic definitions in contrast list a number of criteria and hence a hierarchy of membership within the definendum. An open polythetic approach does capture much of what is implicit in the notion of a family resemblance. But as the article points out, just providing a polythetic definition does not remove ethnocentric or other biases. The next step is take to be an anchored polythetic approach, the example being that a religion has at least the characteristic of "a belief in superempirical beings or powers", together with some combination of other criteria. This is taken as answering the question as to why Buddhism is a religion but not Capitalism.
Hmm. what about the supernatural status of the market in the beliefs of neoliberalism? :razz:
Does the concept of a game refer to nothing?
Eschewing definitions, as is your preference: if playing a game is something we do, religion is also something we do.
Concepts refer?
What sort of thing is a concept? I think the notion quite problematic. Think I mentioned that before. I don't; understand what sort of thing a concept is, apart from just the way we use a word...
Not interested in this old dead horse.
Just noting the game-religion parallel.
I thought it an odd post by you because the riddle of "what is a religion" is no more a curiosity than "what is X," meaning religion doesn’t pose a special case anymore than any other word, and the riddle (as the article points out) was solved by Wittgenstein. Words simply don't have essences, and their meaning is based upon usage and context. That's that.
For some reason though, you don't accept that and instead try to assert an essence (i.e religion at its essence is "a belief in superempirical beings or powers"). Surely we are all creative enough to design a "religion" without that attribute. If we could not, then we'd have defeated Wittgenstein and proved essentialism.
The covert point of the OP I suspect is to prove that the religious believe in a meaningless concept, striking a fatal blow against religion. My reply to that is it may be that religious beliefs are false, but that they might have no referent and that they may be defintionaly elusive doesn't make them meaningless. Meaning is use. We use the term, to be sure. It must therefore have meaning.
:clap:
Yes, prostheses – like verbal or psychological crutches – useful for the disabled but crippling from premature / over-use by the (once) abled.
1. Creation (an explanation of how the world, we, came to be; power/omnipotence)
and/or
2. Morality (a set of codes we must live by, on the whole hedonic in character; goodness/omnibenevolence)
and/or
3. Explanations (of worldly goings ons: knowledge, science/omniscience)
These three basic ideas of religion are propped up with metaphysics, or the absence thereof, unique to each faith.
This is an unnecessarily excessive extrapolation of the meaning is use concept. The concept is a self contained linguistic theory offering a description of how communication occurs, leaving in silence that which is unreducible to words, but not denying its existence.
This is to say, you don't understand my concept of a tree except to the extent you understand how I use the term "tree," but you need not deny my concept of the tree may contain attributes unidentified in my speech.
Assuming even worse, that religion is that which only the stupidest morons believe in, the OP's concern is resolved: The word has meaning.
What's most interesting to me here as a psychologist is how out of character it is for you to include in your phraseology what in the past you've deemed an unnecessary word. Concept. It's even in your OP. Very interesting. What is the word concept doing in your OP?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
Sure, religion is doings in relation to such and such configurations of psyche, symbol and matter.
What sort of thing is a thing? What sort of thing is a sort? What sort of thing is a what? What sort of what is a what? What?
It was in the name of the article...?
Actually it's from Austin rather than Wittgenstein.
Ah, I see, you expect malice on my part. Well, all that does is shut down the promise of a conversation.
Never mind. As you were, soldier! :smile:
Not malice, just motive, but in any event irrelevant. We can substitute cups for religion in this debate is my point, which would be an easy way to avoid the loaded topic of religion.
Wherever it's from, it seems an illogical jump from treating behavior as an objective means of assessing meaning to declaring behavior as the speaker's subjective meaning.
To the existential desperate human effort-need to overcome their end. Death is the concept.
So indeed this old dead horse.
Couldn't your flog be put to fruitfuller use?
If you know how to use the word 'concept', why do you need to know what it is?
You don't know how to define 'game', but you know how to use the word. Why this special pleading over 'concept' - a word you also know how to use?
This is a good point, pointing out that it's not just the metaphysical existence of an underlying concept that is being denied, but "concept" is being denied having meaning even through usage, which is the gold standard under this analysis.
The problem I have in addition to this is that the "meaning is use" position does not require the outright denial of internal ineffable concepts; it just denies such can be discussed. It's one thing to declare that my public behavior is all you can know of me, but another to say that my public behavior is all there is of me.
To the extent @Banno is trying to define "concept" in a metaphysical way (as opposed to a usage way), he's correct in that you cannot tell him anything about your concept expect to the extent you can communicate it in words (your public behavior), but that hardly equates to a conclusion there can be no concept in your head that you are simply unable to communicate.
The notion of a concept? Or the concept of a notion?
Is 'notion' less problematic than 'concept'? Or do you use the word 'notion' here tongue-in-cheek? Even if tongue-in-cheek, here you demonstrate knowledge of its use.
Nothing specific.
Quoting Hanover
It can very much be a problem when it comes to religious exemptions.
Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is a superempirical power.
Whose authority?
Those with special access.
Priests?
Anyone who can somehow convince others that they have experienced or speak for the ultimate.
Legal definitions are easy to come by. It's whatever the legislature and judges say it is.
This only points to the problem.
Some religions are like that, yes.
Can you name one that isn’t like that?
Sure. Shamanic religions don't have anything “ultimate“ in the sense I think you mean. And esoteric Christianity doesn't have an ultimate who could be 'spoken for.'
There are a lot of other examples.
Maybe one of these others would be a good example. Please…
What's wrong with the examples I gave?
It resolves the problem because it declares an authority for a prescriptive language system for a utilitarian purpose. If you want to dispense with the philosophical questions of "what is a cup," you provide someone the power to decree what a cup is and then that's what it is. You can argue as much as you want after the gavel falls, but it won't do you any good.
The fact of the matter is that there is case after case, some reaching all the way to the Supreme Court, dealing with what counts as a religious exemption. Cases including such things as whether discrimination is permissible because of religious exemption, whether vaccination (either all or only particular vaccines) is covered under religious exemption, and whether refusal to seek medical care for children is covered under religious exemption. In some cases arguments are made with regard to widely recognized religions, but in others whether what some individual or group does should be considered a religion and thus covered under exemption.
Let’s see, the Christ in Christianity refers to, well, Christ, and not the average Joe, no? AverageJoeianity would be funny religion though, and I thank you for inspiring the amusing thought.
Shamanism is about accessing what?
I said esoteric Christianity has an ultimate, but it can't be spoken for.
Quoting praxis
Shamanic religions usually have a sun god. What do you think they're trying to access?
What do you mean by ultimate?
In a word, metaphysics.
It seems rather obvious to me that both esoteric Christianity and Shamanic religions make metaphysical claims, or do believe that they merely describe the nature of reality?
Could you give an example of a metaphysical claim? (Because I think describing the nature of reality is metaphysical, so we're not on the same page.)
Even if God was describing it?
So we arrived in a ditch. Excellent.
Allow me to rephrase the question, if you will. Do you believe that religious folk make metaphysical claims or simply describe the true nature of reality? The latter case would require no faith. It would be like someone describing something unremarkable and ordinary, like how to mix a piña colada.
In many cases, religion and science are the same thing. That would be true for ancient Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Celtic, and yes all the old shamanic religions.
It kind of looks like you don't know what ontology is?
It looks to me like you ditched my question. Excellent.
I believe it is, yes.
Was it about faith? Because the rest made no sense.
There's then a lot of complicated analysis of what a 'polythetic' conception of religion might be, drawing on Wittgenstein's 'family resemblances' idea.
I remember discussions on other forums of the notion of 'non-conceptual wisdom', often associated with Buddhist and tantric practices. It goes without saying that forming a concept of anything non-conceptual is self-contradictory; from the viewpoint of conceptual analysis it's a nonsensical idea. But consider this example: religious teachings generally criticize self-centredness or egocentricity. That is found in many diverse religious traditions. But is being egocentric a concept? Well, I can form a concept of it, of what it means, but in practice, in the day-to-day sense, it's a set of habitual attitudes and behaviours. Egocentricity is something other than a conceptual understanding, it's an habituated mode of being and behaviour. So too is breaking it down or become less egocentric - which can be a traumatic experience, or a cathartic experience. But the upshot of that may well be a sense of liberation, in the sense of being freed from a deficient way of being.
As Karen Armstrong says 'When a mythical narrative was symbolically re-enacted, it brought to light within the practitioner something "true" about human life and the way our humanity worked, even if its insights, like those of art, could not be proven rationally. If you did not act upon it, it would remain as incomprehensible and abstract – like the rules of a board game, which seem impossibly convoluted, dull and meaningless until you start to play.
Religious truth is, therefore, a species of practical knowledge. Like swimming, we cannot learn it in the abstract; we have to plunge into the pool and acquire the knack by dedicated practice. Religious doctrines are a product of ritual and ethical observance, and make no sense unless they are accompanied by such spiritual exercises as yoga, prayer, liturgy and a consistently compassionate lifestyle. Skilled practice in these disciplines can lead to intimations of the transcendence we call God, Nirvana, Brahman or Dao. Without such dedicated practice, these concepts remain incoherent, incredible and even absurd.'
What has happened in Western religious discourse, according to Karen Armstrong, is that the emphasis on belief and believing have distorted this meaning, by making religion a propositional matter, not a way-of-being. 'Buddhists, Hindus, Confucians, Jews and Muslims would say religion is something you do, and that you cannot understand the truths of faith unless you are committed to a transformative way of life that takes you beyond the prism of selfishness. All good religious teaching – including such Christian doctrines as the Trinity or the Incarnation – is basically a summons to action. Yet instead of being taught to act creatively upon them, many modern Christians feel it is more important to "believe" them.' And you see that reflected a lot in the debates about religion on this forum.
Yet people do it all the time, those Humpty Dumpties!
I pretty much agree with your account. If there is something to be found in religion, it is in the practice, and not in the analysis, in the doing and not in the believing. As factual accounts, religious texts are notoriously inaccurate. So on that score alone their success is puzzling. Hence the merit of religion is not found in conceptualisation.
Your article from Armstrong is interesting. I'm not convinced by her case that "...during the modern period, scientific logos became so successful that myth was discredited, the logos of scientific rationalism became the only valid path to truth, and Newton and Descartes claimed it was possible to prove God's existence, something earlier Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians had vigorously denied." Certainly Aquinas and Anselm didn't deny that it was possible, indeed necessary, to prove God's existence; and neither could be considered "modern". Nor is the change in use of "belief" from "confidence" to "creed" as modern as she supposes, dating at least from c.1200. But despite these quibbles I suspect the thrust of her article is accurate. The ambiguity of Wittgenstein's attitude to religion has been well noted, but it is apparent that it was something along the lines of the centrality of religious practice, not of religious belief.
It strikes me as curious that the SEP decided to publish an article on the "concept" of religion. Unsurprisingly, that article is mostly about the nature of conceptualisation, analysed through a systematic account of definition. It's effectively an article about definition, using religion as it's example. As such it attempts to systematise Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, a fraught task which misses the point; some (most) terms are useful despite not being definable in such an explicit fashion.
So two things of note: the first, that it is no surprise that the article fails to explicitly define religion; the second, that religion centres on practice rather than on creed.
Thank you for actually addressing the topic.
On the contrary, its only merit is found in conceptualization because it is religious ideas (fictions) that serve to bind groups with common values, a meta-narrative, norms, goals, and so on. Ritual is part of that, but then ritual is also part of secular life. Ritual can also be part of non-religious spiritual life.
Faith in religious authority, yes. You are paying attention. :razz:
Quoting frank
I don’t know how to make a piña colada either, if I’m honest.
Without specifics I’ll simply say that practice or a “way-of-being” doesn’t require religion.
Christianity has clear religious authorities. I was kind of befuddled when I discovered that it's an oddity that way.
Worldviews just sort of arise. Maybe there's some natural selection involved, I don't know. But it's never just a top-down sort of thing.
Not seeing a theme here.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
The claim seems to be that if you practice righty you’ll eventually get it and that only poor practitioners lose faith or never get it. If you hold that these Truths cannot be false there is no other way to look at it, and they necessarily hold that they cannot be false.
People sometimes like to quote the Kalama Sutta where the Buddha says something to the effect of ‘try it out and if it works for ya, well, welcome aboard, mate :heart: ’. Nowhere does he grant the possibility of falsehood.
I think there is another way to look at this. The question is epistemological rather than ontological. Euthyphro cannot demonstrate that what he is doing is pious if he cannot say what piety is. I don't know that family resemblance gets us further, for we would first have to agree that 'x' and 'y' are pious in order to conclude what he is doing is pious based on resemblance. But 'x' and 'y' might be contested. On my reading of Plato this is consistent with his skepticism, his knowing that he does not know. The best we can do is have opinions that stand up to examination, opinions that seem most likely to be true.
Quoting Wayfarer
In that case Paul and Christianity are at the center of this distortion. According to Paul, one is saved by belief. The "way-of-being for those who are saved is no longer the way of being of us who are still under the power of sin. Neither way of being is within our power.
There are all sorts of worldviews. I’m claiming that religions always make metaphysical claims (ultimate truths) that require uncommon access. Those with uncommon access have authority, assuming there’s no higher authority, so it is always a top-down sort of thing.
I take Armstrong to be criticising the propositional nature of religions in today’s culture, although I do agree that the seed of that is in Christianity from the start. But I would also hark back to the long-forgotten distinction between gnostic and pistic forms of Christianity. The gnostic forms are said to be grounded in insight (their doctrinal authority said to be in the verse ‘you will know the truth and the truth will set you free’) whilst the pistic forms very much on belief (‘pistis’ meaning belief or opinion, grounded in ‘believe and be saved’). In Indic religions, this was not so much a division, as it was recognised that different kinds of people required different ways of approaching the question; so there is a Jñ?na path, for ‘discriminative wisdom’, and the devotional path, Bhakti Marga (e.g. the Hare Krishna sect) for the less intellectually adept. They’re seen as complementary rather than exclusive. But in the West, there was huge conflict around the doctrinal formation of Christianity, a lot of it focussed on establishing right belief (orthodoxy) and much of it deliberately intended to exclude or marginalise Gnosticism (although that is tangential to this thread.)
Quoting Fooloso4
It seems the case with the Euthypro in particular, but I take the idea of ‘conceptual definition’ and ‘essences’ to be referring also to the later development by Aristotle of his metaphysics and his formal doctrine of the grounds of identity and the nature of being. That is the context within which discussion of the nature of perceiving ‘what truly is’ was framed. Originally, that was in the province of the sages, like Parmenides (at least according to Peter Kingsley).
It's still not clear to me how you're using "metaphysical claims" and "ultimate truths". The term "ultimate truth" comes directly from medieval Europe. It was part of the ideology behind Gothic cathedral architecture.
How are you using it? Give me an example.
This one’s magnificent.
Notre Dame:
I’ve visited that one. Now I wish we visited Sainte-Chapelle, the one pictured in my post above.
Clifford Geertz: “A religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic”.
It basically describes what it is to be human really. You can literally replace the term ‘religion’ with a number of things and still find that it makes sense.
Note: As you may know the in depth explanation of this is several pages long. I did find Geertz’s over all attitude to the concept of ‘religion’ a little off in places though. The book this is taken from shows his lack of scholarship in that he often veers into opinion rather than giving an objective account.
- Trance Dance
- Prayer
- Meditation
- Fasting
- Sleep Deprivation
- Intense Focus
- Sensory Deprivation
- Mnemonics
All of the above are present in religious practices, but some are more subtle than others. Theatre and ceremony are also pretty much the same thing it is just that in the modern era we have become more and more detached from ‘theatre’. Meaning, in the past we were active participants far more often. Today the ‘theatre’ personal experiences of ‘theatrics’ far more distanced and passive.
In comparison to patriotism we see this is more mild forms with national anthems and memorable symbols infused with emotion.
Me too. :cool:
If you go make sure you get sundown for the full effect. Literally breathtaking. I walked outside after over two hours and had to go back in because I couldn’t believe how amazing it was!
Quoting Hanover
Meaning is using terms to refer to things that are not words. If the word does not refer to anything that exists outside of one's own mind yet it is used to refer to things outside of one's mind (confusing the map with the territory) then it is a meaningless word - just like the term, "god".
Now, if it is correctly being used to refer to a concept (those things that only exist in minds) then it has meaning. The difference is do those concepts then refer to things in the world.
Religion is the belief in things outside of, or beyond, the natural.
Wow, if I’m ever in that neighborhood I definitely will.
If we're using the term "religion" within a community, it has meaning, even if the meaning amounts to delusional, confused, and inconsistent beliefs about the origins of the universe. To declare that the term is meaningless is to claim it's gibberish, just sounds conveying no thought whatsoever. "God" means something different from "cat" and different from "jldjlk." To say otherwise is just to impose an opinion on the validity of the concept that underlies the word "God."
My belief in bigfoot is different from my belief in gorillas, but my belief in bigfoot doesn't dissolve into meaninglessness because there is no such thing as bigfoot.
Your definition of religion is wanting and does not universally describe all religions. It's entirely possible to have a religion with gods that interact only on the "natural" level, which isn't entirely inconsistent with primitive religions, especially considering in primitive societies they don't have a real distinction between the miraculous and ordinary earthly events.
For your definition to be workable, you would be admitting to essentialism.
So capitalism is a religion...? Thought so.
Quoting I like sushi
...all can be found on the floor of any stock exchange!
As I said, for some word to have meaning it needs to refer to something. So if the user of the word, "religion" isn't referring to anything then it would just be a string of meaningless scribbles or sounds from their mouths.
What one person means by "religion" someone else could mean something different, then how do we know that they are even talking about the same thing? To say that the word has meaning in that any person can use it however they want renders the word meaningless in that it is now to vague for anyone to understand how it is being used and that it would be more efficient to just say what you are referring to rather than use the word, "religion" at all. It becomes useless.
Quoting Hanover
I understand that beliefs in bigfoot are not the same thing as bigfoot itself. We can talk about both but some people can confuse their belief with the real thing.
Quoting Hanover
It seems to me that if you want to posit gods on the natural level then you would be practicing science, not religion - which leads me to think of another definition for religion: The act of favoring one unprovable concept over all other unprovable concepts. There is no reason to value one concept that has no evidence over other concepts that don't have any evidence or even others that do have evidence. In this way, religion is a type of delusion. And in this way, atheists are not necessarily denying a theists claims, they simply find no good reason to believe what one theist says over another, or what one philosopher says over another - when none of them are able to provide any evidence for their claims. Essentially a non-religious person would be one that has an open-mind; one that understands that they and others are probably wrong when there is no evidence and questioning yours and others beliefs is a good thing.
This belies the common trait in religions that a practitioners can fail miserably, commit a wide range of transgressions, and still be held firmly in the fold, but should they merely question doctrine or those higher in the hierarchy they’ll promptly be stamped a heretic and considered an outsider. This has always been the case.
The story we apply to lived experiences creates a narrative that can be passed on and repeated. Needless to say such a ‘habit’ is kind of useful in terms of evolution as it helps us adapt to the environment and approach it from different angles rather than as a mere set of lifeless variables.
Without value there is nothing there for us to pay attention to. Without a means of applying or removing value we are not anything as stagnation of value is just as dead as having no value at all.
Quoting 180 Proof
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What you say of the word "religion" is not unique to the word "religion," but is a universal limitation of word definition. The term "religion" includes a number of examples, all of which are clearly designated among speakers for what they are, for example: Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hare Krishna, Janism, Hinduism, Islam, and then there are thousands of others in every corner of the world, many of which have come and gone over the millennia. We can try to find the element common to all that defines "religion," but, try as we might, we will continue to find that there is no essential element that must exist in order for the belief system to be a religion. The reason for this is because essentialism is not a sustainable argument as it relates to definitions of terms.
This problem with the term "religion" is no different from the term "cup," yet we use the term cup in a meaningful way. That is, I can give thousands of examples of cups (just like I can with religions), but there will always be some cup example that falls outside the definition that we keep trying to refine. There is no essential element of a cup for it to be a cup, but that hardly means we can't speak of cups.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I just see this comment as positing a false dichotomy between (1) the scientific method and (2) religion. Most people use neither, but accept as proof just their instinct or general observations. We don't engage in rigorous experimentation for most of our beliefs. Someone who insists upon herbal remedies, for example, isn't practicing religion or science.
It's an error to also deny an overlap between the two also, as most religious people accept science (to greater and lesser degrees) and plenty of scientists allow for the unknown variable, which they to greater and lesser extent attribute to God.
In any event, nothing I've said is inconsistent with atheism or suggests, hints, or intimates there may be a god. My point is simply that your argument of the incoherency of the term "religion" effectively proves its non-existence is incorrect.
Your meaning is not clear but I will point out that we are all saturated in values, narratives, and meaning. There's no shortage.
That was a very odd thread; it's origin and purpose remain a mystery.
@Ennui Elucidator has reduced his concerns to Israel killing Civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, it seems, and pretty much only interacts with you and @StreetlightX. Curious.
Quoting Wayfarer
Given the results of that practice, I can't help but see this as special pleading, as seeing what one wishes to see and not all that is there. Can what is good in religion - charity, ritual, what you will - not happen without the mythical background?
I think something that is missed in its absence is any reason for 'being good'. After all, if life is the outcome of chance, and humans no more than physical, then there's no greater purpose to be served other than possibly warm feelings of self-justification.
A snippet from Josiah Royce:
I should probably leave it there, shouldn't I?
The claim that ethical behaviour requires [i]religion[/I] is very different to the claim that ethical behaviour requires, say, consideration of others, or self-awareness, or simple compassion. These, I think you will agree, do not require ritual within a community, and yet are taken by many to lead to being good.
And we had best steer clear of the fear of hell as the source of virtue...
The notion that it is religion that inspires virtue has little merit, philosophical and sociologically.
In reply to your quote, there seems to be nothing in the glimpse of a higher life that is not found in, say, eudaemonia... considered in the wider sense than mere happiness.
So, what is it that one receives from being a part of a ritualistic community that is necessary, or needed, to make one a good person? And when I put the question like that, your point seems to lack merit.
As we noted before, science has been an aspect of religion for longer than it was separate.
So maybe we could back off of religion in general and specify a particular religious group.
So one needs no reason not to murder, which means murder is just plain wrong in an absolute, objective, non-relative, non-subjective way?
What does that even mean? As if there is a reality composed of morality that exists regardless of the consensus opinion.
A truly bizarre position.
Surely there must be a reason not to murder, else what makes it wrong?
It strikes me as a rather sad and shallow outlook to see the inclination towards religion as a random predisposition rather than a fundamental need for meaning and connection.
And visa versa, surely?
You seem to be arguing in favor of a foundational or transcendental guarantor for 'goodness' which you might consider to be an almost meaningless term without one.
Quoting Hanover
Leaving aside empathy, morality seems to be created by humans to facilitate social cooperation in order to achieve their preferred forms of order. Murder fucks up order.
If there is a reason, then it must apply for the act to be immoral. That is, if the slaughter of an innocent is necessary for the maintenance of order, then it is moral, correct?
Obviously humans are creatures of empathy and caring which are a significant part of our nature - often limited or shaped by tribalism - in and out groups. Our sense of order also pivots on what we consider 'sacred'. I'd imagine very few cultures would sanction child sacrifice, but they have existed over the millennia and we sometimes come close during wartime.
Quoting Tom Storm
Indeed.
Wayfarer, one assumes that posts here are open for comment. You suggested that religion is justified because it provides a reason for being good. That will only work if there is no other reason for being good. Now I think that there are other reasons, including being a decent person. Hence I am critical of your post. Hence looks like an attempt to avoid discussion rather than a relevant reply.
Your first reply here was excellent. I agree with much of the Armstrong article you site, and especially with the concern that modern religion emphasises belief over practice. I can go along with you in agreeing that religion allows the expression of the "numinal", the ineffable. I agree also that there is a correlation between charitable works and religious affiliation. While I find no personal comfort in ritual, I acknowledge that many others do.
But much of what is said in religious contexts is contrary to this. Much of what is posited in the name of religion is immoral. Religion, like all human activities, is plagued by hypocrisy and authoritarianism.
Much of what is stated in religious contexts is false, and ought to be shown to be false.
So far as the topic goes, do we at least agree that ritual practice of some sort seems central to the concept of religion?
It's a question of reason, meaning, and purpose - and the absence of it. 'In social science, 'disenchantment' is the cultural rationalization and devaluation of [the spirit] apparent in modern society. The term was borrowed from Friedrich Schiller by Max Weber to describe the character of a modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society. In Western society, according to Weber, scientific understanding is more highly valued than belief, and processes are oriented toward rational goals, as opposed to traditional society, in which "the world remains a great enchanted garden".[/quote]
The residue of Christian-inspired virtues remain, but they're under threat from many other forces in the absence of a compelling reason for their existence, beyond a wan kind of 'feel-good' humanism. But for instance in the People's Republic of China, you're seeing a post-liberal political order emerge, where human rights mean whatever the Leader deems them to mean - human beings are only worthwhile insofar as they're useful to the State, individual worth is not guaranteed in the way that is implicit in the Christian faith.
Quoting Banno
The problem is, I see a recurring pattern in your posts, which floats various topics to do with religion, but which nearly always seem driven by your fundamental conviction that religions are on the whole stupid and unworthy of respect. So you want to elicit arguments in favour of various kinds of religious ideas, to then be able to say:
Quoting Banno
Even though there's obviously truth in that, there's another factor at work, which Thomas Nagel calls out in his essay Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion:
[quote=Nagel]In speaking of the fear of religion, I don't mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper--namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Instead they become epiphenomena, generated incidentally by a process that can be entirely explained by the operation of the non-teleological laws of physics on the material of which we and our environments are all composed.[/quote]
And the argument from that perspective is one of the major voices on this forum.
Quoting Banno
But, why? What drives that? Mircea Eliade's answer is that religious ritual seeks to re-create the sacred in the midst of the profane. That the religious traditions seek to embody a relationship with the origin of all. Plainly much of that has become attenuated and trivialised and dessicated in today's world, but that was what was behind it.
I think this is a questionable trope. There's not a bigotry or human rights violation going that theism didn't enthusiastically enact or participate in. Nothing could be more disenchanting than religious wars and hatreds brought about by god beliefs.
Quoting Wayfarer
Putin would agree with you and claim he's restoring them.
It's an interesting take. But, I think we are forced into the conclusion that whatever we end up doing or believing, is all an outcome of our the way we interpret the world, meaning, we can't help but "delude" ourselves in a way. I don't think anyone is exempt from this, though "sages", may be less liable into falling too deeply into whatever they believe.
So I think that even in belief, a mitigated skepticism is the best bet we have of being somewhat "on the right track".
Exactly and a good illustration of how theism offers no objective basis to morality. It simply allows a believer to cherry pick or intuit what they think a god would want. It's entirely down to the subjective interpretation of the theist. Which is why religions can't agree upon moral beliefs in the first place - they are all over the place when it comes to war, gay rights, the role of women, capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, tax reform,... you name it.
So psychologising in the place of answering. Yes, I have a dislike for what passes for conversation regarding religion, and yet an interest in the topic. But, please note, I have consistently argued against "the scientism and reductionism of our time." That's explicit in Wittgenstein, as I have enunciated his ideas, and in the various ethical threads in which I have participated or have started.
So I think your accusation, and your psychologising, misguided.
Here's promise of something more interesting:
Quoting Wayfarer
If this is so, then it matters not what religious practice one adopts. Further, this expression "...the origin of all...", expresses an ontological error.
So, perhaps religion ought confine itself purely to ritual, since any statement of it's concerns is fraught.
Yeah, that phrase left me cold. From what I can see charity derives mostly from Jesus' teachings, so I will grant that. Otherwise, that virtue is Christian-inspired is a convenient, self-serving myth.
I'm at pains to point out that it's not exactly 'theism' that at issue. Or 'belief systems' as such. See this post again. I didn't seek confirmation in Christianity in my youth because it didn't seem to convey that insight, that it was something like a fossilised remnant. But - of what?
Quoting Banno
Fair enough. I withdraw it. I will plead 'bout of spleen'.
Quoting Banno
Have I pointed out John Hick's Who or What is God? I think he makes a case for the kind of insight I've been seeking.
There's a lot in that article. Not sure to what particular insight you are pointing. Care to elucidate?
Quoting Banno
But what underwrites virtue? It's all very well to gesture towards eudomonia, but Aristotle was also quite religious in a different way to Christianity, but nevertheless:
[quote=Nichomachean Ethics] [1177a11] But if happiness [??????????] consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [????], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation [?????????].[/quote]
Furthermore, he elaborates elsewhere that seeking this out is the telos, the ultimate aim, of philosophy itself. And you won't find many counterparts to that in today's philosophy. (This is a major point in After Virtue.)
Yes and no. The idea of god being dead, with all foundational values collapsing, is on the table in this discussion. And Weber's idea of disenchantment also springs from theism's gradual diminution from Western cultural life. But of course we can locate foundational values in idealism and mysticism too.
This is an intoxicating story, which probably tempts just about everyone interested in philosophy, be it on the religious or anti-religious wing. Enlightenment, waking from the dream, bearing the torch, leading others from the cave...this is the general form of the grand version the intellectual hero myth, or so it seems to me.
But one man's torch is precisely another man's delusion. For some, the myth of the cave is itself the cave. The narrative is aggressive, since it labels the majority (the generic other) as confused and lost (it doesn't matter that much what the content happens to be.) 'I'm OK, You're not OK.'
I don't deny the allure of this aggression. I also don't pretend that this description is exhaustive. I think the way we live now is alienating and unreal ('society of the spectacle,' etc.) One of the weird features of this world is the rank plurality of aggressively grand narratives.
I like what you write here.
Quick question however -
Quoting jas0n
When did humans last have a culture that did not contain its share of unreality and alienation? One of the other great intoxicating stories is the notion of paradise lost or, in internet comments language; 'Everything today is worse that it used to be...'
Exactly !
Guy Debord opens his The Society of the Spectacle with an old quote from Feuerbach.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm
Perhaps Debord would say that Feuerbach was already living in the beginning of the age of the spectacle (yet without photorealistic false-Heaven that Berger, a similar thinker, talks about.) Maybe he just liked the eloquence.
I think your point touches on a version of cave myth as the actual cave. I looked up some 'pure witness' mysticism, and a big theme there is that it's precisely the seeking of this nondual experience that obscures it. I suspect that alienation just comes with sophistication and differentiation. It's a toll one pays.
Here's a taste of a 'non-religious' (?) example of 'the general theory of a the dominant illusion.'
[quote = Debord]
In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.
The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.
The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.
[/quote]
A taste of Berger, too. Why not?
[quote= Berger]
Publicity is effective precisely because it feeds upon the real. Clothes, food, cars, cosmetics, baths, sunshine are real things to be enjoyed in themselves. Publicity begins by working on a natural appetite for pleasure. But it cannot offer the real object of pleasure and there is no convincing substitute for a pleasure in that pleasure's own terms. The more convincingly publicity conveys the pleasure of bathing in a warm, distant sea, the more the spectator-buyer will become aware that he is hundreds of miles away from that sea and the more remote the chance of bathing in it will seem to him. This is why publicity can never really afford to be about the product or opportunity it is proposing to the buyer who is not yet enjoying it. Publicity is never a celebration of a pleasure-in-itself. Publicity is always about the future buyer. It offers him an image of himself made glamorous by the product or opportunity it is trying to sell. The image then makes him envious of himself as he might be. Yet what makes this self-which-he-might-be enviable? The envy of others. Publicity is about social relations, not objects. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness : happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour.
Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you will become less enviable.
[/quote]
This is in Kojève too. We desire to be desired. Someone needs to be blind, less than, looking up, outside in the cold... (?)
It's an idea I've never bought into. I'm old enough to remember the (in)famous Time Magazine cover story on that, and didn't take it seriously, not that I was 'churchy'.
Quoting jas0n
The fact that these traditions can go wrong and become disastrously perverted is a consequence of human nature. Humans can wreck just about anything.
Quoting jas0n
I really liked his book The Heretical Imperative. And I got a lot out of sociological studies of religions.
Quoting jas0n
[quote=John Hick]The sun’s light is refracted by the earth’s atmosphere into the spectrum of the different colours of the rainbow. Perhaps the ultimate light of the universal divine presence is refracted by our different human religious cultures into the spectrum of the different world faiths. Or, in the words of the medieval Sufi thinker, Jalaluldin Rumi, ‘The lamps are different but the Light is the same: it comes from Beyond’.
And concerning the different, and indeed often conflicting, belief systems of the religions: our earth is a three-dimensional globe. But when you map it on a two dimensional surface, such as a piece of paper, you have to distort it. You cannot get three dimensions into two without distortion. And there are a variety of projections used by cartographers which are different systematic ways of distorting the earth’s curvature to represent it on a flat surface. But if a map made in one projection is correct it does not follow that maps made in other projections are incorrect. If they are properly made they are all correct, and yet they all distort. Perhaps our different theologies, both within the same religion and between different religions, are human maps of the infinite divine reality made in different projections, i.e. different conceptual systems. These all necessarily distort, since that infinite reality as it is in itself cannot be represented in our finite human terms. But perhaps all are equally useful in enabling us make our journey through life.[/quote]
But, in a pluralistic culture where very different and even antagonistic cultures are all in contact through global media, there's also bound to be a lot of friction.
Indeed. In that post, I was trying to think from a neutral place and acknowledge the aggressive clash of demystifications. We have metaphors of vision and light and a metaphors of curtains and veils. Zoom out to this level, and we're like a bunch of pugnacious one-eyed men calling each other blind.
Quoting Wayfarer
Different Berger actually. The 'glamour' critic is John Berger. I did value Peter Berger's The Social Construction of Reality.
What do "habits" and "values" have to do with religion - as if religion has a monopoly on the use of such terms?
We are not creatures of habit. If we were then there wouldn't be humans that go against the grain, like Galileo, and question our habits and values. The world changes so any habits eventually don't work anymore and new ways of adapting are valued (selected by natural selection).
It seems to me that walking that thin line between habit and novelty is the human condition, at least for those that are non-religious. The religious are the ones that stick with habit even in the face of drastic change to their own detriment.
Sure, our use of language attempts to divide the world into neat boxes and we often find that the world is not neatly divided into boxes, but it seems to me that for you to even imply that there are common and uncommon properties that make some thing a cup is itself admitting that there are properties that make one thing more of a cup than another. The fact that you would scoff at my attempt to show you a bowl and call it a cup proves my point. The same goes for religion.
I should point out that religion is a human invention. Natural things like oceans vs. seas, asteroids vs. comets are not. So in trying to define, or divide nature, into boxes we will find that there are objects that will challenge our definitions. This is not the case for human inventions, like religions and presidents. Humans invented these things and have a much easier time defining them than things that we didn't invent.
Quoting Hanover
Sure it does. Your explanation shows that atheism qualifies as a religion, not to mention believing in evolution by natural selection, that Augustus was the first Roman Emperor, or that I need to wear a mask to stop the spread of Covid - all religions by your standard. :confused:
Most people use science without even knowing it. Using your senses, solving problems by the process of elimination, testing your ideas, etc. are all aspects of doing science. Favoring one untested idea over other untested and tested ideas is the primary characteristic of a religion.
Human life is pervasively ritualistic. Much of it is non-religious, so no.
Right. I think it is the motive behind the ritual that makes it religious or not. If the motive is to achieve some goal where there is no evidence that such rituals achieve such goals, then that is a religion.
Shaking hands is a ritual. Is there any evidence that it achieves its goals? :lol:
How about the Jewish ritual of washing your hands before you eat? Effective or not?
Washing your hands before you eat isn't necessarily a Jewish ritual. Are you Jewish every time you wash your hands?
There is evidence that washing your hands before you eat promotes a healthy lifestyle.
Any other examples you want to throw at me? This is fun.
It actually is. It was a whole thing.
By the 1st Century, it was apparently used as a show of piety.
As ssu says: learn history.
I should also add that if the term "religion" is as vague as you claim, then I could just as easily claim that any behavior or belief is not a religion. This is the problem is asserting that the definition of "religion" is subjective, or that people can use the term however they want, because someone can always use it in a way that is contradictory to another use.
Quoting frank
So practicing a religious ritual shows that you are religious?
Yes. Plus it lessens your chances of food poisoning.
Right. So, there is evidence that washing your hands lessens your chances of food poisoning, hence washing your hands is not religious. But there is no evidence that washing your hands is a display of piety. It seems to me that when your goal is to lessen you chance of food poisoning and not to display piety, then the "ritual" is non-religious.
Also, there is no evidence that Jews were the first to wash their hands. That would be a religion to believe that.
And since there are non-religious rituals, and religions that don't have specific rituals, ritual is not the essence of religion.
It shouldn't be surprising that after 5000 years of drastic change in world views, the word "religion" is hard to define.
I agree.
We do not need a reason for wanting what is good for ourselves. Although what we want may not actually be good for us, we want it for no other reason than because we regard it as good.
The more our desire for what is good is motivated by the question of what is good, the closer the connection between what we seek and what we are. The desire for what is good becomes inextricably linked to the desire to be good. The reason for being good is for no other reason than that we regard it as good.
But there is a much simpler answer. Being good is not the result of finding some reason for being good. We do not need a reason to care or be empathetic. If we lack those capacities there is no reason that will make us care or become empathetic. If we are completely devoid of goodness there is no reason that will provide us or compel us to do what we have no capacity for.
Although religion may play a role here, it is not a necessary role.
Our concept of goodness is complex because it's a fusion of a number of different cultural attitudes. It can be about duty, progress, victory over adversity, etc.
Most of these concepts were transmitted by religious traditions, so we could say that's the role of religion here.
I agree that religion has played a role in transmission. Certainly claims of divine origin and authority have proven to be effective. They place moral authority above man.
A more fundamental question has to do with the origin of these concepts. Do they come from the gods or from men using the gods as a guise? What do we know of what the gods demand of us? All that has been transmitted to us has been through the work of men. What do we do when these works tell us different and conflicting things?
Much of religion has been exclusionary even when it strives to be universal. A morality that may work for an insular group can come into conflict with that other groups that either hold different or no religious beliefs.
There is no necessity that what has historically been transmitted by religious tradition must be transmitted by religious tradition. In fact, for those who have become suspicious of it or outright reject it, religion can be an impediment to ethics.
If our tradition is good and ultimately true then other ways must be false and bad, and this discrepancy is commonly capitalized on in order to reify tribal identity, and rationalize abuse of the other.
Quoting Fooloso4
If the role of religion is really to bind people in a tribal group then dependency on the group is essential. Personal development of virtue leads to independence and is therefore at odds with the purpose of religion.
And that's an important question. What is the value of conflict on this forum? I'd say ideally it allows for deeper examination and reflection.
That’s one reason to respect opposing views. Another is that it allows a diverse population to exist peacefully. Acceptance promotes recognition of humanity. That's a value from our time.
Quoting Fooloso4
I agree. I think an important point alluded to in the OP article is that the remnants of religion are all around us. We don't recognize them until we start doing a little exploration of history. So religion isn't over there somewhere in those people. It's here. Within you. In the way you speak, think, and act.
This is the main reason religion is hard to define now.
This imposes a modern sensibility on some ancient belief systems. What you call "ritual" for some encompasses their every act, from opening their eyes in the morning to going to sleep at night. They behave in a way consistent with God's will because they believe that's the correct way to behave. By the same token, you behave as you do based upon empirical evidence, believing certain behaviors lead to certain consequences.
Your ritual of hand washing is not just for clean hands, but for safe food, avoidance of illness, long life, etc. That is, to achieve your good. That's precisely why the religious wash their hands. I just want to point out here that the religious are not superstitious, simply trying to quell their OCD, but they believe as firmly as you in the legitimacy of their behavior.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Actually, the ancient Hebrews were descents of the Jews, and typically the word "Jew" wouldn't have been used pre 6th century bce. In any event, Judaism changed dramatically over the years, bringing up again the problem of their not being an essence to the term.
I describe myself as a non-ritualstic Jew. That doesn't mean my family won't gather for Passover Seder, but that has nothing to do with me thinking God will bless me for the event anymore than when your family might gather for your birthday. In truth, along with our matzoh, we color eggs on Passover, which isn't exact textbook haggadah. Is that ritual?
There is a tension here. On the one hand, one must be obedient, but on the other there are cases, as with the prophets of Israel, where the people are corrupt and the prophet stands against them. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah because the people are corrupt God is about to destroy them. Abraham stands with the righteous among them and against God, questioning him: "Will you wipe away the righteous with the wicked?" (Genesis 18:22)
I agree. And the fact that it takes place on a forum rather than in private is important. All too often there are some who are more interested in defending their claims then in reflecting on them. Those who are reading without having a stake in a particular outcome may be the ones who most benefit.
(
Quoting frank
Some people are puzzles why an atheist would know the Bible. Until recently (20th century?) educated people in the West were very familiar with the Bible, whether they agreed with it or not. A favorite example of mine is from Descartes. What he is doing in the Meditations can be seen in a different light when one is familiar with the theme of being like God in Genesis, and how this relates to what Descartes says about knowledge, will, immortality and perfectibility.
By willing only what one knows Descartes says we cannot err. His geometric method of solving for any unknown makes it possible, given enough time, which is assured by an immortal soul/mind, to leave nothing unknown. Thus man is infinitely perfectible, that is, more and more like the gods. Nothing we plan to do will be impossible.
Quoting Wayfarer
Ok, so what is this "core insight"? This thing on which they both agree and disagree? This thing which cannot be "merged"?
I don't think you, or any one else, can say what it is. That's what it means for something to be ineffable. If I am wrong in theist hen all you need do is tell me what this "core insight" is.
Hence, for the purposes of the this particular topic, I do not see how this "core insight" can be of any use in setting out a definition, of any use in explaining the concept of religion.
Isn't there is a thread of self-deception in the writings of Hick, Royce, and others who would tell us how religion is ineffable?
Quoting Wayfarer
That question seems to me to demonstrate a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the logic of ethical language. it's a bit like your asking for . If one ought do such-and-such, then there is no further reason needed. The notion that it makes sense to ask why one ought be virtuous, to require a reason for being virtuous, is muddled, since being virtuous is exactly doing what one ought to do.
But the point goes deeper than mere logic, into the dynamics of action and belief. Supposing that we might find a something that underwrites ethical considerations gets the direction of fit wrong. Ethics changes the world to fit our ideas; hence ethics is not found, nor could we find something that underwrites ethics. (@Hanover, this is not unrelated to our PM discussion).
Like it or not, we decide what is virtuous.
I might here return your psychologising from yesterday. Is this really about your fear that we don't have a convincing, knock-down argument that folk should act in a certain way? Is god just a way for you to satisfy yourself that your ethical opinions are "underwritten", are authoritative?
In any case, than you for your Thoth-provoking replies.
Yep.
The question isn't why we ought be virtuous. It's why we ought do X, where X is any particular act. Once we've concluded that a particular act ought be done, we can can then call that act virtuous.
So then this construct begs the question then of "what makes an act virtuous." And you respond:
Quoting Banno
Who is "we"? Me and you, the modern Western world, the man with the biggest guns, a wise philosopher? Who?
In any event, is this not a nod to subjectivism? If the world goes mad and finds virtue in rape, is not rape virtuous? Don't you wish to say. "I don't care what anyone says, THAT is wrong!" That is, we can say whatever we want, but wrong is wrong. Do you not agree?
Quoting Banno
A contradiction. Your last statement asserted "we" underwrite our own ethics, but now there is no underwriter at all. Is this not a nod to nihilism? An argument could be made that it's better to say there is no ethics than to say we can decree the profane holy, right?
I know you take my views as improper extrapolating from yours, drawing conclusions you deny should arise from your statements, but it is a serious problem with atheistic morality to try and claim how there can be eternal truths.
Which is precisely why Putin is invading Ukraine: for no reason other than he thinks it good.
Even if one presumed that some given creed is the indubitable word of god, and that it sets out what we God proposes we ought do, it remains open to us to reject that proposal.
It remains open to us to decide to follow god's proposals, or not. It is we who decide what to do.
This is simply an alternate way of seeing out the issue of directionality. In ethical language, we do not seek to make our words match what is the case; we set out to make what is the case match our words.
In this sense, moral authority rests with us.
It is something that has be realised, known first-hand.
[quote=Edward Conze, Buddhist Philosophy and it's European Parallels] The "perennial philosophy" is in this context defined as a doctrine which holds [1] that as far as worth-while knowledge is concerned not all men are equal, but that there is a hierarchy of persons, some of whom, through what they are, can know much more than others; [2] that there is a hierarchy also of the levels of reality, some of which are more "real," because more exalted than others; and [3] that the wise men of old have found a "wisdom" which is true, although it has no "empirical" basis in observations which can be made by everyone and everybody; and that in fact there is a rare and unordinary faculty in some of us by which we can attain direct contact with actual reality--through the praj~naa (paaramitaa) of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides,(30) the sophia of Aristotle(31) and others, Spinoza's amor dei intellectualis, Hegel's Vernunft, and so on; and [4] that true teaching is based on an authority which legitimizes itself by the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents.[/quote]
If I attempt to relate that - even considering I possess it, which I don't - if you're not even open to the possibility that it is so, then there's nothing to discuss.
As far as the rational nature of ethics, I believe that is writ large in the entire Western philosophical corpus - Aristotle, Plato, and Kant, to name only a few.
And was he right? What do you think?
See where the choice sits?
Perhaps not. There will doubtless be folk too enamoured with external authority to see that the decision is theirs.
I think whether he is right or wrong isn't dependent upon what I think. If I ok rape, that makes me wrong.
Quoting Banno
The decision is mine to decide whether to do right or wrong, but I'm not empowered to make wrong right.
Doesn't the way this response closes off the conversation bother you?
Yes, what evidence do we have that god is a moral being - other than in the fan fiction (scripture), which by most accounts seems to suggest the opposite is the case.
And if we separate our notion of god from any old books, how do we determine what god wants us to do anyway? It's all very well to argue that god provides a foundation for morality in theory, but what is that morality if god/s are not present to share their views? We are still left to our own counsel on these matters, to guess or intuit god's values.
Quoting Hanover
Are not some cultures insane by the standards of others? Can we demonstrate that we have access to virtues that transcend human perspectives?
Oh, very much so; but that's different to accepting this or that authority in some actual case. While our philosophical forefathers might show how one might think, they cannot make our decision for us.
This or that authority must be chosen, may be disregarded. Kierkegaard was honest in this regard. Others, including some in this very thread, would prefer to join Brian's mum with "Because it is written, that's why!"
While others may differ, I don't see a way to make morality or ethical considerations central to the concept of religion.
Ritual does seem to have some part, as does some reference to the ineffable... I'll not say "supernatural" since I don't; think that term can be made coherent, for reasons set out by Hume.
So who will do this for you? Something else for you to decide.
The directionality of ethical considerations will not relieve you of such responsibilities.
Quoting Banno
But if you keep going back to a default position which forecloses the idea of there being a sapiential dimension to philosophy, then what is there to discuss? That was what my intemperate outburst yesterday was in response to. I felt that passage I quoted from Josiah Royce conveys something profound, but it's met with 'so what?'
Quoting Banno
But we value philosophers because they have insights that we do not. It's not a matter of slavishly following authority, but also not a matter of rejecting the insights of the tradition because it's an authority.
Good question.
But what is being suggested is not foreclosing on the entire "sapiential" project, so much as setting aside a part which our analysis shows is fraught: the creed, the saying[/I]; other ways of addressing the getting of wisdom are still open to us, in the forms of practice; as well as what we might call [i]showing, but which perhaps belongs to aesthetics.
So we drop the saying, and get on with showing and doing.
The aesthetic aspect of religion needs discussion in terms of the topic of this thread, too.
_____________________
Quoting Wayfarer
Oh, yes, I agree. It's why we are here... but the quality of what these folk have to say varies greatly, and demands a strong critical eye.
Even if one accepts the word of God, the word of God remains necessarily open to interpretation. As Moses learned while leading the people to Sinai, judges are needed to interpret and administer the law.
I'm not sure the reason for this clarification, as if I abandoned my free will to God. As an aside, and a debate for another time, but relying upon the incoherence of an ability to decide for myself, as if freedom of the will is meaningful within a secular context, is an irony.
At any rate, if the power to choose what shall be right and what shall be wrong is truly a power I possess, my divine command cannot be objected to and I'd have no reason to choose one rule over the other.
Unless I do have a reason..
If I do, then I'm not deciding from scratch, but something mysterious is guiding me.
I suspect whatever reservation you have in condemning rape in other nations exists only in your inability to articulate a reason why your cultural values should predominate, but your conscience leaves you no doubt as to the immorality of it.
Are not the varieties of conscience as much a cultural construct as our Western, 21st century proscription of and aversion to rape?
One can fancy a fanciful culture in which it would be considered an honor to be raped....or to be sacrificed and eaten.
Quoting Banno
The Buberian I-It versus I-Thou dynamic looks like a good starting point for a broad analysis of religion.
The confrontation with the self by way of the I-Thou experience allows the survival instinct to be in a sense expanded to the Thou - allowing us a more profound self- and other-realization (realitization!) and a powerful foundation for the golden rule.
Yep.
I'm happy to condemn it. I didn't give you a full answer.
I generally take an imperfect secular humanist view that actions which cause harm to human flourishing are bad. We can even set up 'objective' criteria relative to this basic goal. But I guess you must agree on this presupposition of 'flourishing' to begin with. You refer to conscience. Yep, most people are socialized to hold certain values and these are often shared across cultures and are strongly felt.
You might say God happens when the universe apart from the I - the universe as a whole - is experienced as a Thou.
If we are to construct a Venn diagram with religions, there is nothing in the region where all the circles overlap. That would be what I understand to be the essence of religion, its defining feature. Lacking such a unifying common factor, how do we understand the meaning of the word "religion"?
The meaning is to be found elsewhere then, necessarily so, oui! Wittgenstein claimed that meaning is use. What exactly this means is probably lost in translation, Wittgenstein wrote in German. :smile:
SO far this thread has looked at a few candidates for suitable criteria, such as ritualistic practice, ethical foundation, supernatural explanations, talk of the ineffable... non of which have been found adequate.
I do not think that the article's discussion of the two kinds of analysis does justice to the notion of a family resemblance. A more formal analysis might explicate this.
Edit: oh, and there's , but what that might look like remains unclear.
Buddhism and Christianity both have rituals. Check.
Christianity and Judaisim both are monotheistic. Check.
Now what's the similarity between rituals and monotheism?
To give a mathematical example by way of clarification:
56 = 7 × 8
72 = 3 × 24
There doesn't seem to be anything common between 56 and 72 when factored this way, but hold on (vide infra)
8 = 2 × 4
24 = 6 × 4
8 and 24 have a common factor, 4, as I factorized them.
To cut to the chase, first identify any and all features common between any two religions, suppose these are x, y, z. Step 2, find what's common to all x, y, z. If nothing, repeat the process like so: What's shared between x,y and y, z and x, z. Say that's a, b, c. Reiterate the process until you finally arrive at what is the essence of a given word, here "religion".
...in which A, B, C... are given criteria. The advantage is that any proposition that can be parsed in first order language can be parsed in disjunctive normal form.
IN this formalisation, Monothetic definitions would look like:
...for a single criteria; and
...for multiple criteria. Whereas a Polythetic definitions woful look like:
... for some criteria A,B,C...
Of course the number of criteria can be varied to match whatever definition you wish.
Does that make sense?
One question is, does the Polythetic definition match what Wittgenstein had in mind for family resemblances?
...to whatever level of complexity one wishes. SO there is no single criteria that is common to all members of the family.
But I think family resemblance captures more than this, because it emphasises use over what can be explicitly stated - that is, the way we use the notion of "our family". SO when Jenny and Steven adopt Fred, who is not their child, Fred nevertheless is considered a family member. And that wonderful woman who babysits the kids and always remembers their birthdays is called Aunty Sue and considered to be family, despite not being related by blood or marriage or adoption. And after that indiscretion Uncle Tom is no longer mentioned, no longer considered family.
So a family resemblance can be put in disjunctive normal form, but is extensible or retractible, changing the criteria with use.
Does it cause problems in philosophy? Well, yes because we could be talking past each other e.g. to me religion could mean anything to do with god while to you it might mean moral codes sans a deity.
Is there a solution? We could focus on the common aspects and ignore the differences. So, if we were to discuss Christianity and Buddhism as religions, we could concentrate our efforts on morality, something that's in the overlap zone.
Well, I could never wrap my head around Wittgenstein's "meaning is use" statement. How does one explain the overlap zones that aren't empty? People have been using meaning as that which picks out an essence, it's just that they've been doing it rather loosely.
Well, so much the worse for that understanding of definitions. It doesn't;t match what we actually do.
Quoting Agent Smith
Or was it that they thought they were picking up essences, misled by a picture - a theory of definition - that held them captive; while all along they were just getting on with making use of their words to get stuff done?
:up:
This takes us back to what Wittgenstein said about ostensive definitions.
Suppose X has the "essential" features a, b, c. I point to a coupla instances of X and say "this is X", basically defining X.
Person p looks at X's and thinks a is the essential feature. Person q thinks it's b and to person r, it's c.
We have now, in our hands, the recipe for confusion aka family resemblance:
The person p sees something that has feature a and concludes that's an X; the same goes for persons p and q with their own understanding (b, c) of X. Yet these things aren't exactly X's, oui?
To get to the point, ostensive definitions are (hopelessly?) inadequate unless done so with the greatest care, something we don't have the time for. Plus, it looks like misusing words (being lax with the definition of "definition" i.e. disjunction replaces conjunction) bears a striking resemblance to bad ostensive definitions.
Further conversation might well reveal their differences.
Alternately, which of them is right? How will you decide?
All those infernal threads that start "what is..." reduced to froth.
[quote=Dan Barker]I threw the bathwater. There was no baby in it.[/quote]
Well, if we view philosophy as simply a conversation, then it doesn't matter much whether we agree or not, right?
If, on the other hand, we deem philosophy to be some kind of journey of discovery, finding truths, we have a problem, because if Wittgenstein is correct, we're a hair's breadth away from commiting the fallacy of equivocation; lost in a world ruled by a function (sense/meaning [math]\to[/math] word) that has no inverse!
Don't want to detail the thread, but maybe consider the possibility that meaning isn't mental, that it's out there in the world with our bodies, between us instead of in us.
This is the picture picture, I suppose. Imagine that Beckett wrote a play where characters who live in a junkyard hold conversations by silently taking turns lifting up this or that piece of junk. If that's all they ever did, not much meaning perhaps, but start integrating such a 'language' into practical activities and I think even abstractions will develop. The alternator will represent representation or something.
From the I and Thou wiki:
In Buber's view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou. Martin Buber said that every time someone says Thou, they are indirectly addressing God. People can address God as Thou or as God, Buber emphasized how, “You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life.”
Buber explains that humans are defined by two word pairs: I–It and I–Thou.
The "It" of I–It refers to the world of experience and sensation. I–It describes entities as discrete objects drawn from a defined set (e.g., he, she or any other objective entity defined by what makes it measurably different from other entities). It can be said that "I" have as many distinct and different relationships with each "It" as there are "Its" in one's life. Fundamentally, "It" refers to the world as we experience it.
By contrast, the word pair I–Thou describes the world of relations. This is the "I" that does not objectify any "It" but rather acknowledges a living relationship. I–Thou relationships are sustained in the spirit and mind of an "I" for however long the feeling or idea of relationship is the dominant mode of perception. A person sitting next to a complete stranger on a park bench may enter into an "I–Thou" relationship with the stranger merely by beginning to think positively about people in general. The stranger is a person as well, and gets instantaneously drawn into a mental or spiritual relationship with the person whose positive thoughts necessarily include the stranger as a member of the set of persons about whom positive thoughts are directed. It is not necessary for the stranger to have any idea that he is being drawn into an "I–Thou" relationship for such a relationship to arise. But what is crucial to understand is the word pair "I–Thou" can refer to a relationship with a tree, the sky, or the park bench itself as much as it can refer to the relationship between two individuals. The essential character of "I–Thou" is the abandonment of the world of sensation, the melting of the between, so that the relationship with another "I" is foremost.
Key to this question is the notion of the sacred. What is it that makes an object, a person, a behavior (a ritual), etc, sacred (in the eye of the beholder)?
Can there be religion without the sacralizing power of the human mind?
The spiritual quest for awakening, enlightenment, illumination, is the quest to sacralize every aspect of experience.
Or, to paraphrase Nikos Kazantzakis: To transubstantiate matter, to transform it into spirit. (Supposing all of this to occur within the human mind, with no actual effect on molecules, atoms, etc....)
On a secular level, in the US there are accusations from both sides of judges acting as legislators.
In hermeneutics there is the question of the extent to which an interpretation creates meaning rather than explicates the meaning found in the text.
Somewhere Nietzsche reverses the meaning of "seek and you will find". To what extent is what we find a matter of what we put there to be found?
To what extent does religion give us meaning as opposed to us giving meaning to religion?
Quoting Banno
The transition from the I-It to the I-Thou relationship may reflect a universal access to the sacralizing power of the human mind.
In short, one's religion is centered on what one holds sacred. The human mind - I would think in every case - has a sacralizing potency. One's tabernacle can be sacred, as can one's favorite football team. (Two profoundly different sacrednesses. But both reflect the sacralizing power of the mind.)
Is the sacralizing power of the human mind what separates us, culturally speaking, from the animals? A gradient works well here for me since we're trafficking in unknowns.
In support of what you said:
In order to address this it is necessary to identify what it is that you think a relativistic morality entails. One need not posit an absolute moral authority in order to regard rape as wrong.
So, assuming moral truths are relative to society, the times, the culture, one's idiosyncratic upbringing and experiences, tell me why the rapist ought be judged wrong despite his view it is right?
If for no other reason, because the society judges it to be wrong.
You elide from society to idiosyncrasy as if it is all the same.
You are looking for an absolute where one cannot be found. The truth is that every absolute moral claim rests on shifting ground.
Do you think that rape is wrong because this is what you have been told by a higher authority? If you had never been told this would you still think it wrong if someone raped you?
This for me brought up an old phrase “everybody worships” - for some it’s a god, others money, fame, influence and power, beauty, love, skill, etc but everybody worships. When framed in that way doctrines abound and religions are endless in shape and form.
:smirk: :up:
Quoting Tom Storm
:fire:
Societies of all sorts clicked along with slavery, with its dissolution fucking up everything.
If your basis for ethical rules is pragmatic, you'll have to concede such things as slavery, subjugation of women, and stoning of the guilty and all sorts of other now considered barbaric norms were ethical within their context.
Had I lived 200 years ago. I'd have thought my race entitled to hold slaves and if I lived 80 years ago in Germany, I would have thought the Nazis monsters, unless of course I was one.
We either deny morality and just claim it's a matter of perspective, or we state what we both think: the slave holders and the Nazis were wrong. Now that we've stated what we believe, let's figure out what that belief entails, and I'd submit it demands a morality that transcends time and place.
Does this include what we find in Deuteronomy?
:cool: :up:
Sure, the social order is set by what the culture determines as valuable. If a rights based view, or a religious morality predominates, the order is likely to reflect those values. And those values may shift as the culture changes.
Belief in a morality that transcends time and place requires belief in some kind of "afterlife" (such as in the sense of the Christian afterlife, the Hindu reincarnation, or Buddhist rebirth).
Without God's judgment or karma, the notion of justice doesn't apply, and without justice, morality is unintelligible.
That's how you shoot yourself in the foot, and why so many here don't take you seriously.
Such a self-deprecating remark as you make above is either a sample of false humility (which is offputting), or just a plain declaration of incompetence (which is also offputting).
No. The whole point of authority is that one's subjugation to it is not a matter of one's choice. Authority imposes itself, and it does so totally. Anything that is less than that is not authority, just someone or something with currently more power than oneself.
I've long thought the solution to climate change is a new global religion. The binding and what not.
The fact that it is, at the very least, a radically antisocial act? Would you not consider it wrong if any social animal killed its fellows?
It hurts to think of women I know being raped. I just extrapolate out from there. It's a feeling with a "no" at the center of it.
What are the other options? Does virtue ethics operate in the context of cultural values interacting with those of the individual?
All I'm saying, is I don't claim to be enlightened. Had enough of your sarcasm and constant jibes, baker.
The context was that I was arguing that there is such a thing as a higher truth. The question was, how do you know that? How can you demonstrate it? To which I replied with reference to the idea that in the 'perennial philosophy', there is the figure of the sage, 'one who knows by virtue of the kind of human they are'. I firmly believe that is true, although in saying that, I'm not claiming to be a sage. So it amounts to acknowledging that no, I can't really demonstrate it 'objectively' even if I have the conviction that it's true. This usually then leads to the conclusion that it's only a matter of 'faith', of 'believing without evidence' - because the 'testimony of sages' and the annals of spiritual philosophy are all simply a matter of faith, not scientifically demonstrable. Thereby falling right back into the false dichotomy which characterises modern philosophy, that there is what is scientifically demonstrable and objectively verifiable, and anything else, no matter whether it's noble or profound, must always be a matter of personal conviction.
Other options? Perhaps, since we don't see other social animals murdering their fellows, there is also, at least in regard to murder, an instinctive anti-disposition. Should we think of anyone capable of murder as being somehow radically disordered?
I'm not clear on what your question regarding virtue ethics is; do you want to elaborate?
I wonder if our capacity for atrocities is simply the shadow side of our intellect.
It's understood chimps murder. They also patrol their boundaries and tear apart intruders. Dianne Fossey documented this and it shocked her.
Nature itself seem radically disordered - a suburban backyard is a bloodbath - insects and animals eat each other alive. Even the idea that food means eating another living thing seems perverse.
In relation to virtue ethics, I was pondering if this might be a third option as a source of ethical behavior or is it just an example of cultural values being interpreted by an individual?
He argues in his two books, Forgotten Truth and Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, that there are "levels of being" within which the vertical dimension corresponds to the axis of quality, providing a basis for ethics other than the merely quantitative, which characterise the 'scientistic' outlook.
These levels appear in both the "external" and the "internal" worlds, "higher" levels of reality without corresponding to "deeper" levels of reality within. On the very lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels. On the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute (Dharmakaya in Buddhism.)
Basically this is an attempt to recover this understanding of reality from materialism, scientism, and "postmodernism." Smith does not attempt to adjudicate among religions (or philosophies), or spell out any of the important differences between world faiths, and does not intend to substitute a new religion for the specific faiths which already exist.
Nor should any such project be expected from a work that expressly focuses on what religions have in common. Far from showing that all religions are somehow "the same," Smith in fact shows that religions have a "common" core only at a sufficiently general level. What he shows, therefore, is not that there is really just one religion, but that the various religions of the world are actually agreeing and disagreeing about something real, something about which there really is a matter of fact, on the fundamentals of which many religions tend to concur while differing in numerous points of detail (including practice).
Suffice to say that the only dimension assumed to be real by the modern/post-modern attitude is the first, namely, the physical or natural domain, hence physicalism or naturalism as the dominant paradigm of secular culture. From within that horizon, any of the deeper/higher levels of being can only be depicted as matters of personal conviction.
Quoting SEP
But go aead, if you think it worth your while.
If you do not find rape repellent, then that is about you, not about rape. If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not do such things, you are morally bankrupt.
What to call it if not (informed) personal conviction? And what's so awful about (informed) personal conviction?
I'm sure most scientists also have their pet (informed) personal convictions...
We all have intellects, but by no means all of us have a capacity for atrocities; at least not self-motivated atrocities.
Do chimps murder others of their own troop?
Eating others is necessary; it is part and parcel of the natural order; so I don't see it as disordered; it is, I think, by mere definition, not disordered.
I am not very familiar with the idea and tenets of virtue ethics, so I am probably the wrong person to ask about that question. I will say that I think all our principles and beliefs are pretty much examples of cultural values being interpreted by individuals.
Your call. It's just an idea. If Kaufman and the SEP don't care for it, I suppose it's some kind of bunk.
Or is that more of a religious view?
Yes, Buber has been criticized by other philosophers. But I thought the I-Thou idea might be helpful.
Emotivism then? And if I don't share those emotions, then what's bad to you is good to me and there is no one correct answer? Sort of like vanilla ice cream is bad to me but good to you.
But certainly the notion of the sacred and of the sacralizing power of the human mind is as stable a starting point as any for this sort of dialogue.
It's not that it's awful or wrong, but that it subjectivises ethics. They become a matter of choice rather than being grounded in anything beyond oneself, although that's also one of the consequences of pluralism.
By the way, with respect to the 'I-Thou' relationship - I have the idea that prior to the advent of modernity, this defined our whole relationship with nature herself. Because nature was seen as the creation of God, then one's relationship to it was more of 'I-Thou' than 'I-it'. The world couldn't be seen as simply an array of things being acted on by physical forces but was the expression of intention. The loss of that sense is what was referred to be Max Weber as the Disenchantment (which is kind of the flip side of the Enlightenment.)
[quote=Dean Inge, Christian Mysticism; https://ccel.org/ccel/inge/mysticism/mysticism.iv.html]The world as it is, is the world as God sees it, not as we see it. Our vision is distorted, not so much by the limitations of finitude, as by sin and ignorance. The more we can raise ourselves in the scale of being, the more will our ideas about God and the world correspond to the reality. "Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to them to be," says John Smith, the English Platonist. Origen, too, says that those whom Judas led to seize Jesus did not know who He was, for the darkness of their own souls was projected on His features. And Dante, in a very beautiful passage, says that he felt that he was rising into a higher circle, because he saw Beatrice's face becoming more beautiful.[/quote]
So then we might examine an historical It-ification of the Thou....
I'll check out that Weber reference, thanks.
I think almost everyone has the capacity for atrocity. It simply takes the 'right' situation or triggers - war; holocausts; dictatorships, extremes of poverty, prison...
Yes, chimps beat, kill and sometimes cannibalize from their own tribe.
Eating other living things may be 'necessary' (although people overlay ethical veganism) but I think a 'creation' wherein animals torture prey and eat it still living appears disordered and perverse to me. The fact something is natural doesn't give it a free pass...
I think you are right about cultural values.
This makes no sense.
You've been very clear that there are no objective goods and evils, but just competing points of view. So then a guy comes along celebrating the joys of rape, and you can't tell him rape is wrong, but only that he's defective because he doesn't intuitively know that rape is wrong, even though you just got through saying rape isn't wrong in an absolute way.
This is just to say that a logical consequence of relativistic ethics is that you can't tell me why I'm wrong without imposing an absolute standard on me, or else you'll forever be respecting my point of view.
The rape example is an extreme one, but there are similar real life ones. 200 years ago people were enslaved by people who were otherwise moral but didn't understand why slavery was wrong. They were wrong even though the world thought them right. Surely the abolitionists had better arguments than just to yell "you guys are morally bankrupt." They had to be relying upon some standard of righteousness that they believed transcended their personal opinion or else they'd have just been involved in a power struggle, wanting their morality to be substituted for the current system, with neither more or objectively better than the other.
I don't attribute morality to two dogs that fight to the death or to two rams who fight to the death over an ewe.
Are you taking the position then that morality is determined by time and place and that slavery was good when it was accepted?
Yep, this is a frequently made argument (as you know) and there are probably just two responses.
1) Yes, you're right. There is nothing objective. Sorry about that. It is simply an individual/culture holding subjectively derived values. But humans, in the interest of cooperation and peace, tend not to commit crimes against each other. We are a eusocial species. We build social harmony. And we have prisons for those who don't care. (heavily simplified answer)
2) We can set the goal of the flourishing of conscious creatures as the overarching ethical principle for human behavior. Now we can evaluate our actions on the basis of how this goal can be best supported. No doubt with endless debate.
In both instances we have reasons to condemn the rapist. And with more powerful arguments than 'god says so.'
Can you demonstrate an objective morality?
Who are you, Matt Dillahunty?
See answer above.
Jesus' answer was that all of the law means one thing: have love.
The Neoplatonists continued that theme with: "Love and do what you will."
The basic idea is that by loving, you come closer to your basic nature. If you don't have love, it's because you don't love yourself.
I'm partly Neoplatonic and partly profoundly nihilist. Strangely enough, the two blend pretty well.
So you accept a law from a higher power?
This is idiosyncratic to certain religions, but not logically dictated.
Judaic views vary, although the afterlife is not posited for the purposes of meting out eternal rewards and punishments. It is used to purge one of sin in order to return the person to his holy state. It is a time of atonement, not punishment, and not to exceed 12 months (cool, right?).
The point being that doing good can be for that sake of doing good alone, despite how other models might handle sin.
Digression - Even if we were to accept a law from a higher power as theoretically possible, how would we demonstrate what that law is and what that higher power is? Is this view of any use? Cannot any position be justified as the will (or law) of some higher power?
There was this one time where God zapped it into some pieces of stone, whereupon the guy carrying them threw them down on the ground and busted them. They swept up the pieces and put them in the Arc of the Covenant.
It's a pretty amazing story. It's etched on everybody's psyche. It's our epic.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure. There were these Mormons who believed God spoke directly to them. One heard God say he should kill his wife, so he did.
That story sucks. It's not etched on anybody's psyche.
You've just presented an objective basis for determining morality. You're not arguing relatavism any more.
If "flourishing" is the objective goal, you've got to offer some reason why. If it is just because it is, that is equivalent to "god says so."
I agree and hence the caveat "self-motivated atrocities", which was meant to make the distinction from being sucked into mob thinking or performing an atrocious duty out of fear, and so on.
Quoting Tom Storm
"Free pass" just according to you, or are you invoking the idea of higher authority? If it is just you; I have to say the idea of an individual disapproving of nature seems somehow absurd.
Quoting Tom Storm
I wasn't aware of that. I searched and could not find any reference to that behavior. Can you point me to one?
I'm pretty confident that you agree that rape is wrong. I'm confident you would join me in condemning this misanthrope.
So I can tell him that rape is wrong, as can you.
There's no incontrovertible ethical "law; that again shows a misunderstanding of the direction of fit of moral statements. We do not discover moral statements by examining how things are; we make things fit our moral statements. The direction is not fitting our words to the way things are, but fitting the way things are to the world.
And there is disagreement. The expectation of an incontrovertible moral principle is naive, even childish.
Murder is unlawful killing. It's immorality stems from whatever morality there is in breaking the law. If one ought follow the law, then one ought not murder.
It follows that killing someone does not count as murder if it is sanctioned by law, as in self defence, capital punishment, war or euthanasia.
So is killing someone immoral? It quickly becomes evident that this depends on the circumstances. It is not difficult to dream up dilemmas to suit the most confused adolescent. Treating it as a set of incontrovertible rules belies the complexity. Is it better to run a tram over a half-dozen terminal patients than one Trump supporter? Yep, ethics is difficult.
Yes, I made that point earlier - that this is as close to 'objective' as we can get in my view.
Quoting Hanover
Why flourishing? I've already said that this is a presupposition. No one has to accept it. There are those who think that people don't deserve to flourish and thrive. That a failed state is perfectly fine, that misery and suffering and warfare are satisfactory conditions for life.
As a criterion of value, be it personal or social. I'm not the only person who has pointed to the horror that is nature and felt a repugnance for some of it. Darwin's faith was tested severely when he learned about the hatching behavior of a wasp.
[i]I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ [parasitic wasps] with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars…”
Charles Darwin
[quote=Charles Darwin, private correspondence] But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[/quote]
So, on reflection I see that it would be absurd to invoke a higher authority as support for one's disapproval of nature unless one followed the Gnostics in believing that the world was created, not by the highest god, but by another power such as the self-deluded deity they called Yaldabaoth (if memory serves); an unintelligent designer.
Presuming that our convictions are nothing more than instinctive responses, the idea of questioning the morality of a purported higher authority really is incoherent, because the whole idea of a higher authority, and the question itself, would also be nothing more than instinctive responses.
And if the truth is that some - many - terms are not definable in the way you suppose, you would pretend otherwise in order to retain your mythology?
Quoting Banno
You are confident we are in agreement that rape is wrong. Why? Just because I'm a Western educated law abiding adult similar enough in background to you that I must share this norm? Is that the extent of it?
My question is asked because we know your confidence does not arise because we both have similar reasons to object to rape (as same would childish, like Kant or Bentham I suppose), so then where does it come from? It's not from reason and not from the heavens, so I'm running out of options.
And rape is not as universally condmned as we might hope, and certainly not as much in antiquity as today.
What causes the lack of confidence in the evil of rape among those who shrug it off? Just that they're evil (i.e. "morally bankrupt") and be obviously circular?
My point here is to either ask you accept that rape (or slavery or genocide) (1) has been moral at one point and now it's not or (2) was never moral but was mistaken as moral.
Pick your poison. I choose 2.
If you're interested: https://tjpnews.com/torah-makes-distinction-between-murder-killing/
It comes from moral deliberation, from what we as reasonable social animals regard as acceptable and unacceptable behavior. We begin from where we are, with law and custom, but sometimes what was acceptable can no longer be accepted. We come to regard things differently, to value things differently.
Although morality does not stand on absolute grounds that does not mean that we do not stand absolutely for or against certain actions.
So much for the sovereignty of reason, then. Rather vitiates philosophy, doesn't it? (Oh, the irony.)
You're just describing cognitive dissonance. Sure, we can be absolutely opposed to rape and treat it as if no person can question its immorality ever, but why we suspend our reason and afford it absolute evil status when we know it's really just a subjective preference just means we've arrived at an interesting coping mechanism in order to navigate this godless world.
Well, the point is that we do philosophy regardless, and we take ourselves to be making sense. How do we know that is not compatible with our intellects having evolved naturalistically? To say that it is not may be a mistake we make on account of not being able to understand how the two facts (if they are facts) that our intellects have evolved and that they make sense, could be compatible.
It seems obvious that our intellects have evolved, and it does not seem obvious they have been designed by a transcendent intelligence; reason is sovereign for us regardless, simply because it seems self-evident that it must be, on pain of absurdity.
In other words, what if our convictions are not nothing more than instinctive responses, but are instinctive responses, and validly, or not, reasoned conclusions? Must it be either/ or?
Quoting Wayfarer
Moral emotions may play a guiding role as well.
But do I dare speak fondly of feelings on this forum?
Feelings and reason - it can be a healthy partnership. Though philosophers in general tend to exalt the latter and denigrate the former.
Reason untempered by emotion - that's only half-human.
From the wiki on moral emotions.
"Moral reasoning has been the focus of most study of morality dating all the way back to Plato and Aristotle. The emotive side of morality has been looked upon with disdain, as subservient to the higher, rational, moral reasoning, with scholars like Piaget and Kohlberg touting moral reasoning as the key forefront of morality.[4] However, in the last 30–40 years,[when?] there has been a rise in a new front of research: moral emotions as the basis for moral behavior. This development began with a focus on empathy and guilt, but has since moved on to encompass new emotional scholarship on emotions such as anger, shame, disgust, awe, and elevation. With the new research, theorists have begun to question whether moral emotions might hold a larger role in determining morality, one that might even surpass that of moral reasoning."
What makes you think god/s are against rape (have you read the Old Testament/Tanakh)? What makes you think a god's moral positions are useful, if they can even be identified?
Theistic morality does not escape any of the questions secular morality faces. Theistic moral systems have no foundation for their beliefs.
:clap: Amen!
It's likely crucial to include the potence of the emotions here.
A good part of why rape is considered so heinous is doubtless the way rape, and reports of rape, make us feel.
:100:
The contradiction is that we assured by naturalism that the Universe has no inherent meaning, that the idea that life has a reason for existing is an anachronistic throwback to an ignorant age. Whereas it was assumed by pre-modern philosophy that things exist for a reason and that the rational faculty is what enables us to grasp it.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
You see what I meant by 'subjectivizing'?
''Max Horkheimer's 1947 book The Eclipse of Reason argues that individuals in "contemporary industrial culture" experience a "universal feeling of fear and disillusionment", which can be traced back to the impact of ideas that originate in the Enlightenment conception of reason, as well as the historical development of industrial society. Before the Enlightenment, reason was seen as an objective force in the world. Now, it is seen as a "subjective faculty of the mind". In the process, the philosophers of the Enlightenment destroyed "metaphysics and the objective concept of reason itself." Reason no longer determines the "guiding principles of our own lives", but is subordinated to the ends it can achieve. In other words, reason is instumentalized.
The effects of this shift are devaluing. There is little love for things in themselves. Philosophies, such as pragmatism and positivism, "aim at mastering reality, not at criticizing it." Man comes to dominate nature, but in the process dominates other men by dehumanizing them. He forgets the unrepeatable and unique nature of every human life and instead sees all living things as fields of means. His inner life is rationalized and planned. "On the one hand, nature has been stripped of all intrinsic value or meaning. On the other, man has been stripped of all aims except self-preservation." Popular Darwinism teaches only a "coldness and blindness toward nature."
According to Horkheimer, the individual in mass society is a cynical conformist. Ironically, the 'idolization of progress' leads to the decline of the individual.'
How Nietzschean of you!
Yeah, I get it. People have to decide.
Do you situate the source of ethics and morals in the perennial philosophy you referred to above?
I know it through Huxley.
So if not an argument - if not an act of reason - then a feeling?
:fire:
Yes. A fascinating book.
I try to, but it's difficult. It makes you wrestle with some deep existential questions. But that's why I studied the subjects I did and pursued this particular type of inquiry.
This is true of nihilism and – once again – not (moral) "naturalism". :roll:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/
Too far afield here and really a massive strawman. No one has argued the Bible (or any other text) represents the word of God. I'm not arguing divine command theory. I'm arguing moral realism, asserting an actual right and wrong beyond the opinion of humans. Our understanding of morality, just like the rest of reality, is through observation and reason and it is refined over time. That is, today's understanding of morality is superior to 500 years ago. We're not just flittering randomly over time regarding what is good and evil, but are getting closer to the truth.
The perennial philosophy as set out by Huxley has been a stable source of inspiration to me as a spiritual seeker.
A powerful inspiration for meditative practice.
But, sure, still plenty to wrestle with there in terms of knowledge or certainty.
I'm curious if you're familiar with Nikos Kazantzakis' Spiritual Exercises. Powerful stuff. I think you'd dig the vision, though possibly not the conclusion.
I've been rereading David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus too. Spiritual science fiction; a unique visionary odyssey...Free at Gutenberg.
Quoting 180 Proof
If in a discussion between A and B, A insists on the central significance of X while B insists that X be entirely excluded from the discussion as "not even a possibility" - there is literally nothing left for A and B to talk about.
To my view, Wayfarer was relating this simple fact.
I'll look into that Kazantzakis text you mention. My practice fell of a cliff a couple of years ago and haven't been able to restart it.
Lots of fire in his spiritual vision - perfect for getting it fired up again.
Ha! :wink: Not a strawman if you were arguing for divine command theory which is why I wrote this. Since you aren't, I can now say it doesn't apply to your argument and your rebuttal is fair enough (although what I said will apply to others here who often say there is no morality without a theistic basis).
Quoting Hanover
That's great. Keep arguing. I am happy to be convinced of moral realism. Where does morality live if not in the minds and choices of humans?
Quoting Hanover
Does this not sound suspiciously like a liberal talking social justice and identity politics? I'm fascinated that you are able to identify truth and say that we are moving closer to it. Great if 'true'. Could this not merely be a case that our preferred form of social order is currently privileging rights and pluralism, albeit only by the mutual agreement of a shared subjectivism held by those whose views we support?
I see the point, and will try and find time to read that SEP entry. But the form of naturalism I have in mind is that espoused by, for example, Bertrand Russell for much of his life - 'That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms...'
The other form that this takes is the typical deferral to Darwinism as a kind of catch-all explanation for everything about human nature: that 'we evolved' to have 'feelings of altruism' because of its supposed 'advantage' for natural selection. That is so widely assumed nowadays as to be almost beyond question, certainly by the great majority of those who register on this forum. It seems obvious to naturalise ethics this way.
My view is, certainly h. sapiens evolved just as the science has discovered - you can't argue with the empirically-established facts - but that once at the point of being language-using, meaning-seeking beings, then h. sapiens' capabilities are no longer circumscribed by natural selection alone. It is a factor, but at that point the species transcends its biological origins in some vital sense.; horizons of meaning become available that are not visible to other creatures. And that's why we're morally responsible in a way that animals cannot be. But of course, as evolution has now become in many respects a secular religion, then that distinction is unintelligible to great many people.
He's outnumbered. 'We' don't tolerate such things, nor do 'we' feel the need to justify every justification. On Certainty seems relevant here: "Giving grounds [must] come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting. " While we bother to justify some claims and actions, the bottom of the system is mud, 'blind' habit. Eventually there's that's just the way we do things. (Or, better maybe, the doing of them.) Dreyfus is also good on this:
https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/404866/mod_resource/content/0/Hubert_L._Dreyfus_Being-in-the-World_A_Commentary_on_Heideggers_Being_and_Time%2C_Division_I.__1995.pdf
It's a tough call. What should I do? Treat nonsense as philosophy or give up philosophy altogether.
These are the two choices that are available, oui?
[quote=Richard Polt, Anything but Human] People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts.Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense.[/quote]
Please stop providing interesting quotes and links. I really wish to get through a newish book by Searle, but haven't progressed in three days. At least part of the blame for that is this thread.
Damit.
(I'm supposed to be working....)
Now bugger off while I read your New York Times article.
Must the notion of better be understood in terms of proximity to a postulated 'truth' which I interpret as a perfected morality? This would be something like an End of History, whether or not the limit/ideal were ever obtained.
But it is an impoverished naturalism that is not replete with meaning. Not sure what "inherent meaning" would be implying since meaning is a function of percipients responding to signs, as I understand it. So meaning is contingent on percipients and the signs that they find meaning in, isn't it?
I don't know what "things exist for a reason" could even mean. Things exist and we find meanings in them. Are you suggesting that the existence of things has some absolute purpose? Of course we can kind of imagine that it does, but that imagining is ineluctably vague, since we cannot rightly say what that purpose could be. If we do say what that purpose is we will inevitably be wrong because we would be indulging in fundamentalism.
Why are those the only choices?
It's a form of life, with all the implications of that sanctum.
Or a lifeworld, Lebenswelt, as mentioned in @Wayfarer's article.
This?
Well, (1) is wrong, for starters...
Wikipedia also notes:
I haven't spent much time with that work as I've only just become aware of it, but it seems at the very least a considerable and profound work. But it is probably too big a piece of work to productively argue about here.
:roll: I never said rituals are necessarily religious. I said the motivations behind the ritual is what makes it religious or not. If there is no evidence that the ritual achieves what you intend, then the ritual is religious, ie. Washing your hands to prevent food poisoning vs. washing your hands to please a god.
If you are insisting on "achieving good" as the motivation, then there is evidence that certain rituals can make us feel good without being religious. The problem is that there is no evidence that it makes a god feel good, which makes the ritual religious. If there is no other reason for performing a ritual other than to make you feel good because the ritual has made you feel good in the past, then the ritual is not religious. It would be religious to perform the ritual to feel good without evidence that it does.
What does it mean to be a "Jew" if not performing some ritual?
I was raised as a Christian and we celebrated Christmas. Now I'm an atheist. I still bring a tree into my home during the holiday season, but I don't do it to celebrate the birth of some man that claimed to be the son of a god. I do it because it is fun for me and my family. So it's not a religious ritual.
It's not religions that change over time. It is our motivations for performing the rituals that change over time. We can adopt religious rituals and make them into non-religious rituals by changing the motivations for performing them.
First, silence does not occlude the cognitive dissonance between an appeal to a transcendent authority and disregard for the word of your chosen transcendent authority on the subject of rape when it goes against your own socially established moral norms.
Second, your own subjective preference for holding to a god in a godless world just means you've arrived at a not so interesting coping mechanism.
[Added]: If not a god then what is the source of transcendent morality? And how do we know what that morality is?
It's poetry. Open your heart. Read on.
Quoting Banno
I don't think it would be fruitful to discuss the work on this forum. It's about the vision, about spiritual energy (the energy required to pursue spiritual objectives) and its sources. I think of it as essentially poetry with some philosophical intention.
Like John's Revelation, a literal reading is a fruitless approach.
Awfully vague.
What form of life is it? Is it a form of life centered in an act of reason or in something else? If something else, what? If not a feeling, what?
You could say it's emotion and reason (and X and Y and Z) working hand in hand. But I don't think you want to say that.
You are a Jew if your mother was a Jew. Judaism is not even based upon your belief system.
"Religion" is not a term with an essence.
Jesus never claims to be the son of God in the gospels. It's said of him (in Matthew, I think).
He gets close enough here:
“If you knew God’s gift, that is, who it is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink of water,’ then you would have asked him; and he would have given you living water.”
John 4:10
He may not think he's god, but he definitely thinks he's god's gift.
Yes, I guess so. He actually was pretty cool.
Yeah, a brilliant poet.
"Wheresoever the body is, thither will the eagles be gathered together."
Hard to believe this is so mystifying. Religion is clearly reducible to the "material" conditions that gave rise to it, that is, to what is IN the world that inspired or provoked all the story telling. One has to ask this question first. Otherwise, it would be like explaining a shoe with no understanding of the foot and what it does. Shoes would be disembodied narratives without this. And this is why religion is opaque: it is presented as disembodied narratives.
The question is, then, what is there, in the world, that is the foundation of religion, and minus the historical accounts, minus the specious metaphysics, minus the comfort of authority, and minus everything that is merely incidental. It is a reduction that is sought.
"Wherever the corpse is, there the vultures will gather."
--English Standard
From the Introduction:
"I tried with simple words, as in confession, to trace the spiritual struggles of my life, from where I set out, how I passed over obstacles, how the struggle of God began, how I found the central meaning which regulates at last my thought, my speech and my actions."
At times Kazantzakis seems to take the god's eye view - seems to attempt to speak with the voice of god - the right of every poet.
Eek. From eagles to vultures. How did that happen?
You were quoting the King James Version. It's got a lot of mistranslations in it.
What’s striking about this graphic is how utterly egocentric it is, with man (even women are merely supporting characters) being the center of heaven, earth, and selfhood. How can these stories of sin and ignorance fit other lifeforms when most don’t even possess a central nervous system?
We’re all chained by ideologies and while some are better than others none are *great*.
I'm no biblical scholar, but Google gave me this:
“Eagles” is the literal translation of “?????” (Thayer, Strong’s).
https://www.kjvtoday.com/eagles-or-vultures-in-matthew-2428-and-luke-1737/
However, the original Greek does not use the term “vultures.” It clearly uses the term for eagles, “aetoi,” the plural for Strong’s #105, “aetós.”
https://www.defendingthebride.com/sc/mass/mat24.html
Also, I like 'eagles' better. :smile:
I'm not a biblical scholar either.
"?????" can be translated as either eagle or vulture. Vulture fits the meaning of the sentence better, so most contemporary translations use vulture.
Where people insist on using eagle, it's because they favor some esoteric meaning behind it.
Here.
Quoting ZzzoneiroCosm
That's good enough.
Somehow you tagged me without my getting a notification.
There is lots of great stuff in that article. It is difficult to land on just one part.
Why?
That is my take away. I wouldn't necessarily call language a heuristic and I don't intend to enter the broader discussion of what language is, but the article does such a nice job of tracing the edges of language within context. What is also nice is the end where words are generally shown to be wanting - that concepts seem to transcend words and that the focus on a particular word may be to miss the point.
I would not dwell on whether "religion" refers to anything (or even what it "means"), but the ostensive approach could be helpful in understanding what strikes as a "meta-religion" article. What other conversations about "religion" were excluded from the article? What voices are missing? Are the examples selected indicative of the bounds of what can be said about religion? Are there related conversations that should be included in the discussion?
Language and religion are relational and predicated on community. It is only in pluralistic situations where communities encounter one another that we have to concern ourselves with naming/categorizing the distinctions.
This, I think, is the rub for many conversations:
Is religion a thing? When looked at on the individual level (i.e. the non-communal), the space between is forgotten. Reification, emergence, atomism, correspondence. . . the list goes on. The metaphysics is hard to avoid when we ask whether religion "refers."
(X v ~X) & ~( X & ~X)
Also, we get stuck in the dividing. Language, religion, and life are squishy.
[quote="SEP]
. . . We might say that a bounded polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy, and an open polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy and evolving. Timothy Williamson calls this “the dynamic quality of family resemblance concepts” (1994: 86). One could symbolize the shift of properties over time this way:
Religion 1: A B C D E
Religion 2: B C D E F
Religion 3: C D E F G
Religion 4: D E F G H
Religion 5: E F G H I
Religion 6: F G H I J
…
Wittgenstein famously illustrated this open polythetic approach with the concept game, and he also applied it to the concepts of language and number (Wittgenstein 1953, §67). If we substitute our concept as Wittgenstein’s example, however, his treatment fits religion just as well:
Why do we call something a “religion”? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called religion; and this can be said to give an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. (Wittgenstein 1953, §67)
Given an open polythetic approach, a concept evolves in the light of the precedents that speakers recognize, although, over time, what people come to label with the concept can become very different from the original use. . .
[/quote]
The reason is simply that we are biologically a social species and therefore cooperation is vital to our survival, or rather the strategy our species has developed for gene propagation.
Also, there is a really good article referenced at the end (yes, it starts off a bit beneath the likely reader).
Religion is not a thing
What work do you intend the word to do when you use it? What work did the word do when another person used it? What work do you suppose they intended to do when they used it? Was the use efficacious?
Each of the examples in the SEP article were about the context in which "religion" was used, the intended audience, and the work contemplated. As any of these variable changed, the "meaning" of the word changed. Without context/relationship, we just have meaningless symbols.
It doesn't look like selfishness has been deselected.
The claim is “there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense” and I gave a reason why it fits our biological strategy for gene propagation. As far as I know, freeloading is common to a wide range of species, if not most or all.
Right, so it's not
Quoting praxis
I don't follow.
Basically it's simply that, according to our particular biology, cooperation generally propagates more of our genes than freeloading.
Oh. OK.
I don't have any objections. I didn't really get why we were talking about freeloading.
However, I feel as though yout DNA might be dispersed a little better if you were nicer to me.
Freeloaders take advantage of the cooperative nature of others for personal gain. That doesn't seem selfish to you?
You mean the elite?
It's not in the least ego-centric. In Buddhism, as an example, it is only in the human form that beings are able to hear and comprehend the Buddha's teaching. This is not 'egocentric'.The ego is only one aspect of the human being, the self's idea of its self. Humanity has a particular place, and also particular responsibility, as the living being that is able to realise its true nature, and also act as a ward for other creatures, even though we're conspicuously NOT doing that at this time in history. Modern culture's inability to recognise the unique station of human being is one of the major contributors to this.
I'm not sure what this is about, but isn't a type of freeloading built into the human experience in as much as we benefit from the work/ideas/civilization of all who came before us, without making a single contribution?
But all I can hear is...
..a brilliant tune, don't you think?
That's half an answer. What is the other half? What is it that you have left, after you take the history, metaphysics, authority and all away?
So if we would survive we ought cooperate. And yet one insists on our asking: Why ought we survive?
The mind pondering the supermind*. That's a personal relationship with christ.
The circle of the self-messiah.
*Meaning the mind to come. Use your imagination.
Which is what? To help your fellow man and woman, love and educate your kids, be a force of happiness to all? Why? Seems meaningless to simply make someone's stay as comfortable as possible if you admit there was no reason for them to come and stay in the first place.
It's like being Sisyphus' water boy, tending kindly to him, convincing yourself your altruism and goodness matters, ignoring the fact that you're all involved in a meaningless struggle that will eventually end with your death and then eventually the destruction of the world.
Forever the same on thephilosophyforum.
Quoting Wayfarer
Indeed.
I think this is a good summary of the ongoing debate here. And for all our rehashing of this theme I'm not sure we've really explored it in depth. Maybe I haven't been here long enough or paid close enough attention.
You have reality. Religion is built into the real in the indeterminacy of our world. Indeterminacy here another name for metaphysics, but in this case, it is, if you will, warranted metaphysics, or, metaphysics that is "discovered" not invented, and by this I mean something really very simple and undebatable: All propositions have their truth value revealed to be indeterminate because there is nothing in the revealed world that steps forward to make a definitive claim, which is why philosophy has its insufferable persistence. Just ask any question you please, and follow through with inquiry and you end up where, as Hillary Putnam put it, where ideas run out.
So, the human condition is indeterminate on all fronts where knowledge stakes a claim. Our existence is entirely indeterminate in all of its affairs, and this deserves repeating, because it is rarely given its due, to, well, stand before all things and realize our familiar systems of explaining the world are without ground. It is standing before the world without the presumption of knowing; THIS is, I argue, the essence of religion. And there is nowhere this is experienced so deeply as in ethics.
As sexy as it can feel to 'know' it - I know you know this is unknown.
Quoting Hanover
There is good here, now. That much we know. 'Good' is a malleable word.
No one can say there is a god. No one can say there is no god. It's silly to say those things. I think you both know it's silly.
'God', the word, will always be sacred to some folks and be the acme of nonsense to other folks.
'God', after all, is a word, and likes to play games.
Clings to tonic in a milksoppy way. What is this song afraid of? It has to learn to be brave if it wants grow up to be a real song.
Pretentious twaddle. Simple suits a folk tune.
Yes, you and are correct, and I will accept my share of the blame, for lowering my replies to the repetition of old moral arguments, and being distracted by musical critique.
A few times I've attempted to summarise by listing those things that might have taken to role of the "stipulated anchor" posited in the article. I'll do that again, this time explicitly.
There was, in no particular order,
A bunch of notions that seem incapable of producing any account that would serve to define the concept of religion. All of which happily suits my prejudices that concepts in general and the concept of religion in particular cannot be clarified in any helpful way. All we have is the way we use the term.
Interesting article that this thread is based upon. I'd like to see you keep developing that with someone. Can't be me. I barely have time nowadays to read, but this thread was time well spent.
Kudos.
It wasn't intended as a criticism of anyone. :wink: I'm easily distracted and have participated joyfully here in my own hobbyhorses...
I must confess the concept of religion is hard for me to understand, but having been brought up in the Baptist tradition, my sense is that most religion is like supporting a football team. People and their dreams coalesce around shared symbols and lore and vary in their level of interest or fanaticism. It's generally about social contact and feeling like they belong to something special. Oh, and sometimes god is invoked...
Allow me an interpretation, then. The point of this diagram is that, despite the obvious and (many would say) irreconciliable differences between different traditions, there is a common structure that can be discerned.
Each ring forms a nested hierarchy, or level of being, within which the higher circles include but transcend the inner or lower circles.
In Christian-English terms, on one side, the hierarchy is Body-Psyche-Soul-Spirit (in terms of the individual) and on the other side, Nature, Angels, God, Godhead (in terms of of the cosmos).
This structure is replicated for other cultural forms (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, etc).
That is the basis for Huston Smith's argument that there is a common structure, and that, therefore, the religions are agreeing and disagreeing about something real.
That is also compatible with John Hick's pluralistic model outlined in his Who or What is God?
The question will be asked, that if this purported structure is real, then why can't it be validated by science?
The response is to consider that these are the kinds of structure which are only perceptible to one particular form of terrestrial intelligence, namely, h. sapiens (and even then not every individual member of that species). As the modern scientific model is predicated on the exclusion of factors that cannot be objectively and physically sensed and measured, then naturally this is out-of-scope for the scientific method. In positivist terms, it will therefore be categorised as nonsensical.
However in my view it offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos' as it provides for a vision within which h. sapiens has a role, rather than being the 'accidental byproduct' as it is depicted by scientific materialism. And if indeed it can be discerned across so many cultures and periods of history in the forms of literature of those traditions, then that literature should be regarded as evidence and not simply dismissed as myth.
Quoting Tom Storm
It should be noted that the cross-cultural perspective of a John Hick or a Huston Smith or a Mircea Eliade is vastly different to the mainstream ecclesiastical Christian view, which must always start from the premise that Christianity is the 'one true faith'. That is what differentiates that kind of understanding from the stereotypically religious outlook.
:up: Right there you've done an exposé of religious scams. All the religions of the world piggyback on fun things to do. The Trojan horse, my friend. Here's a gift for you! Wait a minute, what's the (malicious) payload?
Nor was it taken as such. You presented an opportunity to reconsider the topic. Cheers.
I'm also looking for ways to break the cyclic nature of these threads. TO that end it is well worth recognising it when it occurs.
So the very first human was a Jew? Wouldn't that make every human a Jew and therefore meaningless? If not then how did the first Jew become a Jew?
Quoting Hanover
This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page.
Quoting Banno
To use something we must have a goal in mind. What is the goal in using the term the way we do?
If you're asking for the biblical account, no, Adam wasn't Jewish. The Hebrews were chosen to receive the Torah at Mt. Sinai after fleeing Egypt, so the story goes.
If you're looking fur a more historically accurate account of when rabbinical Jewish law developed dictating who is a Jew, I'd assume after the 1st century CE after the fall of the second temple.
I'm also not advocating here the Orthodox definition of who is a Jew over other viewpoints, but only indicating it is one. The Reforn have a very different view
Quoting Harry Hindu
There can be 20 potential criteria that every religion has, with 2 particular examples not having any overlap, meaning 2 examples would not share an essential similar trait
My point here is that even if you wish to maintain your antiquated essentialist views, your above criticism does not logically follow.
And the insults begin. Take care.
"Good for what"? God? What is the end or purpose? God?
Good is not merely an instrumental term. What is good is not necessarily good for something.
Why does life need to have an end or purpose beyond life? How is that purpose known? How do you know it is a purpose that is discovered or given to us rather that one we make?
It is rather that you want to look only at what religion looks like, not what it is at its core. Religion can be contextualized in many ways, but its power to rule a society's thoughts and feelings lies with its foundational claims and the indeterminacy found there. Human being lives within a deficit, not in politics nor in social cohesion or any other way you would observe it as taken up and entangled in our affair; but un all things. If you look for a material conditions, keep in mind that, as with philosophy, religion essentially is not about some vast corporate administrations that wield power and influence. Such are the things (basically, Kierkegaard's complaint) that corrupt it, and if THIS is what you think religion really is, then you are missing the mark of your OP. You have to move to another order of thinking.
Ask, the same question about God: what are the material conditions (and by this it is actualities that confront us prior to abstract thinking) that gave rise to this? Was Freud right? Yes, but Freud was a meta-psychologist. Not a philosopher.
But ten, this asks further, what is made and what is given? The line is hard to draw, granted, but certainly NOT all is made (notwithstanding Rorty). Our forward looking world's teleology is not absent of things truly given in the metaphysical sense, and not all metaphysics is nonsense.
And when the you lie there annihilated by your own foolishness at the horse's feet, THEN the religious event has its grounding. It could have been Trojans, the plague, the Nazis, and on and on. One never settles for the incidentals if the question is a philosophical one.
Good is a contingent word: it depends on what it means given the context. But religious good is absolute. For this, one has to look at metaethics: You know, the GOOD! And this is not merely a fanciful idea.
One can describe how we use language (or maybe just gesticulate), but that doesn't account for WHY we use language. Having an abstracted conversation of "what does the word "religion" refer to?" as if there is one answer (or even two) for all contexts (time, place, audience, etc.) will lead to disappointment. The article itself delves into this problem of "why 'religion'" and I think if you sit with that awhile, you might come closer to understanding what it refers to. Not because there is some essential meaning in the word, but because you might come to understand how it was effectively employed before and how you (or someone else) might effectively apply it in the future.
[quote="SEP]
Despite this murkiness, all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a distinctive kind of reality. In the twentieth century, however, one sees the emergence of an importantly different approach: a definition that drops the substantive element and instead defines the concept religion in terms of a distinctive role that a form of life can play in one’s life—that is, a “functional” definition.
. . .
What is counted as religion by one definition is often not counted by others. How might this disarray be understood? Does the concept have a structure? This section distinguishes between two kinds of answer to these questions. Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion, instead, as having a prototype structure.
. . .
A central theme of his essays is that the concept religion (and subcategories such as world religions, Abrahamic faiths, or nonliterate traditions) are not scientific terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not “like us”
. . .
In some cases, the point of rejecting thing-hood is to deny that religion names a category, all the instances of which focus on belief in the same kind of object—that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case, the objection bolsters a functional definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a functionally distinct kind of form of life.
. . .
Like the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g., Nye 2020), religion is a fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and deployed not to respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control people.
. . .
These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that religion is “out there” have a realist alternative. According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect one’s life, whether or not any human beings have identified it. This is true of things whose existence does not depend on collective agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta particles, and it is equally true of things whose existence does depend on collective agreement, like kinship structures, linguistic rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social structures holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a Uralic language, and can be a member of a religion—even if they lack these concepts.
This realist claim that social structures have existed without being conceptualized raises the question: if human beings had different ways of practicing religion since prehistoric times, why and when did people “finally” create the taxon?
. . .
[/quote]
The article is, in the end, an effort to understand the ways in which we come to describe a particular, though grantedly vague, relation.
And though I was entirely self-aware of the futility of trying to define religion for everyone else when I made the post on the meaning of religion, you can see the hallmarks of religious existentialism and ideas (not to mention language) referenced in the article.
Quoting Hanover
Then you are not necessarily a Jew if your mother was a Jew and Judaism IS based on a belief system because now you've shown that what makes one a Jew is based on one's belief system.
Quoting Hanover
No need to get feisty. It's not my fault that you are incapable of being consistent.
Then a religion would be defined as possessing at least one of 20 (not an infinite) potential criteria. I'm just trying to focus on one criteria - that a religion is the practice of believing an idea is true, when there is no evidence to support it, over all other ideas that either do or do not have evidence. Since it seems difficult for you to be consistent in your reasoning then maybe we should just focus on one criteria at a time and see which ones we agree and disagree on.
It’s extremely generous to say that religion offers a coherent undestanding of 'mind and cosmos'. There is no shortage of roles for people to occupy and there’s no reason that we can’t find them ourselves. The fact that there are so many divergent meta-narratives indicates that they are myths.
I think that moral behavior applies to the living and hope that those not living are beyond such concerns.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Pretend for a moment, if you will, that we aren't talking about religion and instead are talking about government. One day you are born - from that moment onwards, you are a citizen of one state or another. You haven't made a choice, it doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't even matter what your momma or pappa believes, but you are citizen of X. In some respects, this is tantamount to saying there is a metaphysical fact that you are a citizen of X.
What do we make of this fact? Do we say that because if there were no humans alive aside from you that you would not be a citizen of X it means that you aren't a citizen of X? Do we acknowledge that we can create facts through social convention? Do we hold the fact that you are a citizen of X to be something that has legitimacy only if claimed by group Y rather than group Z?
Non-voluntary membership in a group based upon the criteria of others is not unique to religion. Having the world treat you fundamentally different based upon those criteria is not unique to religion. The only difference between being a citizen of X and being a member of religion A is the extent to which such status changes your relationship to the world.
If your goal is to say that there are no such things as socially constructed facts (let alone socially constructed metaphysical facts), then great. Go be a mereological nihilist and describe your world that way. Relationships aren't for you.
If, on the other hand, you are willing to acknowledge that some pieces of papers (or binary configurations) are currency and that some are not, you seem to be engaged in that thing around here people like to say... "Special pleading" is it? Uniquely critiquing religion using criteria you do not apply in other contexts means that you are inconsistent rather than the other-way round.
P.S. Notice here that I do not invoke god/gods as some arbiter of metaphysical facts because god's take on the matter is either a) equally legitimate/illegitimate to that of any other authority and b) not useful if "unknowable".
Mythologies that places man in the center is evidence of nothing more than the fact that there are mythologies that put man in the center.
Man, this "accidental byproduct", is capable of shaping and destroying our world. Our role and responsibility is not enhanced but is instead diminished by claims of cosmic significance. The focus is shifted from here and now to some imagined cosmic stage where we play a starring role. It all too easily becomes escapist self-glorification.
What goes on here has no describable significance for the universe. What we do here, however, can and does make a difference for our small, insignificant planet and its inhabitants.
I don't see why we would need to use the term, "metaphysical" here. It's just a fact that I would be a citizen of X because being a citizen of X is a human conceptual invention - not something discovered in nature that has existed prior to humans, like planets vs dwarf planets, or life vs non-life when talking about the origins of life.
It also seems to me that more than one person would need to agree upon the definition of "citizen" and "X" for us to then agree that I am indeed a citizen of X, or else being a "citizen of X" is meaningless. Words are only useful for communicating shared experiences and understandings, or else what is the purpose of using a word that only you understand the way you are using it? What is the purpose of using words, or any external symbol for that matter, if there are no other humans alive?
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
That's the point in me asking the questions I am asking - of what criteria others are using to define "religion" so that I can then say whether I am religious or not. If they can't give me any criteria then they are simply moving the goalposts so that I can NOT be a member of their group. They haven't given me any reason to believe that I would be a member of their group if they can't define the criteria for being a member. When there are no criteria, or an infinite number of criteria, that define a concept then no one is religious or everyone is religious, which isn't useful.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
It seems that you haven't read my other posts in this thread. If you had you would have noticed that I made a distinction between socially constructed facts and natural facts. The former is invented by humans while the latter is invented by nature. Hanover is the one that is being vague and inconsistent in defining the criteria of what "religion" means. I'm the one asking for the criteria that's being referred to when using the word. Religion is a concept invented by humans, just as currency, states, and presidents are. What we need to be careful of is when distinctions between definitions of "religion" and "democracy" are along the lines of one's own religion or political leaning. We can't have only Muslims defining "religion", nor can we have only the left defining "democracy". The definitions of these terms can only be objectively defined by people that are not religious (atheist) or don't have a political leaning (a-political). In other words, they can only be properly defined by those that are not influenced by some group and can think for themselves. In asking different people of different religions or governments how they define "religion" or "government" you attempt to find the common criteria and start from there, but you have to already acknowledge that your religion or government is not the one true religion or government - that there might be other types but they all must share a common characteristic for them to be categorized as a religion or government.
And this is responsive to why you aren't a mereological nihilist how? Facts are socially constructed whether about social relations or relations of atoms. The states of affairs, however, are what "is" independent of society. The question is to what extent the states of affairs are primitive (only the whole exists, e.g. atoms) or composite (wholes can have parts, e.g. people). If you believe that the states of affair are composite, I am saying that you are already acknowledging that the relationships of parts to one another cause things to exist or not. The question is why you privilege certain sorts of relations (things that are closer like people) over others (things that are further like countries) especially when you are likely to call things very far away from one another existent (like planets and solar systems).
Quoting Harry Hindu
That is because you are not understanding metaphysical in the way that I am using it. It is something that is true of the states of affairs independent of how we think about them. Perhaps "ontic" would sit better with you?
Quoting Harry Hindu
You don't seem to appreciate what a definition is - it is inherently emblematic of intersubjective agreement, i.e. not objective (existent independent of minds).
Quoting Harry Hindu
You also don't seem to appreciate the difference between objectivity and disinterest. Further, you don't seem to appreciate that people are social, i.e. they are necessarily political and religious (by at least one definition).
Quoting Harry Hindu
This is exactly the problem that the "anchor" in polythetic approaches is intended to address. The problem with @Banno's post is that he plays fast and lose with words. He references a word ("religion") which is discussed in conceptual terms, highlights an approach which is intended to incorporate essentialism into a non-essentialist analysis of concepts, and then asks whether there is an essence to it. (It doesn't help that he vacillates between "concepts" and "definitions".)
So it would be great if rather than rehashing why essentialism is dumb, we can move on to whether something can "refer" that is non-essentialist. (Where the answer is clearly yes).
Of course they do.
See cannibalism and infanticide in animals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism
I know I exist.
The problem isn't relativistic morality per se, it's moral trivialism. Ie. the view that moral judgments are essentially trivial. This comes from viewing ethics/morality as a subcategory of aesthetics. It renders ethics/morality as a matter of "ethics/morality is in the eye of the beholder".
In order for our moral judgments to have weight, to seem relevant, they need to be assumed to have more to them than being the mere opinion of an individual person.
Quoting Fooloso4
No, but one needs to posit an absolute moral authority in order to regard one's moral judgments as relevant.
Quoting Tom Storm
The issue is how can we or how do we consider a certain moral standard or moral judgment relevant, binding, as something that is more than mere opinion.
It means different things in different contexts.
"Religion" means something different to modern Western secular culturologists than it does to a pious Roman Catholic, for example.
And back to Humpty Dumpty:
But when we actually use a word, we assume, take for granted it has an essence. When we use words, we don't think of them as some kind of amoebic, shapeless, shape-shifting entities that can mean anything and perhaps even nothing.
Quoting Hanover
On the contrary, it's instructive to look into the processes of the meaning of words precisely when it comes to "loaded topics" like religion.
Maybe, I don't know what incorrect assumptions people make, but why is it relevant that we evaluate our incorrect knee jerk reactions?
Quoting baker
Of course. But just like cups neither have essences, which was my point.
It's always opinion, even when it is theistic. That's the point. It's always going to be an interpretation of what someone thinks a god wants or what someone thinks is best for humans. No way out of that.
Indeed.
For virtue to be "its own reward", being virtuous has to be about more than just the gratification of one's ego; instead, it has to have real-world consequences that are advantageous for the person acting virtuously. Otherwise, virtue becomes something vestigial, expendable.
In some religions, being virtuous serves the purpose of purification (mental and bodily), and purification is done for the purpose of attaining goals that would otherwise not be attainable.
And even in entirely worldly settings, morality is implicitly conceived as serving a purpose. For example, a student needs to behave virtuously in order to complete his studies. If he focuses (too much) on drinking and partying, he won't be able to concentrate to study, won't have the time to do complete his academic assignments, and so on.
- - -
Quoting Banno
By being part of a _religious_ community, one has a context in which certain actions seem meaningful and worthwhile even when they are hard to do or don't have immediately visible positive outcomes.
There are other communities membership in which gives one such context, but a religious community ideally provides a broader metaphysical framework than other communities can.
When you put it like that, all hope is lost, of course.
Is your claim that only people who posit an absolute moral authority have any say on issues of morality? Those who do posit an absolute moral authority do not always hold the same opinion as to whether a particular act is moral. Differences do not track along the divide between those who posit a moral authority and those who reject such an authority.
No, this isn't because essentialism would be wrong, but because an inductive approach to the definition of something is backwards.
We cannot come up with the definition of "religion" by "observing" "religions", for without an a priori definition of what we're looking for, we cannot even decide what to look for, what to speak of looking for it.
You cannot figure out what a cup is by observing cups. Without having any idea what a cup is to begin with, you won't know what to focus on to begin with.
The process of how a word gets a dictionary-level definition, a meaning, is simultaneously inductive and deductive. We start off with some preconceived notions with the help of which (through which) we observe reality, and then we sometimes adjust based on "what we find" (in line with our knowledge, needs, interests, and concerns).
Quoting Hanover
No, he wouldn't. He would only claim one particular meaning to be the correct one, or the most common or relevant one.
They are the only ones who can be taken seriously. In contrast, those who shoot themselves in the foot by openly declaring any extent of incompetence disqualify themselves from the onset.
Of course.
It's not clear what you mean here.
My theme here is how to regard one's moral judgments as relevant.
1. How do you know they are incorrect?
2. Our "knee jerk reactions" are relevant because they are our starting point, our foundation.
Rape and murder are easy examples.
How about other examples of virtue:
[i]If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not drink alcohol, you are morally bankrupt.
If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not tell white lies, you are morally bankrupt.
If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not illegaly download stuff from the internet, you are morally bankrupt.
If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not spit on the floor in public areas, you are morally bankrupt.
If you need an argument to convict you that you ought not walk on the lawn where there is a sign "Do not walk on the lawn!", even when other people walk on this lawn, you are morally bankrupt.[/i]
Do you still agree?
It's dictated by our need for our moral behavior to be relevant, meaningful, worthwhile. And to be such in various life circumstances.
When things are going well for you in your life, it might seem to go without saying that it is morally wrong to steal and you won't steal. But what about when you fall on hard times, or when an opportunity for an easy theft presents itself: What will then be your motivation to stick to your moral principle of not stealing, even though sticking to that principle can sometimes be inconvenient, hard, or even life-threatening?
But this applies only to Jews, not to everyone, correct?
Since there are usually good times and bad times in a person's life, the matter is a bit more challenging.
What makes you think the same doesn't apply to humans?
People generally kill people for the sake of (re)establishing social order (whatever they understand by that in any given case).
How so?
Quoting Fooloso4
You write this as if there is a real universe without sentient beings in it to realise what it is. Nobody has any knowledge of such a universe. What if part of the significance of sentient beings is to help bring reality into existence? [sup]1[/sup]
Quoting baker
:ok:
No, it is goal-oriented, purpose driven: In order to attain goal X, you must behave in such and such ways.
If your goal is to never cause a traffic accident due to drunk driving, you must never drink and drive.
This is incontrovertible.
Or take on smaller scale example: That husband who shot and killed his wife, claiming he did it because she wouldn't stop nagging him. The nagging was the disruption of the social order, killing her was his (final) act of (re)establishing social order.
You've not familiar with hermeneutics?
If you have 100 people, 50 think that there is an absolute moral authority and 50 do not. If you poll them on their views of moral issues you will not be able to identify who was in one group rather than they other.
They don't simply shrug it off; they shrug it off _selectively_.
For example, about a 150 years ago in the US, many whites believed it was not wrong for white men to rape a black woman; but they would hang a black man who was suspected of raping a white woman.
I once heard that the Ten Commandments are actually a short form, and were not intended to be taken generally, universally, without further qualification.
So, for example, "Thou shalt not kill" wasn't actually a general prohibition of killing, but was intended to mean "Thou shalt not kill any members of your own tribe, unless specified otherwise (e.g. if they committed adultery, etc.)", and outsiders were not included in this prohibition (ie. it was not prohibited to kill outsiders).
Such a reading explains the apparent contradictions in what adherents of the Ten Commandments profess to believe and what they do.
Your assumption is that the action is all that matters, regardless by whom it is done, to whom, and under what circumstances. It is on this point that many people disagree.
Sure, but that isn't my scope of interest anyway.
I'm just not familiar with magic.
Sure. But he also said something else, which was what I addressed. If one says things that disqualify one, then one shouldn't be surprised of the negative response.
War is "nothing personal", eh?
Nah, self-help literature does it for us.
It doesn't capture me in the way it seems to have captures you, but we can add transcendence, or some form of hierarchy proceeding from self "upwards" towards divinity of one sort or another, to the list of potential "stipulated anchors"
Of course they are myths. That doesn't make them wrong. Saying Lord of the Rings is not an accurate account of the history of the world is neither useful nor cogent.
"You're just saying that because you're depressed and cynical, and you haven't learned to 'live in the present moment and enjoy it'!!!"
The (upper) middle class idea that we're being sold by some seculars is that secular life _is_ good enough, _is_ worth living, _is_ satisfactory, and that there _is_ something wrong with the person who doesn't see it that way and that they just need to try harder.
I don't really have a response to this secular stance.
In an important sense, this is wrong. But that's for another thread.
How can you know a cup doesn't have an essence?
Nice.
Because you are in danger of losing the human scale of things. Quoting Wayfarer
I think it very likely that there are sentient beings elsewhere, but they are too far away for anything we do here to make any difference to what happens there.
Quoting Wayfarer
What holds for photons does not tell us what happens at other scales of magnitude. Theoretical possibilities may be interesting to think about, but there is not enough attention to what is happening here and now.
Could be what was in that Pulp Fiction briefcase.
The issue at hand isn't something that could be "demonstrated objectively" to begin with. It's something that requires effort both on the part of the speaker and the listener. You know that.
The problem is that you're trying to carry out the discussion on the terms set by your opponents. Which, of course, doesn't work out well.
Quoting Wayfarer
I want you to up your game. Put some cattle under that hat, a horse under that saddle.
Yet religious people do it every day.
SO we drop the "thou" and the supernatural as incoherent, drop ethics as too fraught, drop the ineffable as outside of our discussion.
At present we have ritual, transcendent hierarchies and longing as core aspects of religion.
What is your scope of interest? Denying those who do not hold to an absolute moral authority a decision making voice? How so we determine what is the authentic voice of authority? What authority do those who are to decide have?
What I'm trying to articulate is a revisionist interpretation of the meaning of spiritual awakening. It provides a religious cosmology but one not centred around the Biblical sense of religion - possibly more Gnostic
There is a theme (or meme) that is found in both Western and Eastern sources of the human as microcosm 'which posits a structural similarity between the human being (the microcosm) and the cosmos as a whole (the macrocosm). Given this fundamental analogy, truths about the nature of the cosmos as a whole may be inferred from truths about human nature, and vice versa.' Ideas of this genre can be found across cultures and across history.
A compatible idea is found in the SEP entry on Schopenhauer:
At a very high level this provides a sense of the way in which self-knowledge and the 'philosophical ascent' can be seen in cosmic terms: that human beings are in some fundamental sense the Universe coming to know itself. Julian Huxley saw this:
although he was much less spiritually-inclined than his brother.
Whereas, by contrast, the standard naturalist attitude in the 20th Century was that humanity and indeed life itself was a kind of 'biochemical fluke', the chance occurence of molecules banging together in an infinite empty universe. But that started to break down as soon as physicists became obliged to acknowledge the 'role of the observer' in their experimental outcomes. Maybe the observer is not so accidental after all.
Quoting baker
:yikes: Working on it.
SO if you think they have something to contribute, contribute it.
Sure, so did the Mimbari: "We are Grey. We stand between the darkness and the light. I am grey. I stand between the candle and the star"
Wittgenstein apparently had a poor opinion of Schopenhauer: "Schopenhauer has quite a crude mind ... where real depth starts, his comes to an end."
The emphasis on introspection is partisan. Dawkins describes the transcendence of unweaving the rainbow. If we are the universe understanding itself then we must understand the universe.
Hence science is central to the spiritual path you desire, not antithetical to it.
If you try to define religion as someone who is not religious, from the outside, then your notions of religion will be all over the place, not making a coherent whole.
A, for example, Hindu's idea of religion and a Roman Catholic's idea of religion differ, even significantly, but what they have in common is that their own notion of religion is meaningful to them, respectively.
You, however, seem to be starting from the position that there is or should be a suprareligious, religiously neutral concept of religion. Arguably, such a concept of religion is the product of Western secular religiology.
The sour snake in the belly
coughs up the bloody purpose:
To build walls of mud around the meaninglessness
and bite and bite
Because the pain won't go away
And it means nothing.
What bollocks. As if Wittgenstein is the final word.
Quoting Banno
Dawkins has not the least inkling of what the term 'transcendence' means.
And you gained this insight from your reading, your time here, or in the pew?
I'm not going to deny there are elements of what you say present in various religions, but I will deny entirely you have come close to capturing the essence (to the extent that word makes sense), at least from my perspective from my seat in the pew, of what religion can be (and it certainly can fall quite short).
It's like asking what it's like to play soccer. It's all about ritual, hierarchy, authority, mindless loyalty. Yes, but that's not why we play. If it were, you might ask why we choose just to be burdened with odd restrictions.
If this interests you, just go to whatever religious service you desire and gather actual first hand knowledge. Religion is about doing. Otherwise you're just watching odd people do odd things and wondering why otherwise reasonable people play this game.
I don't see that yours is a significant contribution to the discussion. Prove me wrong, address the article mentioned in the OP, with something non-trivial.
Like I said:
Quoting baker
No, saying that those who doubt and relativize themselves shouldn't expect to be taken seriously by others.
Like I said:
Quoting baker
Yes, this is the one thing all religions probably agree on.
:razz: Sacrilege! Of course he is the final word!
But the serious point is that introspection is notoriously inconsistent; and that science in this regular's is a transcendence of that emphasis on the self. That is, too much navel-gazing is bad for you, while explaining how rainbows work can bring one closer to the majesty of the universe.
One could add science to your diagram, a new segment.
You make it sound like shit when you put it like that.
Religion appears to be a phenomenon that is defined by insiders, and can be done only by insiders (only insiders can do religion).
This is another thing religions appear to have in common.
How are you going to identify such authorities if you don't even have a definition of "religion" to begin with?
I'm trying to counteract your dominance and your externalizing, etic approach.
Phhh. Read the thread.
Quoting Hanover
And I agree with you. There is this thing folk can do where ideas are mooted, for discussion, without being accepted as true.
Quoting Hanover
DO you think I would disagree with that? I'm the one who repeats ad nauseam "Don't look to the meaning, look to the use".
This is a philosophy forum, it is not a theology forum. I've tried joining a couple of comparative religion forums, they were a real mishmash. The thread topic is about the 'concept of religion' which I think is a valid topic and I'm attempting to address from the viewpoint of comparative religion.
I didn't start off on my spiritual quest as if it were an obviously 'religious' one. I thought, at the time in my life, that I was engaged in the attempt to understand enlightenment. This was present in popular culture mainly through counter-cultural sources, like the Beatles encounter with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, LSD trips, and writers like Alan Watts and D T Suzuki. Nothing to do with Church pews and organ music. That was what I had attempted to study through the perspectives of comparative religion, anthropology, psychology, history and philosophy (the latter being of almost no relevance. Only much later in life did I begin to realise that what I was considering 'enlightenment' and what goes under the heading of 'religion' might have something in common. And that was because, when I started trying to practice meditation in order to arrive at the putative 'spiritual experience' sans artificial stimulants, mostly what I experienced was pain, boredom and ennui. So I gradually came to realise that this 'enlightenment' I had been seeking was not likely to be a permanent state of 'peak experience' after all, that, if there is such a thing as religious ecstacy, that it is a very elusive state indeed.)
Quoting Banno
It's there, but solely confined to the innermost circle. That's why, in the 'scientific worldview', nothing really happens for any reason, as distinct from a prior material cause, and only ever in service to adaptation.
OK, but you're looking at other people's usage, not your own experience. You're watching the animals in the zoo and telling the monkeys what it is to be a monkey. I'm saying hop in the cage.
If the shoe fits...
Quoting baker
...as am I. That's the point of following through on the search for a "stipulated anchor". I do not think that such a thing can be found. This thread is about looking to see if I am wrong.
I don't think you've understood what is happening here.
, too, it seems.
Oh please. I'm trying to decipher your objective here as much as you are trying to decipher mine
If the fool shits...
Here's a topic!
I think this a too narrow notion of science. Science is, for many if not most scientists, a spiritual practice, a way of transcending their self by achieving an understanding of the world. The rituals of bottle washing and statistical analysis are part of a far bigger picture, they have a place within a great enterprise that has as it's goal the comprehension of reality itself. How is that not much the same as your circles in circles?
The scientists innermost reality may be washing bottles, the outermost may be understanding our place within the cosmos. Their innermost selfhood their concentration on the lifecycle of some parasitic worm, their outermost, why things are as they are.
Doubtless.
Who here is not a fool? You?
So the candidates for an anchor that seem most promising are ritual, transcendent hierarchies and longing.
The question which for me is central to the thread is now why science does not count as a religion, given these anchors.
Is introspection fundamental to understanding our place in the Universe? Or can physics show us the face of god?
The idea that pure intellectual intuition can yield real knowledge was demolished by Kant, and Hegel attempted to resurrect it. The idea is common to religions in the forms of "revelation" or "enlightenment". .
I think such intuitionistic ideas are incapable of demonstration; even if intuition or introspection can give us true direct knowledge of the nature of things, that it could do so can never be demonstrated. So we might know, but can never know that we know. Same goes for science, of course. The whole idea of certain knowledge is bogus, in my view.
I think the most certain knowledge we can have is the phenomenological knowledge of reflection on our experience. But even that assumes the reliability of memory. I think we live better if we live comfortable with uncertainty.
Quoting Constance
You are describing a sort of existential angst, the looking into the void, the acknowledgement that all this stuff is bullshit.
But so much of religion is the opposite; the certainty of faith runs whole against what you set out here. Faith is "standing before the world with the presumption of knowing."
Quoting Janus
...whereas I would not call that either certain, nor knowledge. It doesn't have the propositional character of either. The private nature of introspection rules it out of contention for a foundation for knowledge.
Interesting.
But see: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201&version=NIV
Not introspection, reflection. By remembering we can know how things seem to us. Even in relation to mere introspection, if we report whatever we find and others report the same, then we can have an inter-subjective basis for knowledge, which in the final analysis, is the only basis there is. Of course none of it demonstrates anything about anything beyond our experience.
I don't agree, not at first blush. Knowing is doing; That one knows how to ride a bike is demonstrated in the act of riding. Just being aware (conscious) of the bike is wholly insufficient.
How true!
Did you know that the Krishna - avatar of Vishnu, the supreme god of the Hindu Trimurti - is less well known for his miracles than his cunning? Kinda blurs the boundary between supernatural powers and just plain and simple intelligence.
The reference to Ecclesiastes was to provide a counter to the idea that religion does not include existential doubting and to quell your whole enterprise of finding a few key terms to focus on in your quest for a definition of "religion."
In any event, don't get too focused on the word "meaningless" in that translation. The more accurate translation is probably "vapor." https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/1/what-translation-best-translates-the-word-vanity-in-the-kjv-in-ecclesiastes
"Vanity" is a common translation as well.
We can't even define the meaning of meaningless. Ironic I guess.
That one knows how things seem to one is demonstrated in the act of being conscious of how things seem. It is also an act, a doing. I wasn't suggesting that one could know how to do complex tasks merely by being aware of them or whatever apparatus they involve.
Ah, seeming as something we do... a practice, the following of a rule?
That is not Kierkegaardian faith, of course. But as the usual kind, Chomsky was asked about religion and his response was a good one. If you're just desperate and life is just wretched wherever you turn, I am not going to be giving you an argument about the foolishness of public religions.
But as a philosophical question of religion is not bound to incidentals. It wants to know what is it in the world that makes the world a "religious place" and I mean "religious" as a structural feature. We don't want a thing to be defined by its entanglements. Faith as a presumption of knowing, rather than as I have characterized it, would be a matter of objectifying metaphysics, taking strong impossible claims as if they were as true as geology. I have little patience for this kind of thing.
As a structural feature of our existence, I refer to the structure of knowledge relations, all of which are open. It is, I mean it should be, quite a thing to really understand this.
I had this more in mind:
[quote=TLP 6.371]At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.[/quote]
Implying that the religious situation is no more than a realization of one's lack of cunning? But then, the term "supernatural" just gives religion a bad name, which it usually deserves. But the reality of religion lies outside of the cunning and the supernatural. It is something else.
This reeks of prejudice and close-mindedness.
What if half the world “believes” that it’s accurate?
The "rituals of bottle washing"? And the liturgy of the lecture hall and the Eucharist examination? Heh, heh....I don't think so. If so, then everything is religion. Washing my dog. Ah, the soapy....baptism?
What I want to shy away from is the idea that the concept is of necessity the same in all contexts - that what makes religion fit for use in one case is what makes it fit for use in another. We try it and see if helps the conversation along - no need to quibble about use if we find it falls flat. And that perhaps is the unspoken difference - the people in the article are making use of the word and other people seem to be more interested in saying why the “concept” is stupid.
So I am not sure that the context supports your interpretation.
What?
The knight of faith does not doubt his understanding of god. He is "standing before the world with the presumption of certainty."
Seems to me that there is a failure here to acknowledge the piety of the scientist, their subservience to a greater being. Take care not to be indulging in special pleading.
It's as if the rejection of scientism leads folk to the rejection of science as a profound human enterprise. So it is as if @Wayfarer would deny that what he referred to earlier as sapiens is also evident in the practice of science.
Or maybe I am reading too much into “explicitly” and not enough into “set out”. Either way, we agree the concept of religion is non-essentialist and it is a fool’s errand to try to make it one. What I haven’t figured out yet is whether that strikes you as a negative thing about the concept or just an observation to be shared with others.
Not to go too far afield, but I am reminded a bit of Mr. Holland’s Opus (if you’ve ever seen it). Is music necessarily sound/heard? You get to cry a bit as he (and perhaps you) discover the answer.
Big all encompassing ideas are tough. It is their sheer size and people’s desire to use them that makes them fit in places you wouldn’t otherwise think they belong.
It's a common feature of all concepts, I suspect. So not something that counts against religion.
It's interesting that the struggle to explicate the concept leads to so many places.
Okay, I take it back. "Greater being" is an interesting choice of words. If there is no "greatest" Being, then all that remains are the demigods of mundane living. Unless you think that the term mundane is unduly deflationary given the grandeur of science. Then I would ask what you mean by great, for in this lies something beyond the science as science, just as there is more to the hymnals, solemn music, symbols, etc., of practiced religion. Then question then clearly goes to this sense of greatness or grandeur, as I would put it. And this grandeur is not specific to the science at hand. It is not born out of the math and the data. Rather, it comes upon one in a moment of exaltation, which is just a synonym for grandeur, really, and there are others, but importantly it is a rising importance of something that really transcends the occasion itself.
I suggest that in this one really has touched upon the religious, and if this feeling of grandeur that has no object is given its analytic due, it is not unlike what I said about indeterminacy. It is a finite affirmation, and since all that is affirmed is indeterminate, it is a metaphysical affirmation. The one premise that is always unseen is that indeterminacy puts all of our affairs beyond the boundaries we set for them.
And if the argument is that it is not the case that all things are indeterminate in their final analysis, then it would be patently wrong. Simply because indeterminacy is self affirming, easily testable.
The presumption of certainty in the denial of mundane certainties. Faith, the faith of Abraham that surpasses the principles of common morality and affirms in the qualitative leap beyond, is also a negation of the world's laws, culture, religious comforts. Mundane faith K denied most passionately.
Use the word a bit. Play the game. See when you are called in and called out. In this way you will come to know the concept of religion. Kicking some ossified remnants of prior generation’s use is amusing in some respects, but do you really expect it to be enlightening?
Oh, sure. So what is the more...?
Can you tell me? If not, don't ask me to tell you wheat the "greater" is in science. Let's just agree to a revert silence.
Again, What?
The conversation went...
But that is exactly what Kierkegaard says Abraham did. Despite all else telling him not to sacrifice Isaac, he follows through on his certainty - "standing before the world with the presumption of knowing".
Faith is believing despite the evidence.
Nothing of the kind. Think about what the postulate of methodological naturalism excludes. When that is transposed to the domain of philosophy it is not only ‘scientism’ that results. That is what I think that TLP passage is driving at.
Something more like positivism.
Quoting Banno
Some kind of minimal 'being mysticism' seems to be sketched here. From the outside, it's just wandering at a tautology (any tautology will do). I don't see how anything could be added without spoiling the effect. This is like 'the pure witness' who is the world.
Why would you think that "it is something else"? Have you read/seen the Mahabharata? I recommend it, with subtitles of course. Opens up a new window on god(s).
Natural science is situated mainly in the inner circles - physics and biology. There are always questions as to whether psychology is a science at all, and as for theology….well, what need be said.
So for the purposes of naturalism, only natural explanations ought to be considered - which is perfectly sound. But when it comes to the philosophical question of the reality or otherwise of the outer rings - well, that’s a metaphysical question. Properly speaking the naturalist response to whether they are real is not to venture an hypothesis (‘that of which we cannot speak’….)
Positivism is the tendency to assert that nothing outside the naturalist circle should ever be considered, because there is no evidence - well, nothing which it considers evidence. It starts by excluding certain kinds of factors or ideas - again quite sound with respect to its scope of application but not beyond. But this doesn’t mean there is no beyond. That is what occurs as a result of taking mythological naturalism as a metaphysic, which it isn’t.
Scientific laws are universal in scope, within their range of applicability. But the question of ‘what is a scientific law’ is not itself a scientific question. It’s a metaphysical issue, one on which there are various competing schools of thought. But it’s not really subject to scientific verification.
I would say more, but I family duties are [s]screaming[/s] calling.
I don't quite get positivism. It's supposed to be the stance that only verifiable claims are in aany way important or truth-apt. Any and all claims that resist verification is, for positivists, nonsense.
There are two kinds of verifiability which I will illustrate with examples:
1. S = My car is metallic silver in color. The statement S is verifiable. All one has to do is find my car and look at it. If it's metallic silver, S is true, if not, S is false.
2. The theory of relativity is verifiable. Use it to make some predictions. Conduct an experiment and if the predictions pan out, the theory of relativity is verified. However, this doesn't mean the theory of relativity is true. Review the scientific method to confirm my statements.
The first kind of verifiability (truth can be established via observation) doesn't sit well with metaphysics, but the second kind seems very much metaphysical in character (truth can't be established and all that can be said is they hypothesis/theory fits the facts).
https://www.britishwittgensteinsociety.org/wittgensteintolstoy-and-the-folly-of-logical-positivism
Separating science from religion is a recent development. In Europe, Christianity disintegrated so that "religion" came to reference the conflict between different sects.
The idea of a secular government with non-divine legitimacy appeared and with that, the idea of religion is now substantially contrasted.
So you're dealing with a concept of religion that's familiar to you, and no doubt associated with various memories and emotions of your own. Remember that an analysis of that won't transfer to the larger concept of religion.
A revert silence? Look, it is your position that the scientist is comparable to the, say, religious disciple, and the comparative trappings of belief, test tubes to tabernacle, if you will, is your doing. If you make a claim like this (though I do suspect you are being evasively vague) then you have to follow through You talked about a subservience to a higher being and the rituals of the laboratory. If you don't like my interpretation, then by all means, disabuse me on this.
But as you know with all serious thinkers, all ideas are presented in context. the ordinary, churchy faith of the many is something Kierkegaard rejected from the very core of his being. We are talking here about existential faith: an affirmation that has no content. It is a personal movement toward a qualitatively different kind of faith born out of wonder and realized in a "positing of spirit", to use his jargon, against all certainties of the world.
So it really is not about believing in the usual sense at all. Belief needs an object, and the church, Christendom (Kierkegaard's favorite pejorative) is ready to provide one, in the the ritual, the symbols and so on; K's faith is a radical departure from all this.
On the contrary. Faith is believing because of the evidence. Not because the evidence points directly at a presence, but because there is no evidence for àn ultimate scientific explanation. So the evidence is lack of scientific explanation. No doubt you call that a god of the gaps but as long as science offers no explanation it's only God who offers an explanation. And by its nature, science can't offer such.
But religion is not about "god(s)" and the Mahabharata is extremely long and and where something symbolic and enlightening may be there (Hinduism in its basic concepts apart from the story telling are differently considered here), the narratives and the metaphysics tell me nothing at all, nearly, about the nature of religion.
For me, the way is clear: The essence of religion is discovered in a suspension of all that is merely incidental, the particulars of the given system of religious beliefs and practices that are of a cultural nature, and vary in content. I ask, what is it in the world that religion responds to that is not political and controlling, nor merely organizational or anything else. After all, remove, say, the politics, and religion remains. Remove the empirical science and religion remains, and what does not remain is the bulk of historical struggles of the entangled world.
It seems to be the case that all forms of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, are ‘ideological’ in the sense that there is no neutral, objective body of knowledge that is not infected by the purpose-relative concepts of a group of inquirers. However, scientific knowledge isn’t woven into a meaningful narrative that offers…
Quoting Haglund
I ask, what is there, in the world, that makes us reach out and scream WTF? I think about concrete and steal raining down of Ukrainians, and there you are huddled together then in a moment, you arm is gone and there's screaming everywhere. Or the black plague. Can't even imagine the horrors of it. Not to get dramatic, but on the other hand, to, just for a moment, to get very dramatic, just so I know and I'm not just pretending to know by moving on directly into language and interpretation. How quickly we reduce the world to an abstraction, and everything then toes the line, and we're safe again.
As I see it, religion is found here, in the not turning away. Humans created a great deal that causes misery, but they didn't invent misery itself. This puts these affairs in the hands of the world and our throwness into it. It makes our struggles exceed the localized descriptions of circumstances that want to put it all into narrative. But narratives, and this is an important point in my thinking, cannot contain this.
Then things get metaphysical. Redemption is a metaphysical necessity.
No problem. It's my little obsession. If ever you do find the mood for this, you might want to check out Simon Critchley's Little, Almost Nothing. He explores the impact of ethical nihilism. :up:
:wink:
See https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10177/knowledge-belief-and-faith-anthony-kenny/p1
You view would seem to be at odds with the church fathers.
Ok, so we have ritual, transcendent hierarchies and longing. Would you add "an ultimate explanation" to that list? It somehow seems overkill.
I'm still sticking with "an ideology that relies on ultimate authority," which to my mind covers its essential nature.
This last post was only meant to address your question about why science does not count as a religion.
It is apparent how different that set of circles is from the other. It's not a simplification so much as a different item.
SO this is a representation of your suggestion that some form of transcendental hierarchy is central to the concept of religion. I take it that the proposal that propositions in each circle include the propositions in the preceding one, a Venn diagram of truths. That's at odds with the notion, due in the main to Wittgenstein, that the really important stuff of ethics, aesthetics, of life, is non-propositional, the it is shown, not stated - something I thought you were down with.
So still, I remain uninspired by your concentric circles.
We. might modify this to "an ideology that pretends to ultimate authority..."
This definition excludes those for whom religion has become mere habit.
Ritualistic habit with no thought of ideology or ultimate authority.
Makes you wonder why he bothered putting pen to paper.
Any thoughts on this? It is, after all, posted on the website of the British Wittgenstein Society.
Here's the article in situ.
Now, what do you find problematic, or curious, in it? It's a good article.
I read it. So I wonder if you would be willing to engage the issue. Let's say I understand all of the arguments, because I do, frankly. None of these capture's the essence of God. As with all ideas, its true nature is revealed only when the "material" basis of its meaning is discovered, and God the idea has a lot of baggage. The first question is this: What is the good? Two answers. There is good in the contingent way, like a good couch or a good knife. And there is the Good. This latter is the meta-good, and the concept in play is meta-value. It begins with Wittgenstein's Tractatus:
[i] In the world everything
is as it is, and everything happens as it
does happen: in it no value exists—and if
it did exist, it would have no value.
If there is any value that does have
value, it must lie outside the whole sphere
of what happens and is the case[/i]
If you prefer not to go into this, I'm fine with that. But on the other hand, it IS the only way to approach the issue of God, of this I am sure.
Anyway, the issue begins with value. Do you agree with Wittgenstein?
In that case, it can still be an identity and have influence. People who don’t think for themselves and just go along with the tribe are the ideal followers, actually.
A brilliant passage. But Witt, like Kant, in denying metaphysics any meaning, opened the door for positivism. You know, the only wheel that rolls. Positivistic approaches ignore anything that cannot be defined and justified clearly. An emasculation of "truth'!
I'd noticed that. It's articulating our differences that is of interest.
I'd go back a few more years, to Moore's Principia[/I], to trace the notion of [i]the good. Moore identifies it, but I think fails to justify it. I suspect Wittgenstein to have been influenced by Moore in this regard. It would be interesting to take Wittgenstein's treatment of Moore's "here is a hand" and apply it to Moore's Good. There are interesting parallels.
But yes, I agree with Wittgenstein. Where are we going?
I don’t think either of them did that though. More that they were scrupulous about the use of conceptual language for what is beyond its scope.
The distant cause of these problems was the loss of the use of analogical language and symbolic imagery. That in turn goes back to Duns Scotus ‘univocity of being’. It was that which foreclosed the possibility of there being expressions conveying different modes or levels of being.
(But I’m not going to be able to develop on that right now as it’s not the kind of dialogue that lends itself to tapping out characters on an iphone in a car park. But see this post.)
Kant rejected the possibility of doing traditional metaphysics.
Wittgenstein definitely thought that traditional metaphysics is "language on holiday". His "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" shows his attitude to metaphysics.
From the article on Wittgenstein in SEP:
"Having developed this analysis of world-thought-language, and relying on the one general form of the proposition, Wittgenstein can now assert that all meaningful propositions are of equal value. Subsequently, he ends the journey with the admonition concerning what can (or cannot) and what should (or should not) be said (7), leaving outside the realm of the sayable propositions of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics."
Neither, in my view, would have said that metaphysical concerns have any meaning, in the sense of being of no significance to humans; rather I think both would agree that metaphysical claims can have no propositional sense. I've been saying this to you for years now, and you never seem to be willing to accept it.
My friend, Kant is traditional metaphysics.
It's pertinent that those who emphasis Wittgenstein's rejection of metaphysical statements so often stop at the Tractatus. Yes, he showed that metaphysical statements are senseless, but then showed that metaphysics is more than just statements.
One can act in silence.
Wittgenstein did not put an end to metaphysics, so much as showed that it is better done in action than in philosophical speculation.
See PI §133.
Sorry if this gets tedious for you. Part one, in brief: Moore went on about the good being a non natural property, and back then, they say, most philosopher's took this for granted. Times do change. But look closely. Contingent goods are easy, for they are everywhere in good violins and bad (not good) spectacles. Contingency is about explaining the good of something (or bad) with conditions that make a particular thing good or bad, and the world is made of contingent propositions; in Wittgenstein's "facts" or "states of affairs", in that great books of facts in his Lecture on Ethics, there is no value in the world, just as he says in the Tractatus. What he means is, as you say, Moore's "good".
I find this "good' and "bad" the only route I can think of to ground God, and the argument goes to the contingent and the absolute. There are no anthropomorphisms here, no straw person arguments that try to make metaphysics out of a human personality. We deal with actualities. There is a reason Wittgenstein took value seriously, just to swat it down as without meaning (just as Kant did with metaphysics): he denies value having value because such a thing is beyond speech, beyond the logical grid of possible meaningful propositions. But he did say in Culture and Value, "What is Good is Divine too. That, strangely enough, sums up my ethics."
And on this he was right. Take a contingent good, as in, this is a good knife. Contingency is about context. It is a good knife because it is sharp, balanced, comfortable, and so on. But this is, of course, not an absolute claim about the knife's goodness, and contexts are accidentals. The knife could be for Macbeth. Then all the goodness of the sharpness is gone; in fact, a sharp knife for Macbeth is a bad knife. This is a critical juncture in the argument. Contingency demands the possibility of a denial of the goodness or badness. Good pianos, running shoes can always be second guessed, by setting the goodness of the thing in a good-denying context, by "relativizing" the good in a different way. The good can always be reset in some alternative language game, if you will, in which it is not good.
But all of this contingency of explaining things in the world assumes there is nothing that is truly absolute, which was Wittgenstein's point--nothing "in the world," for the world is a logical place, and value has no logical identity. What does this mean? Moore's non natural property: put a flame to your finger and hold it there a few moments to get the point. Reduce the event by suspending all facts that might be descriptively present, like damaged flesh, c-fibers firing in the brain, and so on. Once all facts are removed, there is in this a residuum that is non factual (if you follow Witt, who follows Hume; debatable, though). It is the value. The argument here rests solely with this. This value AS SUCH cannot be second guessed, unlike the knife's sharpness-as-goodness that can be turned around instantly, this experience of the badness of the pain taken outside of any contextretains is badness. Impossible with contingencies in the world. There is no such meaning to a knife good in its sharpness free of context.
Value is absolute. Not value here or there, but the presence of value as such is absolute. Try an argument from utility: the philosopher's evil demon is up to no good, and insists you torture one child for the weekend, or a thousand other children will be tortured for a thousand years a far greater intensity. Utility says go for the weekend, but note: this decision does not diminish one whit the badness of the weekend affair. Clearly, and this is the point, there is NOTHING that can diminish this, which tells us we are in the presence of an absolute. There is no way possible, it is apodictically impossible, to relativize this badness away.
God is part two. But I have little confidence that you find part one compelling, so far. No one does at this point. It takes convincing, but keep in mind this is Wittgenstein's argument, essentially. The "bad" of the flame, the torture. or, speaking generally, suffering, is entirely without logical status for Witt because it cannot be be observed, and set against something else for a contingent bearing. All bads and good come to this. They are is "stand alone" no matter how they are caste and recaste.
Thank you! :smile:
:fire: More!
You're not disagreeing with anything I said other than that Kant is traditional metaphysics; which is just plain wrong. Kant critiques the idea that any rationalist conception or empirical observation could tell us anything about anything real beyond human experience; that is about the nature of things per se; which is what traditional metaphysics and ontology purport to be able to reveal.
Perhaps give this a read: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-metaphysics/
Might make tea.
Of course, the worry that the world as an illusion dates back to Plato (The Allegory of the Cave) and the Buddha (maya) and they had somewhat good reasons to doubt the authenticity of experience. Science too has more or less confirmed this in its own small way (the Orchid mantis & the Spider-tailed horned viper). Nevertheless, this is hard to explain, I feel these aren't adequate grounds for our suspicion that the world is, in some way, deceiving us.
:lol:
Do! I'm in.
Thinking further about @Banno’s emphasis on the metaphysics of ‘doing’ - those schematic representations I provided earlier about the various levels of the hierarchy of being in the different traditions. The point is, all of those were indeed very much associated with cultures which embodied those understandings in social practices, religion, even in architecture (i.e. sacred architecture). In other words, they weren’t simply meaningless phrases but the distillation of the sacred principles of those cultures. It is (as Karen Armstrong says) modern Western culture which treats those terms as ‘propositional’ i.e. reduces them to verbal formulas and then declares them ‘meaningless’ - the same culture which has declared life and all who live it that ‘outcome of the accidental collocations of atoms’ (Russell, A Free Man’s Worship.)
——-
* Thomas Nagel says in his Secular Phillosophy and the Religious Temperament that Wittgenstein clearly had a religious attitude to life while not an adherent of any particular religion.
The mystical, the religious, spirit is shown, for example, in the great cathedrals and buildings of other cultures, as well as in poetry, painting and music. Think of Bach as a paradigm example. But when you say
Quoting Wayfarer
when you talk about a "transcendent source" or "hierarchies of being" I think you are departing from Wittgenstein's ideas; and you are skating dangerously close to the kind of reification which he condemned as being "without sense".
That's my view, anyway, which you should be pretty familiar with by now.
I would add the importance of experience. In the Tractatus, rewards and punishment, and the happy man. In the Lecture on Ethics, certain feelings.
Just to add, and this is where he got it wrong, in the same way Kant got it wrong: it is not impossible of vacuously speculative to discuss metaphysics. This is way of positivism. Heidegger thought it is through poetry that we can give form to the "wonder" of the world, but this limits the possibility of revelatory description. to approach this kind of thing, Husserl's phenomenological reduction provides the method, which is not qualitatively different from meditation yoga.
Not more scrupulous; emphatic. These philosophers drew a very distinct line not to be crossed, and left very little room to vaguery or intimations.
But this loss of analogical language is intriguing, in that it suggests that what it means to "fall" away from something foundational and profound (Heidegger talks like this, and Kierkegaard, but with a Christian bent) in our existence lies with a turn toward the categorical thinking brought on by secularism. "Analogical" relations? What are these? Seamless living in the world? My cat is like this. But then, so was the Buddha. It is the Question that intrudes in this natural complacency.
I'm interested in the link between Husserl and "meditation yoga." Can you say more about this?
I don’t follow. Torture weekend is not as bad, in the mind of the torturer, relative to torture millennium in both quality and quantity, assuming the torturer feels that torture is bad to begin with.
Put aside attitudes, dispositions and judgment in the mind of anyone. It is an argument about the presence of suffering as such. The utility illustration is only meant show that comparative utility has no bearing at all on the actuality.
Look at it like this: the color yellow is, I would argue along with almost anyone else, as such is "almost" without meaning. Certainly we are forced to admit that there is a difference between language and contexts and the ways these establish the possibility of making "sense", on the one hand, and the bare phenomenon, on the other. But the bare phenomenon taken AS "yellow" is already contextualized among possible sentential and logical forms, and so, to identify yellow as being yellow is always already a contingent matter. But consider an instance of pain. The same holds as for yellow (the qualia of yellow, if you like), but pain has, after analysis has cancelled out all contingencies, a residuum, which is, I argue, the essence of ethics: the metaethical good, bad.
If it is preferred, the matter here is about the qualia of pain and bliss (etc.), embedded, as all things, in contexts of contingency. Reduce the color yellow to its bare phenomenal presence and you have something radically different from a reduction of pain to its presence, which is evidenced by, say, that intensity you experience when your arm is twisted or ankle sprained.
I still don’t follow. Concepts are interdependent and are meaningless in isolation.
One thing I don't understand about Milbank's argument is whether Scotus's 'univocity' cancels St. Thomas arguing that God is simple in Question 3 of the Summa Theologica. There is a list of what cannot be said of him. The negatives are balanced against what can be said of him in the 'voice' of 'natural' being:
Maintaining that God cannot be expressed as a being seems to remove him from the discussion of different 'modes' or levels of 'being' rather than provide the means for such. A better example of the 'univocal' may be Spinoza whose metaphysics does not allow agents of creation to loiter in the hallways.
Apologies to all if this point of theology does not belong to a discussion of the concept of religion.
That ought be an "or"? That metaphysical speculation is vacuous is not just an assertion, but is demonstrated. Pointing out that Heidegger or Husserl indulged does nothing but display their emptiness.
The "doing" is a form of life; it involves our experiences as well as our acts, and also the things we take as granted, those "hinge propositions" that cause such verbal constipation in other threads. SO yes, what you suggest is not surprising.
Keep in mind, these are my thoughts about Husserl and others. I'm not just recalling text.
What is the phenomenological reduction? It is a suspension of the natural way we relate to the world, the everydayness, the science, and the implicit default interpretations that are always there in a given moment of conscious existence, in the effort to discover the "things themselves". This is not the Kantian thing in itself, impossibly remote, but is the intuited world that, if you follow Husserl, stands there before one as "pure phenomena". His is a "method" of achieving intuitive purity, the true philosophical calling.
It is, or it can be, a very strange business, even mystical. A normal way living is just these assumptions always in play. It is the basis for the familiarity we have with the world: it's language, thought, judgment that rules one's sense of normalcy, and these are not things that are simply there, like we think of plain objects being stable and inert. We conceive of the world in time, and this is a very important thing to get straight if one wants to understand anything existential philosophers have to say. Not that we live in time, as a physicist would put it. We ARE time. Time is the foundation of our existence. So Husserl's reduction, this turning away from normal naturalistic default understanding of the world, is a turning away from the temporal dynamic that constitutes our lived lives. Not ALL of what constitutes our lived lives, obviously, for that would turn one into James' infantile "blooming and buzzing". But it is an explicit cancelling of what is not there before one as a direct intuition of the world. For me, it is rediscovery of something profound, and I won't put too fine a point on that.
So what does this have to do with meditation? The reduction is a radical suspension of knowledge claims that, if you will, usually run our lives, and if successful, the reduction is a kind of lifting of a foggy illusion of the presumption of knowing. (If this reminds you of the Pseudo-Dionysius' Cloud of Unknowing, it does so with me as well. Think also of Meister Eckhart--God, deliver me from God!). But the goal is to bring one to a pure apprehension of the world at the intuitive level, and this is exactly what meditation is all about, if you ask me, only meditation is the reduction radicalized to its limit: the annihilation of the world. To sit and "reduce" the moment to nothing at all.
This is not something that sits well with philosophy, of course. But then, what is philosophy if not the personal encounter, intimate and palpable. If not this, then Rorty was right: might as well teach literature. But he was wrong.
It is demonstrated on the premise that knowing the world is either an empirical knowing or an analytic knowing (putting aside Quine's attack on analyticity). But these are false categories. Look at it like this: there is nothing at all that is prohibitive of content in neither Wittgenstein nor Kant. These ideas of sensory intuition or states of affairs are, at the very basic level, arbitrary. What IS it for something to be empirical? This is an open concept. Kant's noumena is everywhere in all things. The phenomenon is, if you will, noumenally saturated. It simply can be no other way, for that would require a metaphysical restriction, which is nonsense.
I think this has been explained before.
Firstly, the atomic propositions of the tractatus need not be empirical. That is part of the Vienna Circle misreading @Wayfarer's article dismembers.
Secondly, by the time of the Investigations it is clear that whatever categories we might posit are arbitrary in that we might posit quite different categories if it suited our purpose. They are not about how the world is but about what we do in the world - we ought not look for their meaning but for their use.
...and this cannot be done; hence the approach taken here will not work.
Exactly! But that fire on your finger, is THAT a concept? It certainly can be taken up AS a concept, but it most certainly is not a concept, and therefore is stands before one as the world, and not an interpretation of the world, a concept.
But the important point is that logical restraints have no hold on content. Atomic propositions being empirical or not begs the question: what is it for something to be empirical at all? What is logical restraint, anyway? The term "logic" is abstracted from judgment. The conditional structure is abstracted from time (if....then...is a forward looking concept). The point is, all categorical thinking is interpretative, and certainly not prohibitive of what can be present in the world. All of the glory of the divine presence could appear before us, and reason would not blink (said Hume). Reason is an empty vessel and what is empirical is about content.
As to the Investigations, I see no help in the matter of the concept of religion. It is not a question of language and how it works. It is about value and ethics, that is, metavalue and its correlative, metaethics. Religion is about the Good, as Witt said. The point I would make is that this has extraordinary implications.
What does it mean that it cannot be done? It is not a breaking of logical rules, and one cannot really argue against it. It is not an argument. It is a reductive method of discovery and a description of what unfolds. It takes, well, curiosity, motivation to explore the claim that intuitive insight can be made clearer.
Thanks for the explanation.
I read Husserl twenty years ago and your words gave my memory a good jog. I remember having a kind of semi-mystical experience at the university library while playing around with the epoche - making an attempt to bracket out all but immediate sense experience, coupled with an attempt to identify self and transcendental ego. (Again, it's been awhile...)
Later in life I became obsessed with mantric and zen meditation. Yes, the Cloud of Unknowing resonates here. That was an important book for me.
I've been an avid student of meditation for over 20 years: the obsession settled into a placid daily practice. And I have to say - after twenty years' experience - I don't see meditation as offering a link to nothingness. (I played around with notions of nothingness for a long time....) I see it as the ability to sustain near-sleep and near-dream states while maintaining full to partial conscious awareness.
If we can access the unconscious via dreams, we can access it via this sort of meditation.
The epoche can certainly be done. Banno likely has no experience with mindplay of this sort.
It can be done in a state of undisturbed solitude. And quickly vanishes when attention returns to its default.
So, to my view: doable, but unsustainable.
:clap: Hence the links that have been discerned between Pyrrho (ancient Skepticism), and Buddhism, which has emerged in the last couple of decades (e.g. see Everard Flintoff 'Pyrrho and India'). From this you can discern a 'family resemblance' between Husserl's ‘epoché’ and the Buddhist ‘??nyat?, between the Skeptic 'ataraxia' (tranquility) and the Buddhist 'nirodha' (cessation) which connotes 'suspension of judgement'. e.g. from an OP on the Buddhist teaching on emptiness:
[quote=Thanissaro Bhikkhu]Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there's anything lying behind them.[/quote]
where the resemblance can be clearly seen.
Quoting Constance
Also from a Buddhist source:
[quote=Nishijima Roshi, Three Philosophies, One Reality; http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/DogenStudies/three_philosophies.pdf]The Universe is, according to philosophers who base their beliefs on idealism, a place of the spirit. Other philosophers whose beliefs are based on a materialistic view, say that the Universe is composed of the matter we see in front of our eyes.
Buddhist philosophy takes a view which is neither idealistic nor materialistic; Buddhists do not believe that the Universe is composed of only matter. They believe that there is something else other than matter. But there is a difficulty here; if we use a concept like 'spirit' to describe that 'something else other than matter', people are prone to interpret Buddhism as some form of spiritualistic religion and think that Buddhists must therefore believe in the actual existence of spirit. So it becomes very important to understand the Buddhist view of the concept 'spirit'. I am careful to refer to spirit as a concept here because in fact Buddhism does not believe in the actual existence of spirit.
So what is this something else other than matter which exists in this Universe? If we think that there is a something which actually exists other than matter, our understanding will not be correct; nothing physical exists outside of matter....Some people explain the Universe as a universe based on matter. But there also exists something which we call value or meaning. A Universe consisting only of matter leaves no room for value or meaning in civilizations and cultures. Matter alone has no value. We can say that the Universe is constructed with matter, but we must also say that matter works for some purpose. So in our understanding of the Universe we should recognize the existence of something other than matter. We can call that something spirit, but if we do we should remember that in Buddhism, the word 'spirit' is a figurative expression for value or meaning. We do not say that spirit exists in reality; we use the concept only figuratively.[/quote]
Notice the convergence between 'matter alone has no value' and the aphoristic passage previously quoted from Wittgenstein 'If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being-so'.
A lurking issue with these comparisons is that in our minds skepticism is usually associated with a kind of common-sense realism which implicitly preferences sensory (i.e. empirical) experience, whereas the ancient skeptics and Buddhists were skeptical of the innate sense of reality that common-sense realism takes for granted.
A second difficulty is that Buddhism's aims were soteriological (i.e. concerned with salvation or liberation), but in our minds such philosophies must necessarily depend on the acceptance of dogma (which is what we equate with 'faith'). So here we're presented with something that seems paradoxically like a 'skeptical faith'.
I practice stopping my breath. Genuinely interesting, for air hunger comes along and is very insistent. And I have to ignore this, tame it, and there is, beneath the breath, if you will, an extraordinary sense of the presence of, well, presence. I can see that our thoughts and attachments are not abstractions, but real energic forces. A thought is not an abstraction. It requires energy to think, that is, a production of interest, and it "covers" the world up. And what it covers, and this is where it gets impossibly weird, is the Real world, which we never see in our everydayness.
Yes, doable. But certainly not everyone's cup of tea.
Never tried that. Sounds like a bold approach. "Air hunger" - that's got to focus the mind. :smile:
Into the files. ??
Quoting Paine
Note the inclusion of the indefinite article 'a'. I think when you use that, you're already including 'God' in a set - the set of possible deities, or whatever. This is addressed by Paul Tillich - if God is being qua being, then He cannot be a being. See Pierre Whalon God does not Exist, also What is the Ground of Being? (I think by a blogger called 'metacrock'.)
Religion includes dark moments of excruciating longing - anguish - comeocomeemanuelings - and also rich moments of (let me play it safe) near-near-perfect fulfillment.
Longings are painful so the anguished and staff have invented a cure for longing: dogma. Ideology calms* but invites sterility. Like Yoda notes of the future, 'god', the word, is always in motion; resists the proposition-stasis; always points to futurity; to dys- or to utopia** contingent on how devilish is Its mood. (Allow me the proper It.)
Rich moments of near-near-perfect fulfillment must be lived to be entertained. It's not sensical to moot this point. Either one has had rich moments of near-near-perfect spiritual fulfillment - or by the same token dark moments of excruciating spiritual longing - or one has not. The second are wise not to take the word of the first. The word 'god' wants to be known, not rumored of.
The word 'god' will be absurd until a person sees how it can be fruitfully used.
As to the concept of religion: the intellectual approach will never reach the heart of it. Every little buddha has to leave the ivory tower.
*Anxiety is at the heart of religious experience. That's the Buddha kissing pa and ma so long. Think of the discovery of religion: how the child sets out alone.
**LET YOUR WILL SAY THE SUPERMAN SHALL BE THE MEANING OF THE EARTH!
I don't understand the incessant need to put labels on people and their ideas. I find the ideas or the definitions much more interesting than the labels or terms we use to identify them.
Facts, as you seem to be using the term, are like knowledge and beliefs. There are states-of-affairs and then our knowledge and beliefs of such states-of-affairs. Facts, as such, are not socially constructed. They are acquired through observation and reason of a single individual using their own senses and brain. Sharing, discussing, and debating of the observations and conclusions reached comes afterwards, and those conclusions that a single person reaches that are useful to other individuals become prevalent like the spreading of individual genes that provide a benefit to the entire population over what the pre-existing gene pool provides.
Is it a fact that the states of affairs are what is independent of society? Was that something that was socially constructed? Do I simply have to disagree with you for it to not be a fact? A social construction is an agreement between two or more individuals, not a disagreement between two or more individuals.
As an example, there is a state-of-affairs of objects orbiting the planet Jupiter. This was not known until Galileo pointed his telescope at Jupiter and observed, over several nights, little "stars" moving around Jupiter. Galileo performed these experiments in secret. He reached the conclusion that there were objects orbiting Jupiter before he published his work and shared it with anyone else. So, was it a fact that objects orbited Jupiter once Galileo reached his conclusion privately, or only when the rest of the world agreed with him?
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I still don't understand how you are using the term, or its relevance. Maybe we should just stick with "states-of-affairs". I agree that there are states-of-affairs that exist independently of how we think about them. I'm a realist. I also think that how we think about things is also a state-of-affairs. That is to say that minds and what they do are just as much a part of, and exist in a causal relation with, the rest of the world. Another way of saying it is that our thoughts about things are just as natural as the things themselves.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
Oh no. It's the complete opposite. I sincerely appreciate definitions. Definitions are something that I am constantly requesting of others so that I may understand the terms they are using. As I said before, the definitions are more interesting than the terms being used, and my point that you are replying to was that definitions that are not influenced by the need to control or dehumanize others, like some religious fundamentalists and politically biased people do, are the more useful (objective) definitions.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
Hehe, yes, well Banno does like his word-games. But that is the difference between he and I in that I don't see language as a game. I see it as a means of sharing individual "facts" (knowledge and beliefs).
I have read, and pondered, the Prajnaparamita, and, of course, one can easily see why thinking like this is all but absent from our culture and thinking. It calls for the annihilation of the world, if taken to its conclusion. And clearly, I'm not talking about the physicist's world. "There is no world, only worlds," and whatever that which is the ground of all things may "be" it certainly does not good to call it substance or energyat the level of basic questions. These terms are fine for science, and we all use them all the time. As I see it, ??nyat? is the term that, while it cannot be explained positively, it can be gotten to around the back door, so to speak. I've listened to lectures and read a scattering of commentaries about this, and the best I can think of to indirectly account for it is Husserl and his ilk. For Buddhism is a "way of liberation" at its core, not a metaphysics, which, as I see it, is its great virtue.
I cannot well access scholarly work in Buddhism or Hinduism; I'm too embedded in other things. But then, I do believe all roads lead to ??nyat?. To me, this is an annihilation of the world and time. Time is the doing of things and the interest that motivates this, the anticipation, the assumed goal and its cultural generative sources issuing forth the doing and the doing of thinking and feeling. This is Kierkegaard (minus the Christian obsession). This is K's analysis of the concept of original sin, this cultural transfixity.
These ideas about time, the world and annihilation are radical, and I know have no place in the thoughts of normal thinking.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I should have read down for this. Soteriological, eh? Never heard of this term, but I guess I knew there had to one for this. I should have read Suzuki, but instead, I stuck with Allan Watts for the popular read.
On dogma, K's book's full title is Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Not well received by the church. He was a true threshold personality, though. Couldn't actually become a knight of faith himself, such is the trouble with having a genius mind--too entertaining.
As I see it, one needs to take the matter all the way to Derrida, which is not a happy thought for people, because he is deliberately obscure. But what makes him so important is his arguments that show that language is, in its nature, not metaphysically groundable at all. Rorty like Derrida for this. One cannot never escape the "regionalism" of a language use, is the way I think of it, borrowing from Heidegger who borrowed form Husserl, and this means that when I say, there is my cat, the term cat is not AT ALL a definite designation. It is a kind of context of terms, all related to cats that are not the term cat but "gather" in cat regional thought and relevance and out of this emerges, there is my cat, which is itself certainly definite enough in the usage, but the philosophical analysis yields no definiteness at all. It is, as I think of it, a diffuse meaning, spread out in a web of interference, no single referent of which is itself singular.
This is, I think close, and right. Caputo examines Derrida's thinking in terms of apophatic theology/philosophy: It puts language as, as I see this, a self annihilating position. Deconstruction is self deconstructing as the deconstructive analysis has no exceptions. This is Derrida's version of hermeneutics: radical. Language, to put it in a familiar way, never "touches" the world, for reference is impossible in the familiar way this is thought of. Reference is a "spread out" in language "regions" in which the difference of the interplay expresses as singularity in speech and thought and writing.
So, our language is not in an analogical relation to God's, if God is conceived as being anything at all, because all of our terms are in their nature, at the level of basic analysis, diffuse and in regional "play". And we are, as Caputo cites Eckhart, finally "free of God", that is, God the concept, the idolatry of know ing. Apophatically liberated.
It is the ultimate control, watching air hunger rise, then calming it down, but it insists, but there are moments when the massive energy of thought and feeling fall away.
According to the instruction manual, Right View (twelve link chain of dependent origination, karma, rebirth, etc.) is doggedly claimed to be essential to liberation.
Right view is a method, and has to do with what is not liberation. As I see it, the matter is simple, but the language we fit to it, and the contextualization of it in our habits to schematize and endlessly "understand" what it leads to distortions.
It is hard to conceive that language itself is a utility. The four noble truths, Hindu metaphysics, and all we can think of is a just there as a "method" of grasping the world, a utility that serves one end: the security of well being. So what is well being? One can only discover this, and if the Hindus are right, and I am sure they have to be, then well being is off the charts.
Language is delimiting, pulls things down to its own terms. Finitude itself, it could be argued, is language.
There are more things than there are words! The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao! The named are things that are critical to our well-being and I mean those things that are both harmful and/or beneficial; that which is neither, our minds ignore for a good reason in my humble opinion viz. to nip information overload in the bud. We've evolved to sense only mates, prey and predators and anything else that gets caught in this sensory net, being the right size in a manner of speaking.
There are non-religious approaches to that end. I think the utility is in binding tribes, which can offer well-being, but if well-being were essential then I think religions would be better at the task. There is no reason they couldn’t be better at it.
The point in the article about analogical language does point to something that is not 'univocal' in Aquinas' language. And Aquinas' statement that there is no difference between 'His essence from His being', does not permit predicating His existence as we do with any other thing.
But noting that God is the efficient cause is for Aquinas a given 'natural' function such as Aristotle saw was necessary to explain the realm of becoming. That seems 'univocal' in its purpose.
All this to say that one must convince oneself of one's religion; kid yourself into it, so to speak.
Actually, Buddhism of all schools stridently rejects the charge that it is nihilistic. It is a charge that was frequently made by its Brahmin opponents and was also characteristic of the early European intepretations of Buddhism. It's not 'annihilation of the world' but a clear insight into clinging to the apparent reality of sensations and concepts as inherently real. It's a subtle skill, and exceedinly hard to master - I don't claim to have mastered it in the least.
The point I tried to make, which I'm afraid has not come across, are the convergences between that characteristically Buddhist discipline of 'choiceless awareness' of the contents of consciousness and the idea of 'bracketing' that is found in phenomenology. That has been the subject of considerable commentary i.e. in the 'embodied cognition' movement.
The universe is not merely matter; matter means nothing, can be nothing, unless it takes form. Meaning is inherent within form. How could there be form without meaning?
How can you deny that words can refer to things perceived? We don't perceive the world; it is the idea of the unconditioned totality of possibly perceived things. So it is not merely words which don't "touch" the world.
Hence the appeal of hylomorphic dualism, although that's worlds away from what Nishijima means. Although I think you mentioned you have To Meet the Real Dragon, didn't you? Still think it a great book.
My response was not a critique of Nishijima, but to the incoherence of the idea of meaningless matter; I mean people often imagine matter that way, but really meaningless matter, formless matter, is impossible.
How can there be matter without form? There is no meaning without beings for whom things have meaning. Meaning is not inherent in form. Things can mean different things to different people. It is a matter of what we ascribe meaning to.
Not sure where the above fits in.
I'll just say if you're honestly aiming at a deeper understanding of religious notions and practices, anxiety is the key.
So you can follow Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling et al) to Freud (The Future of an Illusion et al) to Rollo May (The Meaning of Anxiety and Man's Search for Himself), Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom et al) and Karen Horney (who links neurosis and the pursuit of glory (self-apotheosis, the nearest god to thee) in Neurosis and Human Growth).
Anxiety is the heart of it.
Anxiety facing the loss of the mother-father-womb archetype*, god as substitute for mother-father-womb. Anxiety as source of the heinous doctrine of original sin. Anxiety as anguish or spiritual suffering, god as the (imaginary? - it's unknown) healing friend. Increased anxiety in light of the infamous Death (murther! murther!) of God. Ritual, and sheepish conformity, as antidote for anxiety. Meditation as the result of and as antidote for anxiety.
To my view, without anxiety there could be no religion.
*It's no joke losing an archetype.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The only conceivable antidote (thus saith the lord!) for universal anxiety? The Brotherhood of Man.* Whether heaven, houri or Utopia. Religion lets us dream, grounds our dreams, justifies hours spent dreaming of god and goodness. In our dreams of god and goodness - as in an hour of prayer or meditation** - we escape (soon to return) from our anxieties.
*Our Christmas vision.
**Meditation can decrease anxiety permanently. It's a gradual thing as brain wave patterns shift. There's a neuroscience behind that last sentence, it's Googlable.
The notion of ritual is much criticized in some religions.
For example, in Buddhism, there is the cocept of silabbata-paramasa, usually translated as 'attachment to (grasping at) rites and rituals'. It is considered a fetter, an obstacle to spiritual advancement.
So either ritual cannot be part of what makes something a religion, or Buddhism isn't a religion.
Perfectly right. I never argue with what is supported by observation and logic, and if religion were the kind of thing that could be handled in this way, I would defer to readily.
But it's not. Evolution and its ideas and theories taken as a given. We have to understand that evolution is not a theory about what is. It is a theory about how it got here and has nothing to say about the qualitative conditions of our existence. That the hand has an opposable thumb is entirely an "accident". There is no "principle of evolution" in the world moving things forward.
Not if by "seem" one means 'pretend'.
Some people don't doubt their perceptual processes, but they doubt that other people and things are honest; they assume that they pretend, are treacherous, that they make themselves seem one thing, when they are actually something else.
So to "know what something seems" is to see through its pretense, its treachery.
But religions have that dimension of the radical unknown, the metaphysics. I can think of many ways cultures take of the world and systems of thought as a utility, true, but religion is a "utility" or perhaps a complex heuristic (a provisional dealing with) that has as its object no object at all, and the constructed object, its rites and symbols, are these weird, threshold institutions that deal with this foundational position of our indeterminacy in all things. This is why philosophers like Quine and Wittgenstein would not dismiss religion. It's a metaphysical necessity, because the world is, beneath all of our affairs, indeterminate, especially indeterminate in value and ethics (Oh why are we born to suffer and die? is not an vacuous metaphysics).
Now that humankind has appeared on the scene we can begin to evolve more consciously. Certainly this can be done on the individual level: this forum is evidence of a will to psychical evolution. It may be a Morlock-Eloiesque evolution, but it always is. We found an okay body so now we can start to upgrade our brains and imaginations, wordskills and emotional life. On to homo misteriosus.
[quote=Zarathustra]What is the ape to man? A laughingstock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the superman.
[/quote]
Quoting Constance
No. Evolution is happening now. As long as environments with organisms change, there will be selective pressures to adapt in some way to those changes. For things to happen by accident implies that there was a goal or purpose in things being a certain way that somehow wasn't - as if the universe has a goal or purpose as existing without the existence of opposable thumbs, yet it still happened anyway. It also implies that you know how the universe was suppose to be (without the existence of opposable thumbs) yet they exist despite how you know it was suppose to be. Nothing happens by accident. What happens now is dependent on what has happened before.
Quoting Banno
If you're using language to report that things seem, then you've already engaged in some kind of ratiocination. How language seems to the individual seems to include how that it is just more than scribbles on a page or sounds in the air - that they can be used - but only after careful ratiocination.
Scientism does.
What usually passes for/as science is actually scientism anyway.
Depends on how you define religion.
It's not clear that actual religious people think that way about religion. They are not relativists and doubters like that.
It's Easter time. The local Catholic parish sends out a monthly newsletter to everyone living here, including the non-Catholics. "This is the time of celebration, of the victory of life over death", "Christ has risen", and so on reads the newsletter.
To suggest that the people who wrote this newsletter believe that they are dealing with something merely constructed about the radical unknown???
And with the processes of teaching and learning that knowledge.
Quoting Banno
Why the wink?
No, but commitment to a particular religion.
The way you're framing your "honest aiming at a deeper understanding of religious notions and practices" is already done with the assumption that religions are human constructs with which humans try to overcome existential problems, while you automatically exclude all possibility of divine revelation, quite ignoring that divine revelation is key to many religions, esp. some major ones, like Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.
Only desperate prospective adult converts do so.
A.k.a. hypoxia.
No, you're not. You insist on the external, on the perspective of an external, uninterested observer.
You're like someone trying to discern the taste of the proverbial pudding 1. without tasting it, and 2. by dimissing the accounts of those who claim to have tasted it.
Moreover, you appear to deny that the distinction between the emic and the etic approach even exists, or at least that it is not relevant.
(I've noted before that you're a semantic atomist, or at most, a semantic molecularist.)
Neither do I think such an anchor exists. But this is not because "religions" would have nothing in common, or because a term doesn't have an essence, but because the term"religion" is often used as a product of secular religiology that has its own needs, interests, and concerns, while other times, it is used in a specific intrareligious context.
It's Humpty Dumpty land.
Why should I be content with someone else’s answers to that?
But nihilism can be taken both epistemologically as well as ethically. When I say annihilation of the world, I refer to language and culture that constitute what makes our existence what it is, It is not like the common thinking that all there is, is unity and particularity is just an illusion. I consider this to be, well, bad metaphysics. Annihilation is a temporal concept: I sit quietly doing nothing and in this I rush of thoughts and feelings fall away. I call the world these thoughts and feelings, speaking generally. The self as a constructed historical entity falls away, is forgotten, if you will.
I do think those "sensations and concepts" are inherently real. But they are interpretatively missing the mark, and the mark is invisible, so any kind of Hegelian, is you will, convergence is impossible to conceive. Presently I think we acknowledge it in "indeterminacy", which is the way I see metaphysics as a concept. As a lived experience, it is wonder and grief thrown upon the abyss from which all things come. But re. the reality of sensations and concepts, generally speaking: this has to be given existence as a presence. Important to see that, to put it all too simply, perhaps, they exist but they are wrong, or merely interpretative or indeterminate. The rub: the term 'reality' too is wrong, or indeterminate; that is, when I say a concept is real, I am simply saying there is something there.
Final definitions? All things are hermeneutically in play. Annihilation to me is saying, look, when we terminate thought and attachments, an extraordinary stillness emerges that intimates something the usual engagements obscure and distract from. Many want to describe these engagements indifferent ways, and they are, many of them right. But the intimation cares nothing for this. It simply beckons with profound irresistible presence, and when one actually follows, s/he annihilates the world.
Finally, the idea of bracketing: As I see it, this is a momentous kind of thing to do. Why others don't see it this way I will never know. I read Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy and I am instantly interested, while others are repulsed. I can't go into why this is.
But then, one can put aside this kind of thing altogether, not dismissing it, just affirming it likely true in one way or another, then ask another question: This "evolutionary plateau" in which we find ourselves, what is this? What is the foundational description of it? This is phenomenological. The basic givenness of the world. Here, I would add, one discovers that all theory, certainly including that of evolution, is constructed out of the matrix of thinking afforded by this very givenness. In other words, evolution is a construct of the very thoughts that are supposed to explain things, itself included. The question is begged.
I think you are right about that. But then, a newspaper deliverer does think of herself as, say, a pawn in the grand capitalist game. There is "living in" without pause or question, then there is stepping away into a broader context, and giving an account.
Religion is the broadest possible context, which is without form itself, brought down to earth, if you will, through the rituals and the candles, and the spooky dark church interiors (which I like), and so on. But ask aunt Betty who sits in a pew on Sunday, and she will tell you about Jesus and redemption, or the like.
It sounds like you are saying that by calling something accidental we imply the nonaccidental, and the nonaccidental is just presumptuous assumption the calling it accidental is supposed avoid. By calling something structureless, we assume structure in the calling.
But this is true, of course. The term accidental is defined in a contextual embeddedness, and it plays off other terms for its meaning. You speak from a position outside of this?
Ahhh. But what is hypoxia? It is not a deficit of oxygen outside of the physiologist's lexicon. And there IS an outside of this.
You certainly should not be. I take this question to be truly primordial, issuing form the the world, if you will, not the church. The church invents "answers" with its robes and solemn initiation rites, etc. Beneath all this is the question that is buried, It is a terrible impossible question the more it is pondered, something we loose a sense of while staring at our cell phones. Not to be cynical of modern life, which a like. But it is very, very weird, not to put too fine a point on it, to pull away from it and reclaim that original territory of wonder and terror.
This is a good example of the leap I am discussing between states-of-affairs and facts. What is is - the state of affairs. What 'is'? Those are facts (or perhaps the subject of metaphysics). How we speak/conceive of the states-of-affairs does not change what 'is', but we still have concepts about what is and those sorts of concepts are things like process ontology, substance ontology, etc.
Although there is a bit of irony in the critique that I am using a label for a concept (mereological nihilism) in a thread about "religion", I rather don't care what you call your ontology. My critique is about whether the relationship of "stuff" creates new stuff or if the relationship of stuff has no impact on what exists.
You write Quoting Harry Hindu
But does Jupiter exist? Is it a state of affairs? Is the naming of a particular assemblage of stuff related to the state of affairs or merely to our intersubjective discussion? What I am trying to point out is that ontology (or our particular ontology) does not suddenly get us from language to the states-of-affairs and calling things "facts" is a linguistic turn.
Pretend for a moment that Jupiter is a fact. Does Jupiter have parts? Are Jupiter's parts facts? As those parts change, does Jupiter cease to exist? Does Jupiter endure regardless of the constituency of its parts? These questions of identity are not about language games (though to some they strike as such). They might take place within the context of a language game (after all, where else would they be asked?), but they are intended to be about the states-of-affairs in precisely the same way that you think "fact" is about the states-of-affairs. I am asking you to provide what in the states-of-affairs, if anything, constitutes a fact.
The generalized claim is that a social group is just as much a candidate for being a fact as a planet, a person, or a particle. The fuzziness of when something is a fact that is constituted by an assemblage of stuff does not preclude you from calling Jupiter "Jupiter" or saying that it is a "planet" and it should not preclude us from calling Christianity "Christianity" or saying that it is a "religion".
Quoting Harry Hindu
Picture a time one billion years from now when humans are long since gone. Was George Washington the first President of the United States of America? Is it a fact that survives humans? Or perhaps human memory? The question here is whether social groups can create facts independent of the underlying "facts" (you'd likely agree that George Washington had arms and legs regardless of whether people with language ever existed). In this context, can you, as a matter of fact, be a member of a religion without your consent/agreement? As in, do your personal beliefs have any relationship to the fact of the matter of you being a member of X?
Put differently, is being Christian a state-of-affairs?
I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation.
The only things that do "fall away" in oxygen deprivation practice are your cells and tissues, specifically, your brain cells. It's an ascetic practice that doesn't lead to any noble attainment.
Again, I strongly urge you to stop experimenting with oxygen deprivation.
Fear not, I breathe. It is not as radical as it sounds. But you are invited to wonder what the experience is about.
By calling something accidental, you are implying purpose. By implying that inanimate objects, like the universe, have accidents you are projecting purpose (anthropomorphism) onto things that have no purpose. There is no purpose outside a mind's own goals, therefore there are no accidents outside of some mind's goals.
That's what religiologists, culturologists, and the like do. Not what religious people do.
What is the aim and purpose of comparative religion?
That's because you didn't start off with purification of bodily actions, and purification of verbal actions. Those are an absolute necessity, without them, "meditation" cannot bear noble fruit.
* * *
I have to go now. I threw my back out the other day. I'm in so much pain I can't sit upright anymore.
Do not.
"Divine revelation": breathtaking, inspiring, inspirited poetry; uncannily wise instruction or insight.
Let's wait till we know god exists before we start calling things 'divine'. An unkown by any other name is still an unknown.
Yes, it can look like this. It can also look like my uncle Raymond who has a phd in geology. Do better!
Still too slippery, Harry. How is this different from what I said?
thank you.
I know what they do and how they think. Philosophy's job, as I see it, is to take this, and give a reflective analysis. What is going on when we pull away from the participation, and see it in a broader context?
[quote=Wikipedia]Comparative religion is the branch of the study of religions concerned with the systematic comparison of the doctrines and practices, themes and impacts (including migration) of the world's religions. In general the comparative study of religion yields a deeper understanding of the fundamental philosophical concerns of religion such as ethics, metaphysics and the nature and forms of salvation. It also considers and compares the origins and similarities shared between the various religions of the world. Studying such material facilitates a broadened and more sophisticated understanding of human beliefs and practices regarding the sacred, numinous, spiritual and divine.[/quote]
I explained earlier in this thread my motivation for studying it was to understand what was meant by the 'enligtenment' promoted by figures in the popular media at the time, such as:
I entered University through a 'mature-age student exam' (no longer offered). A large part of the exam that day was a comprehension test on a long passage from Bertrand Russell's essay, Mysticism and Logic - which was just the kind of thing I was interested in. I was to learn that there wasn't much discussion of it in philosophy or psychology, but there was at least some discussion of it in Comparative Religion, which had a broad curriculum. (The first class of comparative religion was taken up with the question, can religion be defined? which we failed.)
The point of that study was, as the quoted section says, to understand the common themes in different religious traditions, through a number of perspectives. It was as near as you can get to a kind of scientific study of the subject. I found the anthropological and sociological perspectives particularly interesting.
The 'old school' approach to comparative religion was very much 'beetles on boards' - the attempt to classify, summarise, describe, very much as laboratory specimens. That was exemplified by the Head of Department. They weren't really into 'finding yourself' or exploring enlightenment as a spiritual quest. That has begun to change in the later part of the 20th c with the advent of the 'scholar-practitioner' types (who often hailed from the sixties generation.) One of my classmates was the very interesting Harry Oldmeadow who has a good reputation in 'perennialist philosophy' circles.
The first ten years are the hardest. For the average Joe, I don't think there's anything like a permanent peak. There are peaks and valleys, and, by and by, loftier peaks and not-so-deathly valleys.
For religious ecstasy, I think the pentacostal phenomenon - which can be de-Christified - is a quick, easy path. I found a path to pentacostal energy by way of obsessive, passionate, insistent mantric meditation. Constant repetition of the word 'god' until the pulse of continous prayer set in.
I should say there is a suffering in this kind of ecstasy. So I mostly do the zen thing lately. It's more peaceful than ecstatic.
I did realise some real home truths through that engagement. Sticking with it is difficult, though.
It is. I had the gift of desperation.
Paraphrasing
Spock (bleeding): I'm pondering upon the meaning of life.
Dr. Leonard McCoy (applying compression to the wound): Feeling philosophical, eh? That's what massive blood loss will do to you.
Better: Morpheus: "Do you think that's air you're breathing now?"
Quoting Harry Hindu
You are saying there are no "accidents" in the world apart from the mind that conceives such things. Calling something an accident is simply saying it is contingent. All things are contingent, most philosophers would say, and this means they are not "stand alone" in the meaning they have. Meanings are contextual, and nothing that can be understood, stands outside of a context.
"The world" is contingent; to say otherwise is just bad metaphysics, with one exception. Value. And this really isn't an exception at all. Or is it? Value is where things get interesting.
Yes, that's what I said?
Doesn't matter taking the form of the various elements mean the opening up of all the possibilities which we see manifest today?
There is talk of contention between those who would include spirits or "a general order of existence", and those who think this too broad. But this moves over to a functional definition, more akin to what has been suggested by some in this thread, in which religion is concerned with a way of life. -apparently in an attempt to ensure nationalism and economics are not counted as religions...
None of these historical attempts at explication seem adequate.
Are you blaming the poor posters? Why should one assume that there might be such a thing as a good definition? I think the problem is rather that a "good definition" is impossible for such terms.
What I meant was it's not going to be possible to find sense in nonsense or thereabouts. We've been using the word "religion" without paying attention to the rules of good definitions. To then look for a good definition for "religion" is pointless, pisssing in the wind so to speak.
So, if we do pay attention to these rules, we can provide such a definition?
Well, set them out, so we may proceed.
Yup.
[quote=Wikipedia]An intensional definition, also called a connotative definition, specifies the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing to be a member of a specific set.
---
Certain rules have traditionally been given for definitions (in particular, genus-differentia definitions).
1. A definition must set out the essential attributes of the thing defined.
2. Definitions should avoid circularity. To define a horse as "a member of the species equus" would convey no information whatsoever. For this reason, Locke adds that a definition of a term must not consist of terms which are synonymous with it. This would be a circular definition, a circulus in definiendo. Note, however, that it is acceptable to define two relative terms in respect of each other. Clearly, we cannot define "antecedent" without using the term "consequent", nor conversely.
3. The definition must not be too wide or too narrow. It must be applicable to everything to which the defined term applies (i.e. not miss anything out), and to nothing else (i.e. not include any things to which the defined term would not truly apply).
4. The definition must not be obscure. The purpose of a definition is to explain the meaning of a term which may be obscure or difficult, by the use of terms that are commonly understood and whose meaning is clear. The violation of this rule is known by the Latin term obscurum per obscurius. However, sometimes scientific and philosophical terms are difficult to define without obscurity.
5. A definition should not be negative where it can be positive. We should not define "wisdom" as the absence of folly, or a healthy thing as whatever is not sick. Sometimes this is unavoidable, however. For example, it appears difficult to define blindness in positive terms rather than as "the absence of sight in a creature that is normally sighted".[/quote]
Shouldn't we (have) follow(ed) the rules of a good definition?
When we start off we have to always remind ourselves that a good definition
1. Must focus on the essential features
2. Must not be circular
3. Must not be obscure or, inversely, must be clear
4. Must be neither too broad nor too narrow
5. Must be positive instead of negative when possible
So when we define the word "religion" I could list down the following sufficient and necessary conditions:
i) There should be a deity/deities
ii) Ethics is a component
iii) Explanatory framework for the universe's origins
As soo as we do this, it becomes crystal clear what is a religion (The Abrahamic Triad & Hinduism) and what is not (Buddhism).
You get the idea.
So, take (i)There should be a deity/deities. Taoism and Buddhism do not have a deity at the centre of their considerations. So are they religions?
It's the methodological concern I have here. If we decide that Taoism does not involve a deity, we have a choice: Do we decide that Taoism is not a religion, or do we decide that the definition of religion needs correcting?
No, they're not (religions).
Please follow the rules (of what a good definition is) and it's smooth sailing.
Do religions have to involve a search for meaning? Do they have to provide guidance for behaviour?
But your rules say "1. A definition must set out the essential attributes of the thing defined" not "There should be a deity/deities"; so I am asking if you are indeed following your own rules. Perhaps "There should be a deity/deities" is not part of the essential attributes of religion.
Your disagreement stems from your exposure to a misused term viz religion. In other words, you're being misled by people who haven't followed the rules (of good definitions) when they coined the term "religion". To drive home the point, assume "religion" only applied to the Abrahamic Triad (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Would you still have written the OP?
Indeed, it's not wrong to ask whether deities are essential features of religions. However, once we define the word "religion" according to the rules set out for a good definition, there's no confusion at all.
How ordinary.
Well, if you wanna break the rules knowingly don't be suprised to find words like "religion" and "game" have no essence. You can't have it both ways, oui?
Report yourself to the police! :grin:
Why? :chin:
For the simple reason that deities seem to be the common factor we should focus on with regard to religions. It appears that words are designed to pick out classes of objects and then the individuals of that class. To classify we need to look at what properties are shared and religion is one such class/category.
If I were to look at Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, it should be a cinch to realize that I have nothing to go on if my objective is to group them together under one banner. In other words, if I then use the word "religion" for all of them, I've commited a glaring error, definitionally speaking.
Indeed, porridge is a common factor, but you lost the plot now, oui? The definition is too broad.
Porridge. Atheists eat porridge too, oui?
That's the thing about stipulating definitions. They make philosophy so much easier.
The "religious" atheists? :chin: Is that not a contradiction?
Taking a few steps back, I'd say we're supposed to attend to only the essentials which, it just dawned on me, are simply those properties that populate the zone of overlap between purported religions.
Remember that we labeled the religions as religions and if we find nothing that links religions up, the blame falls squarely on our shoulders. GIGO!
The point is to determine what they are.
You haven't justified your stipulation. Nor, i think, added much to the discussion.
I answered that question 2/3 posts ago. Essential features are:
1. For a class, those properties which all members share.
2. For an individual, those properties that identify it and it alone from the rest in class.
The two seem to go hand in hand as far as I can tell: We must be able tell apart a class from other classes, like how individuals are distinguished from other individuals.
My hunch is that the first step towards a definition is to make observations. Assume there are only 5 object (A, B, C, D, E) in a hypothetical universe. We find out that A, B, and C share feature X and we then bring them under one banner, (say) religion. We also discover that C, D, and E have Y in common, we group them together as (say) philosophy.
As you can see, we have two classes in our hypothetical universe viz. religions and philosophies with only C being both.
This is the genus stage of proper definitions.
Now we have to find some way of differentiating A from B and C; the same goes for B and C and D, E.
This is the differentia stage of proper definitions.
From this very superficial analysis of good definitions, it appears that for us to able to define a word it's necessary for the referents of the word (the extension) to be both alike (genus) and unalike (differentia). That's a tall order even for someone as powerful as Momma Nature.
I'd be grateful if you could kindly attend more closely to the paragraph that immediately precedes this sentence. Much obliged. My paradox-o-meter is getting a reading. Maybe it's just a glitch!
All right, it's porridge (Genus) without sugar (differentia).
You have a point. This is a bloody cartoon!
In principle, one can be religious about anything. You can feel obliged to God, the State, the School System, or your mother in law.
"Curiously, for a people so religiously minded, the Greeks had no word for religion itself; the nearest terms were eusebeia (“piety”) and threskeia (“cult”)."
Curiously indeed! Olympus was crowded. Didn't they worship or felt obliged? Was it a cult for them? Piety?
Is religion a modern phenomenon, concept, idea, practice? Is it connected with god(?) uniquely? Like I said, it can be used non-theistically. Wikipedia agrees:
From the Online Ethymology Dictionary:
There is more to it... A manner of life, morals, being careful of creation, or a bond with God, it can be associated with religion, but when I think of religion, the first think that pops up in my mind are visions of churches, mosques, rituals, religious culture, power hierarchies (God being just an instrument to maintain it), candles, choirs, Christmas, fastening, Carnevale, saints, the pope, Khomeini, praying, Sundays, temples, offerings, hell and heaven, Olympus, damnation, good and bad, Christ (in Rio), Buddha, Mohammed in Mecca dancing the Hajj , crosses on tops of high mountains, holy books, rising seas, Armageddon, the ark, ten commandments, Bismillah, Beelzebub, boats beneath fire, crusades, missionaries, in the name of... etcetera. And not so much of the nature of God, theodicees, apologetics, the reasons for creation, the meaning of life, or science.
Yes. Because it is at odds with the fathers. They, in general, have little understanding of the sciences closing in at the fundamentals, the bearing structure of creation. Had they the knowledge, they could rightfully justified pronounce in joy a first clear evidence of the Holy God in the heavens. Of course I'm exaggerating here but in principle they could.
Good for you. I'm not so lucky.
You seem to think other people are as much in the dark about god as you. That's bold.
I'm refering to the uselessness of self-mortification practices.
But what when no actual religious person believes those things? Comparative religion tends to offer concepts that are alien to actual practitioners. Religious people normally don't seem to have a metareligious or suprareligious view of their religion.
The moment we 'pull away from the participation', we stop being religious.
What use is the 'broader context' to a religious person?
They like to say they know what they only believe.
Do you know that god exists, or do you believe that god exists?
So what? You're not allowed to have an interest in the subject unless you're a 'religious person'? Who get to decide that?
Well, the broader context is philosophy's world: pull away from mundane affairs and ask more fundamental questions, like what does it mean to know something, not about the weather of if the couch is comfortable, but anything at all. But when you arrive here, you face indeterminacy, which is a term I lifted from others to use place of metaphysics.
When you face indeterminacy at the foundation of all of our affairs, you are where religion begins, and where philosophy should be. The former is fiction, largely, the latter analysis.
Perhaps not so useless; after all, it is not something to be measured by how it looks in the dress, the posture and behavior, and so on.
It"s not clear how you get to that from what I said ...
My point is that comparative religion offers concepts that are alien to actual religions, concepts that are artificial impositions on actual religions.
For example, the idea that all religions are essentially about the same things, the same desire for the sacred. In contrast, religions typically take a dim view of eachother.
Neither. But simply for the sake of precision, I cannot just exclude the possibility that god exists.
I have always understood religion to include epistemology, and other philosophical disciplines.
Granted, some religions are more explicit about this than others.
In regard to this, I've had strange experiences with some religious people. For example, when I asked a Christian what the self was, he told me that this was the field of psychology, not religion. He preached eternal damnation to outsiders of his religion, yet he thought it is psychology that decides what exactly it is that burns in hell forever. Bizarre!
Not sure I know what you mean here.
For the religious, there seems to be no such indeterminacy.
You're describing the experience of zoning out. It can certainly be pleasant enough, it can seem profound. But I question its value in relation to suffering.
The hatred that religions have often showed for other religions is one of the best arguments against religion.
As I said at the outset, when I embarked on that course of study, my quest revolved around 'what is enlightenment?' (Years later that would become a magazine title published by a turn-of-the-centuy bogus guru.) But I still think it's a valid and legitimate question.
The kind of cross cultural study of religion that comparative religion offers provides plenty of insights into that.
I think this hatred is an argument against comparative religion.
Why do you think it's an argument against religion?
How does it do that, can you elaborate?
Every religion that has a notion of 'enlightenment' has its own ideas about what it is, how to achieve it, and how relevant it is.
It's not clear whether the idea is justified that enlightenment is somehow an objective phenomenon, quite independent of religions, and that different religions just have different takes on it.
At last! You say something connected to what I've written. Took some doing. It is, nevertheless, a thesis I find both defensible and appealing, because it points to a genuine 'higher truth' over and above the individual manifestations that have appeared in different times and cultures.
Christians are the MOST compromised in their clarity of thought. You might as well ask a child. Christians are my pet peeve because they think dogmatically, the enemy of inquiry. Kierkegaard went on and on in his distain for this kind of thing. Popular religions are messy things, and I don't care about this boring dimension of our lives, the way we manufacture entanglements. Might as well be a politician.
Beneath all of this, where the primitive beginnings are and the world, the "originary" world, shows itself, this is philosophical. Here you find foundational indeterminacy, which reveals itself as a wonder and horror of our being here. One has to step OUT of texts to witness this.
And you remain mundane, as always.
Oh.
Do tell how you distinguish between
on the one hand, religious/spiritual/philosophically deep/profound experiences or insights,
and
on the other hand, the feel good feeling you get after a good meal, or the experience of hypoxia, or what comes up when under the influence of intoxicants
?
It seems that you're ascribing profundity where it shouldn't be ascribed, but you miss out on occasions where it does.
Such "stepping out of texts" is, for all ordinary practical intents and purposes, impossible.
What you're doing is just ditching standard religious texts, and firmly embedding yourself in other texts.
On the contrary, it's not defensible. The different religions that have the concept of "enlightenment" or something like it have quite different ideas about what exactly it is, how to get to it, and how valuable it is.
And why focus only on "enlightenment" as a "higher truth"? What about "God" or "eternal damnation"? Those notions are quite common in religion/spirituality.
It's clear, though, how such a thesis as yours can be appealing. It requires no work, no commitment, no religious choice, no practice. It allows one to sit back and rest comfortably in the conviction that all is well.
It seems the whole implicit purpose of comparative religion is to emasculate the religions, to make them seem harmless, redundant, and most of all, ineffective, so that neither the need nor the desire for actual practice can arise in one's mind.
To paraphrase you,
After all, if all paths lead to the top of the mountain, then there's no greater purpose to be served in one's religious/spiritual/philosophical quest other than possibly warm feelings of self-justification.
How do you distinguish the influence between the good feels in general? One simply does. Keep in mind that hypoxia is a term that belongs to pathology, that is, assuming something's wrong. How would Thích Qu?ng ??c.the Buddist monk who immolated himself in 1963 be pathologically assessed? The answer? Very easily.
I push kriya yoga to its limit. Pays off. It's only a pathology if you are on the outside looking in.
Quoting baker
Which is saying, there is no stepping out of text, and if you were Derrida, I would know what you mean. But read Caputo on Derrida, his Radical Hermeneutics. You may be averse to unorthodox approaches, but you should know where orthodoxy itself has it end. It is like this: Try any interpretative reduction that is possible, any at all, and you will end up in the contingency of language, aka, deconstruction. Deconstruction is all pervasive, because language itself is its own indeterminacy. For me (and you are free to read his Structure, Sign and Play, Of Grammatology, and others) it translates into a perceptual indeterminacy (not unlike Sartre's Roquentin and the chestnut tree, if you've read Nausea), not merely an abstract theory. Look at the world and realize the object you behold is NOT possessed by the language that claims it, and does so with the powerful grip of familiarity only. This is Husserl's epoche at its perfect realization. This is what Buddhism is all about, I would argue: for language has its "grip" deep into the conditioned psyche; a lifetime of socializing that began in infancy.
If after all this time, you still think that ... then go fuck yourself.
That's not what I asked you about.
No, it's more systematic than that. Can't you tell?
Killing oneself in a public place for a political reason is not a sign of a noble attainment.
So it is with shooting heroin up your veins.
I'm averse to hocus pocus and to shallowness being masqueraded as depth.
Again: In its proper application, the analytical mind exhausts itself.
Your description seems to hint at the jhanas.
There is, however, more to "Buddhism" than the jhanas. People often forget what it takes to get to them.
Just the obvious point that one tells the different between experiences according to their, well, differences. Clear as a bell; so clear one wonders why the question is raised at all. Surely you know the difference between being in love and lasagna. You're grasping at straws. Curious.
Quoting baker
Do better. It is not the killing oneself that is in question nor the noble attainment. It is the inner state of mine that made such an act possible; to suffer so little, or not at all, inspires the wonder that perhaps there is such a thing as nirvana and its perfect detachment. So then, what IS nirvana? Not simply happy as a child, but removed, distant from engagement, the manifesting of something profound and beautiful. One has to take this kind of think seriously, and no summarily dismiss it. Buddhism is certainly NOT about a "noble attainment" in the usual sense, the term 'noble' being a social and ethical concept.
Again, a bit obvious. Oddest yet: no respect for someone who almost without argument did the most extraordinary thing one could do.
Quoting baker
A little juvenile.
Quoting baker
And yet you toss around such terms as if you know what they are. Is kriya yoga hocus pocus? Well, my goodness. Sorry to trouble.
Quoting baker
Couldn't help but notice. Hope things improve with whatever is troubling you.
It's just a bland term that encompasses all the dogmas and rules that an intellectual minority superimposes on a civilization in order to remain in power indefinitely.
Of course, that is, if we are looking at the concept of "religion" with completely unbiased eyes.
SO neoliberalism is a religion.
You could say that Communism, Socialism, Fascism, even some modern social movements are "religion-like" too.
Too bad that in my question you don't recognize Joseph Campbell's question. He wondered how it is that one can tell whether one has indeed had a religious/spiritual experience, or whether the feel good feeling one has is simply due to having had a good meal.
Direct your attention to the difference between feeling x and being x.
Some "spiritual practices", "tips & tricks", consumption of intoxicants, altered states of mind due to physical exertion readily produce in one's mind a feeling, feeling x. This, however, doesn't yet mean that one is x.
For example, one can read some productivity literature, hype oneself up, put some of the advice into practice, and then one feels more productive. But whether one is actually more productive or not is something that yet needs to be measured.
One can make oneself "feel the presence of the Holy Spirit", through prayer, going to a church, using intoxicants. But that alone doesn't yet mean the Holy Spirit is indeed present.
There is a difference between feeling safe, and being safe.
There is a difference between feeling that one has overcome egoic thinking, and actually overcoming egoic thinking.
And so on.
Feelings are easy enough to conjure up. Facts that can be measured, not so readily.
Strange that the Buddhists say the Noble Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths.
Clearly, you are not aware of the wide range of opinions that one can find among Buddhist practitioners on the topic of public protest in the form of self-immolation.
Insiders have knowledge, experience that outsiders don't. It's not uncommon for insiders to be proud and to feel superior to outsiders. This is true for lovers of modern art, fine dining, religious adepts, etc. or heroin addicts.
On the contrary, I'm not the one being troubled, because I'm not the one acting in bad faith.
But this just begs the question: what does having a good mel have to do with the qualitative nature of experience? Certainly there can be a causal relation between the two, but this says nothing about WHAT the experience IS. Looks as if you are looking some kind of reduction of experience to physical brains states, such that a brain chemistry's analysis can yield up what an experience IS. This is obviously not true; the worst kind of question begging: how does one know what brain chemistry is? Why, through brain chemistry!? You should see that this is one way to approach the justification for a phenomenological approach.
Quoting baker
Same problem. An experience due to exertion, the light headedness, the runner's "high" and the like, are seen to be causally related to the exertion and it effect on physical systems like the brain's, but talk about this, even at the detailed chemical level says nothing at all about what the elation itself is. It tells you nothing about the nature of value. You will have to deal with the Tractatus here: the good feeling of a runner's high is entirely transcendental. Of course, all experience is, at the basic level, transcendental. We, e.g., think before we commit to ontology. Thinking is a structured experience, so the ontology can be no other than someting that issues from this structure, and since we have no access outside of this, we are committed to a general indeterminacy in all things--THE foundation to our existence is indeterminacy.
So what I claim is that experiences need to be assessed and understood for what they are, as they "appear" for appearance is all one ever has. And this is not to invoke talk about "representations" and their objects that do not appear. The world "appears".
Quoting baker
This raises the issue of making an error in judgment. Certainly this happens all the time, as when my dogmatic Christian neighbor insists the gay couple down the street is going to hell for eternity. But this is not about unjustified beliefs. It is descriptive, merely. Go into a strong effective meditative state, control the breathe, especially the release, out and slow, and at the end when the breathe cycle is complete, linger. It is a remarkable experience of control.
Serious meditation is not an easy thing to account for. One must, I hold, see that it is not about the brain, even though there is science's strong causal claim in the background. The brain is just another phenomenon, and it has no more relevance here than knitting. The brain is a phenomenon, and its causal relation to experience is phenomenally acknowledged. So, one simply witnessed the breathe, the intruding thought or feeling, the dismissal. the breathe is simply this rising and falling and the work one has is about controlling this, for the breathe is a most insistent attachment. After all, we yield to the breathe's insistence as we do to a thought or a feeling. The calm that issues from this exceeds familiar calm, and the world "settles" in such a way that one actually stands on the threshold of a sublime stillness, and the concepts of existence and reality take on an extraordinary meaning.
Look, I can't convince of the validity of this. But if you're going to criticize it, you should know something about phenomenology. A medical diagnosis is inherently pathological in its judgment, and this implies a standard of what is normal that issues from everydayness. In serious meditation, you are not in everydayness at all! Meditation is the cancellation of just this.
Quoting baker
But all of this talk belongs to a world of assumptions one gets from high school text books. Here "all schools are in abeyance" says Walt Wittman. You have to go there. I live in a world of dogs and cats and shopping just like everyone else, but I also read Kant through Derrida, and I have learned that this everydayness is a fraud, at the level of basic questions, lacks reflective justification altogether. Facts? Are these Wittgenstein's facts, on the logical "grid"? These are free of value content. So then, what IS nirvana? The most extraordinary value experience.
One thing Witt did was he took value off the table for discussion by claiming to be transcendental and unspeakable. This gave analytic philosophers the license to ignore THE most salient feature of our existence: affectivity. The meaning of life is not about facts; it is about the depth and breadth of affectivity.
Quoting baker
Heuristics! That is all this is. Sitting under that fig tree is not at all about the four noble truths.
No such reductionism. Again:
You find yourself feeling good, hopeful, life seems meaningful. Question: Is this feeling because you just had a good meal, or is it evidence of your spiritual attainment?
You're giving up on analytical thinking before it has had the chance to bear fruit.
Well, that's that's the question. To god or not to god. If you consider not being observable not to exist, then virtual particles don't exist either. Still they have observable effects. Is god a virtual macronic? Can they show up by hidden mechanisms, and if so, what would be the message they try to convey? What are they. What kind of creatures we could expect, might they show up one day? How can a life without them be worthwile? These are the questions philosophy needs to address. It will articulate the concept.
These are ideologies, religion isn't ideology.
It could be interpreted as an ideology since the moment when it is based on "faithful" who follow a leader/prophet just for religious ideas or beliefs
1. Chronological order: Someone well-versed in theology should be able to help. The best I can do is as follows:
? [math]\to[/math] Judaism [math]\to[/math] Buddhism [math]\to[/math] Christianity [math]\to[/math] Islam [math]\to[/math] ?
2. Logical order: There's got to be a sense of progression, I'm using ethics as the yardstick. In that case, religions can be ordered thus:
? [math]\to[/math] Islam [math]\to[/math] Judaism [math]\to[/math] Christianity [math]\to[/math] Buddhism [math]\to[/math] ?
The sequences above are almost mirror images. We're, truth be told, regressing, morally speaking.
:up:
Quoting Agent Smith
I think there could not be a "logical order" in terms of categorise religions. All of them are just metaphors which were born by a prophet discussing them. They even tend to share the same principles or basic points such as: God, suffering, uncertainty, life afterwards, etc...
But just from a different interpretation
You are right that Buddhism uses animals as symbolism in their metaphors. Even the elephant is a cult animal in India.
Inside Christianity it is often used the phrase lambs of God. The metaphor is related to the followers of the average priest representing the Christian values. Nevertheless, I see it as an insult because it seems to be a relation to follow some standards without questioning the circumstances
Point made, point taken. One must take into account the general milieu into which religions are born. The Abrahamic religions, to my knowledge, weren't founded in the best of circumstances (those were violent times - genocide was just another day at the office if you know what I mean). It shows.
On the other hand, Buddhism was possibly part of the golden age of Indian civilization.
In other words, it would be unfair to compare Abrahamic religions to Buddhism.
Exactly :up: :100:
controversial abuse of terms and language.
Many things could be "interpreted as" with the aim to decry.
Maybe I should have included a definition to avoid confusion?
https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-religion-and-vs-ideology
From the link:
I believe in gods but don't think they have controlling power. They just created the universe and let it,go it's way, including all life in it. Like it's happening in heaven. They have the power of creation but uncreating or intervening in what they've made is something completely different, although quantum mechanics seems to offer possibilities.
Maybe what you really meant was that isn't Easy to set out what qualifies as a religion...because we already have definitions that are commonly accepted!
As with all our attempts to categorize phenomena under common characteristics we can always found some standing at the foot of every Bell Curve not really checking most of the boxes.
As I said, we already have definitions for religions and you should start by providing them and pointing out your issues with them.
Then you should point out the phenomena or concepts that you also have a trouble including them in the agreed category.
The same is true for the concept of game.
yes, this definition is horrible obviously, I posted it in hurry and didn't read all.
I'm sure with additional research a better definition could be found.
Understandable, but I was referring to religion as an overall not Christianity as a specific example
An ordinary man belong to majority.
majority is ordinal.
Therefore an ordinal man follows religion that is in majority.
What is an "ordinary" man according to your thoughts? Because I am atheist, for example
consider it a joke :wink:
I think having supernatural or divine powers (whoever the entity) are vacuous characteristics. We have to understand and accept that the humans are weak and we have to suffer until our lives end
Your arguments and words sounds like a totalitarian person. You have to be more open minded and try to understand (or have empathy) with other views.
When did I dictated religious beliefs?
So what?
The question is, would this be considered a religion? On the surface, secular humanism doesn’t seem to have any supernatural beliefs, but as some philosopher said, it does hold human life as “divine.” Personally, I’d consider it a religion. Mariam-Webster defines a religion as
. The attitude that human life is somehow worthy of moral consideration is an institutionalized moral belief. Furthermore, I’ve read sociologists who argue humanism is simply a continuation of the Christian tradition, rooted in Christian ideas like the parable of the Good Samaritan where empathy is universalized.
As Greg Epstein said,
Unfortunately, he should have specified this to be secular humanism, because one can of course be a humanist and also a theist.
I dunno, it just seems odd to call a time when genocide was the norm a "golden age".
:chin:
You'll find that most people aren't interested in discussing modern religions, but only the ones principally concerned with Jesus with the occasional use of Islam or Judaism as tokens/foils. I am sympathetic to the idea that secular humanism is largely just secular Christianity (in-so-far as it is principally the product of Christian culture), but I would very much agree that theism is not a requirement of religion. Focusing on communal practice/behavior is helpful when evaluating what a particular group is, but so often the conversation devolves into discussions about individuals as if religions exist on the individual level.
Humanists would have a much better go of it if people realized that they could reject beardy head without abandoning communal practices such as meaning making and belonging. Alienation as pathology to be cured by exercise and the like has come to be the only legitimate way to address the sorts of existential issues previously addressed by religion. God doesn't animate religions and never has (after all, god doesn't exist), so it is terribly odd to make God a requirement for religions. This is why, I think, that academics in the field are loathe to simply define Christianity as religion and include other "groups" in-so-far as they sufficiently resemble Christianity. Religion as a way to understand large social/communal practice (including ethics, mythology, social relations, etc.) is more useful, perhaps, than what people people here let on.
You have posted about a dozen replies that contain just a dot. I wonder why are you doing this ...
I can't think of a purpose for that is or that it is so difficult to control your posting ...
Interesting phenomenon! :smile:
I noticed too. He deleted all after a dispute. Another thread he deleted. :grin:
Acutally, this is "deleting", not deleting. Indeed, you cannot delete your reply even before posting it! It will be waiting for you to get posted for ever! "Dude, you shouldn't start typing ... It's too late now. You can't back off!" :grin:
(I wonder why the TPF administration likes to keep garbage in its house instead of just adding a "Delete" option ...)
and the evidence of things not seen.[/u] :up:
:fire:
:chin:
Humanism:
noun
an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.
Maybe this works for a polytheist? I can't imagine a monotheist in the Judeo-Christian tradition thinking like this. A traditional theist who values humanism over theism is a very bad theist.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
We have plenty of institutions that have communal practices without reference to the divine. Corporate cultures engage in meaning making and provide a sense of belonging, so does the military. The problem is when you try to remove God from religions and still maintain that the rituals or morals are still good; it's like removing the foundation from a house and expecting it to still stand. If you remove the idea of God from Christianity or Judaism or Islam then it's basically lies and bullshit. A very extensive history of lies and bullshit. Sure you could try to salvage some of the ideas like human life having value or being nice to the poor but these ideas need to be justified on totally different foundations.
It is tough to take comments like this seriously when there are active Jewish and Christianity communities that do just that and still find the religion worthwhile. Religion becomes aesthetics just like everything else. If it is your cup of tea, great, if not, move along. It isn’t very hard.
Your view of corporations is very on point. IBM doesn’t exist, yet it is meaning making. Strange that.
One can find practicing their religion worthwhile (maybe it fits social needs), but it could still be bullshit (intellectually). I can't wrap my head around any version of Judaism or Christianity which removes God from the picture. If you remove God then the Bible goes too, but if we come to know these religions from the Bible then this Godless Judaism/Christianity seems to be basically saying "hey here's our Holy text but we don't believe in the absolute main character" - and God is definitely the main character. What are these religions central texts?
I also believe that there are worse and better ways to interpret text and the better interpretations ought to take precedent if you value intellectual honesty. Within a religious framework there are better and worse answers to questions.
EDIT: The Pentateuch is largely a life guide; if religion has been degraded to mere aesthetics then it has been degraded.
The major issue I have with your questions is not so much whether you get the facts rights (for whatever they are), but about the order in which you proceed. Religions are what people do - when we ask what a religion consists of we look to its practice (we can parse out what practice is later, but suffice it to say espoused dogma is not independent of practice). We don't look at the Bible to know what Judaism is - you wouldn't recognize a single modern practice of "religious" Jews. Being Jewish is not about interpreting some text correctly (hermeneutics), but about being a part of a people, i.e. community.
Someone smart said this: "Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.”
The problem is that this is a discussion about religion, not Judaism, so talking about Judaism as if it somehow stands in for other religions is to miss the point. What is being asked is not what Christianity, Islam, or Judaism is without God, but whether one can have a religion without god. The broad consensus among religious scholars, so far as I know, seems to be that you can. The actual practice of many people also seems to be that they can be in a religion without believing in god/s.
Outside of making demands of religions that religions do not make of themselves, I'm not sure what the point is of insisting that it must be X to qualify as a religion. What is the end goal? To make it clear that social institutions exist outside of god? No shit. God doesn't exist, so even religious institutions exist outside of god. Take for granted in advance that the story book character you are so wedded to could NEVER HAVE BEEN the justification for religion - the justification was always provided by human communal practice. Being honest about it doesn't make the idea of religions go poof, it just lets people have a serious conversation about when communal practice becomes religion rather than staying the same or becoming something else.
It depends what you call "religion." Typically religions have God/s, but Buddhism is defined as a religion yet there is no central creator figure. No traditional God.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
You're just too far into your own field here. It's okay. My background is Philosophy. This is a Philosophy Forum so you should expect us to approach ideas from that angle. Is your background anthropology? I approach things more as an ethicist. In any case I don't understand why we're talking about justification for religion here.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I meant OT, not Torah. Book of Proverbs is a good life guide, good wisdom, a lot of it is common knowledge today.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I understand and agree; as long as you're a Jew you're a Jew. However, humanistic judaism essentially asserts defines a Jew as anyone "who identifies with the history, culture, and future of the Jewish people."
Do you agree with that? Do words just not have any meaning anymore? Anyone can define whatever identity now. Why speak the truth (biblical principle, btw.)
More on humanistic judaism according to wikipedia:
-Ethics and morality should serve human needs, and choices should be based upon consideration of the consequences of actions rather than pre-ordained rules or commandments.
Humanistic judaism adopts some form of consequentialism but what do we tell the child who asks "why?" More importantly, how do we judge the consequences of the actions? That's the real question.
Also what about animal needs? What if the needs of humans conflict? Where do you go for answers to moral questions through this religion?
-Jewish history, like all history, is a human saga, a testament to the significance of human power and human responsibility. Biblical and other traditional texts are the products of human activity and are best understood through archaeology and other scientific analysis.
This one is just an attack on theology and philosophy.
-A Jew is someone who identifies with the history, culture, and future of the Jewish people.
Translation: Descent is meaningless, anyone is free to identify as a Jew or not. This is just a deconstruction of the word/meaning of "Jew."
But it isn't semantics. The core/central ideas and practices are not found in the Bible (books of Moses or otherwise). You can't hold up a book, say "This is your religion!", and expect people of that religion to agree with you by force of character. The book had its last entry what, 2200 years ago when the people were a temple cult slitting the throats of animals? Seriously, the people (and religion) have long since moved on (undeniably helped by the destruction of the second temple and the transition into the diaspora). My point, again, is not about the facts/beliefs of Judaism, but about how you (or outsiders generally) like to impose essential characteristics onto ideas/people/etc.
I find there to be some irony in an ethicist calling out religious beliefs as being bullshit. Just so that we are on a somewhat equal playingfield, I am an ethical nihilist/absurdist. There is no normative statement that can be made that is other than "Hooray!" or "Boo!!" (i.e. emotivism). In that context, every axiological claim is of necessity "bullshit" (be it religious, ethical, or aesthetic in nature). While I am happy to discuss the underpinnings of value, I think you've quite the hurdle to jump to somehow attach the conversation of values to "truth."
Quoting Moses
This is, to some extent, where @Banno's thread began and many people take up - whether words (or concepts) have essential features, i.e. that there is some way to employ a word incorrectly by virtue of the word's sine qua non. For my part, I am firmly in the camp that meaning is individually constructed within the context of that individual's aptitudes/experiences/proclivities/etc. What I mean when I type and what I mean when you read it are never the same thing, even if we act as if they are. Meaning can only ever be established through interpretation of signs, i.e. the process by which the meaning maker converts a signifier to the signified within a particular context. I am completely comfortable with the heuristic approach to language (or, if you prefer, meaning by approximation). Are the signs employed effective?
With that said, group identity is fascinating and complex. There are ways that ingroups define themselves, ways that outgroups define ingroups, ways that individuals define themselves, ways that people define others, etc. What constitutes a particular person has a multiplicity of answers. Asking "who is a Jew?" is inherently ambiguous and requires a great deal of parsing to answer. Suffice it to say, I have my own view on what constitutes membership in a group and self-declaration doesn't cut it.
I recognize it's not the mainstream view, but see:
https://www.yoramhazony.org/phs/
Or watch the discussion with Rabbi Sacks: https://youtu.be/8bKJF3UjkLU
What do we keep and what do we throw away? You imply that having "moved on" is a good thing but you clarified that you're a moral nihilist so moral advancement shouldn't occur for you. The purpose of the OT is to instruct/inform regardless of whether you agree with it. The OT is a guide. I don't understand on what basis a reconstructionist jew comes to advocate a moral/ethical positions. People always need to live and make decisions on what basis ought we make them. Religions need to answer this. There needs to be something here. Especially in the realm of ethics.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
You're digging your heels in here. Earlier I said we can conceive of Judaism as either a current practice/civilization or a philosophical system but for some reason you reject this distinction. I'm happy to consider both angles, we could talk about Jewish civilization today or we can talk about Judaism as a philosophical/theological system. I don't see why we need to point to one definitively and totally exclude the other. I'm happy to talk about jewish civilization today, but we'd really just be describing what is, not what ought to be unless you think I've missed something.
I also don't equate the bible with my religion. That is not my position. It is a history, so if you're into that...
Regarding meaning I'm not going to say much. I feel like we should just use our words to clarify and we can discuss different aspects of a concept and use precise wording to aid understanding.
Good discussion, let me know if there anything you'd like me address that I missed. I'm also not sure where you got that I'm an outsider.
Well, there's far more going on than one might put into a single post, but notice that "every axiological claim is bullshit" does not follow directly from emotivism. "Boo for slavery" is not bullshit.
A troll who cleans up after himself... how odd.
:lol:
...
Possibly a cycle of aggression and regret. Wrath is a powerful debilitating addictive chemical. :smile:
Definitely odd.
When I mentioned bullshit I was referencing Harry Frankfurt's conception of the term. Bullshit is "speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but cares only whether the listener is persuaded."
I don't think reconstructionist judaism falls under this definition, but humanistic judaism is obvious bullshit. Under humanistic judaism anyone who feels like it can be a Jew, morals are whatever is popular; it's feel good ethics without backing (or at least none that I could find). As far as I can tell the movement (around 50 years old) is more designed to be super-inclusive and progressive and unconcerned with philosophic truth or rational explanation/backing of ideas. One can disagree with utilitarianism or Kant but at least there's an underlying logic to it.
It's fine if people think morality is nonsense, but if you think that then please don't present moral claims.
Quoting Moses
Only, when an abolitionist claims slavery is unacceptable, they do care about the truth of that statement. That's by way of pointing to a problem with naive emotivism; moral statements are statements, and hence prima facie are truth apt.
Quoting Moses
I quite agree.
Bullshit = Rhetoric then?!
Maybe there's a very good reason for why we all bullshit so much. Like authentic bullshit (manure), it may act as a fertilzer for good memes, helping 'em blossom! :chin:
My garden of meme-complexes is looking fab. Thanks to my own and others' bullshit! :grin:
this was ennui's position, not mine.
Quoting Banno
:up:
Quoting Agent Smith
i think we'd have to better define rhetoric so no comment. the bullshitter is unconcerned with truth/more interested in persuading the listener. if one is being honest and transparent about one's views like many of us are on TPF then we are not bullshitting. i think you see more bullshit in religion than in philosophy.
Not sure how to take your statement. Are you asking me whether there are things more important than truth?
Yeah. a lot of rhetoric is bullshit. It could serve a purpose but it's still bullshit. It's fine. It depends on the bullshit. It's a pervasive in modern society but on some topics like religion it becomes too much for me.
More thoughts on reconstructionism vs. orthodox judaism.
Let's take homosexuality; orthodox judaism is against while reform/conservative/reconstrictionist community is de facto pro/permissive of it.
so the reconstructionist could argue that the bulk of the "modern" (excluding orthodox+) jewish community today is accepting of homosexuality and how civilization has evolved and to trust in the process of civilization evolving.
the honest reconstructionist accept the implication that he smuggles normative connotations into the term "evolving" for evolving here is seen as a good thing.
this position also goes directly counter to the bible in that the bible describes the israelites as a stiff-necked people who frequently stray from god and are in turn punished. this happens repeatedly. so given that we ought to learn from history where should that bring us now?
:snicker:
The reason that I quoted Kaplan is not to get into Reconstructionist Judaism, but to point out that major modern thinkers within religion understand that their own religions are a function of communities and the needs of those communities as they evolve through time. Just because the word “evolve” is referenced, doesn’t drag all of the teleological non-sense often associated with evolutionists. Evolution is value neutral - what reproduces is what reproduces. Not to get too wrapped up in Dawkins, but his contribution of the notion of “memes” as the mechanism by which social practice is transmitted and subject to the same evolutionary analysis as “genes” is very useful. What survives in religious communities is merely what survives - that survival has no inherent relationship to purity/fidelity/etc. to the past or the features of prior communities. What is transmitted from one generation to the next is a function of the needs of the generation doing the transmission, not the needs of long since dead forbearers.
It is, perhaps, helpful to speak of taxonomy and the danger of not learning the lessons from biology and or applying them to the social sciences (as applied to religion in this instance). Naming a “species” serves certain purposes and does not magically make the reproducing organism of a fundamentally different sort than the resulting organism/s. Instead, the naming serves as a dividing line in the sand between the grains before and the grains after with full awareness of the actuality of the continuum being analyzed. Unlike grains of sand, however, what begins as something like a rodent may one day reproduce in to an elephant such that there is a meaningful distinction between how the rodent related to the world as compared to the elephant. Despite the obvious dissimilarity between the two, the elephant is the heir to the rodent and one cannot speak of the essence of the rodent as anything aside from a definitional imposition. So yes, some modern religions appear to hue more closely to their forebearers than others, but that does not make the doppelgänger any more the descendent of the earlier religion than the one that looks radically different.
I grant to you in advance that there are lots of good reasons to distinguish between Jews who did not “follow” Jesus and those that did, but in a very real way, the early “Christians” that were Jewish would have come to define modern Judaism but for their ceding their claim to Judaism and effort to be universalist. I don’t necessarily want to debate early Christianity and its particulars, but I do think the example serves as a useful example of how religious communities can reach dividing points and what it means to be the inheritor of a religious tradition (aka meme).
Quoting Moses
I’m not sure why you think I thought you are an “outsider.” My reference to ingroups, outgroups, etc. was not about you in particular, but on how different contexts can result in different identities. One major struggle of the modern liberal who wishes to define him/her/it/zi/etc.self against the world is how the world will say, “It is nice that you think that, but this is what you are…” As it turns out, self-identity is insufficient grounds to convince others that you are (or are not) a member of a group/tradition/etc.
Regardless, the notion of “who is an X” and the like (independent of the subject and object) is generally not monolithic. Speaking of the philosophy of Judaism or Jewish history is equally perilous - there are many philosophies and many histories. The reduction of the many to the one is not a reflection of something inherent about the multiplicity, but the values/agenda of the reducer. Who gets to speak for Judaism (what counts for Jewish Philosophy/theology) informs and is informed by what is taken (a fortiori) as authority on what Jewish Philosophy/theology is. Put simply, we come to a subject with ideas about the subject that define the subject in advance of our perception of the subject.
Maybe @Banno can help me flesh out a method by which we can employee an ostensive heuristic to delineate what accounts for a slab.
Without being glib, I think that it is dangerous to speak of majoritarian practice in a religious community as coming to define what that religion is. Before WWII, the majority of the Jews in the world lived in Europe and the vast majority of them were slaughtered. The Judaism that survived the holocaust is not the Judaism of the dead, but the Judaism of the survivors. This is what evolution looks like - what survives is what survives, not what we think is right or ought to be.
Regarding trusting in evolution, it was MLK who said that the arc of moral history is long, but it bends towards justice. The Christian can easily leave it to god and time to fix it all. (cf Christian and Jewish eschatology) The modern Jew (and some of the historic ones too) see it as their personal obligation to bring justice to the world even if they cannot personally achieve it (while it is not for you to finish the job of perfecting the world, you are not free to desist from trying). The metaphysical structure of Judaism between the sacred and the secular - the sanctified and the profane - and the obligation of the Jew to bring holiness into the world is fundamentally at odds with any passive notion of progress by virtue of the passage of time. Indeed, it is the charge of humanity (and humanity alone) to repair the world and restore what was broken. God abandoned the world and is not going to fix it.
For what it is worth, the reason that Judaism fits so well with existentialism is because of the ideas of personal and communal meaning making in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. While people here don’t typically discuss religious philosophy (and not much philosophy of religion either), it is worthwhile to see how one can get from properly slitting the throats of cattle in a pretty room by men with the proper number and quality of testicles to where we are today. Just as philosophy will engage in another round of re-interpreting the Greeks or Germans to justify some seemingly novel philosophical idea (you know, doing philosophy), so too will members of a religion engage with their mythic texts to legitimize seemingly novel ideas (doing religion). It isn’t just about the Greeks being right and us needing to properly interpret them (philology), but about their being a tradition which provides a useful context for having the conversation and an appeal to antiquity which provides some grounding to avoid accusations of being too far outside the playground to be taken seriously - after all, if it is really that important or profound, wouldn’t people have said something about it before?
The vicious, radical nature of contemporary thinking which claims no inheritance from the past and no obligation to treat kindly that which came before is anomalous. It might be the new normal, but people’s seeming desire for connectedness to past and future suggests that we will continue to seek wisdom from what has come before and to justify our contemporary claims by making them fit with our traditions.
I leave this post here because this is already too much. I apologize for the disjointedness.
I wouldn’t call it bullshit, but I suspect that “truth” as Frankfurt meant it makes a bad bedfellow with normative claims. It is in that context which I made the comment.
People are social - with this comes heaps of empathy, sympathy, and cooperative behavior. Taking someone’s preferences into account independent of your theories of truth/epistemology is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect people to do. Not just that, I’d expect consideration of those preferences to be a fundamental basis upon which people act. Anyone who would discount preference as legitimate justification is just lying to themselves and spending too much time sniffing their own farts.
Sure, we can argue about how we resolve competing preferences or whether or current moral intuitions permit multiplicity of “right” answers, but this isn’t the thread for that. Looking to the universe to provide “truth” that you can attach your normative claims to independent of people is a fool’s errand. Abandoning truth as the only (or even primary) consideration in normative judgments isn’t to say that there are no normative judgments, but it is to be honest about the origin of those judgments. Yes, slavery is wrong, but not because of the next version of the grand unified theory. We can say absolutely nothing regarding observations of quarks or blackholes that gets us to “Don’t torture babies.” If you want to try to smuggle some value theory in on the back of “truth” as Frankfurt’s allegation of bullshit used the term, I’m game.
Or maybe accusations of bullshit against religion are as inaccurate as accusations of bullshit against art and ethics. Just maybe “not caring about the truth” can mean different things in different contexts and that universal condemnation of such is unwarranted. You may have read this before, but I found it amusing in this moment.
[quote=“Say Anything by Jim Holt”]
Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.
Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” [/quote]
Essential nature of religion - essential nature of bullshit…. A match of divine intent or mere coincidence?
What is somewhat funny about that video is how they are a touch more pious/apologetic than I am, but don’t majorly deviate from any of my themes. Even the orthodox say that Jews in their generation must re-intepret the Bible in their time and keep it is a living document (covenant, if you will), but somehow people are convinced that there is this timeless slavish devotion to a singular reading of the Old Testament.
In any event, I love their enthusiasm, but at least through when I stopped watching (over an hour), they didn’t address the major objection to any alleged use of the Bible as a personal document - no one could read it or had a copy of it aside from a very limited group. It was a political document drafted for a particular purpose and immediately abstracted away from its putative subject - the people Israel. We can absolutely reconstruct the document as a guide to personal philosophy and an appeal to reason, but that is the baggage of a tradition that existed long after the document came to be. The beauty of the tradition should not be understated (whether I agree with it or not), but apologetics is apologetics. It is interesting how Saks stresses that there is no word for “obey” in the Bible in support of his theme of freedom but zooms over the “commandments” part and says then says that “command and control” is not a part of the Biblical narrative. Oddness abounds. 36ish minutes.
What nonsense!
:snicker:
:lol:
You're the best!
Thanks for the post. You bring up a lot of different points here so I'll try to address a couple more in detail. I prefer substance over breadth. Let me know if I glossed over something you'd like to address.
I'm not quite sure what your position on God is. You say God abandoned us which would be deism, but you also say that the world/universe is devoid of divine meaning which sounds more like atheism. I would also argue that moral nihilism is not a strong practical grounding to build a religion/moral system.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
What is the agenda here? Who are these villains that edited the Torah?
On the subject of God you have surprisingly definitive/strong views. More definitive/stronger than mine (I'm an agnostic theist.) You express a greater degree of certainty and I don't know how this certainty is warranted. I'm the skeptic in this convo.
I also don't believe humans have this kind of immediate, direct knowledge of God/ultimate reality where we can look at the world and say "God has abandoned us" - what do we as humans really know about that? We live like 70-80 years if we're lucky (or unlucky, maybe death is bliss and life is pain); we can't zoom out. We don't know what happens after death and we take our best guess at what happened before and then process it with faulty minds prone to a billion cognitive biases. We'll never know the effects of events 100, 300, 1000 etc. years in the future. It is beyond our comprehension.
I don't know where draw the line in terms of existence. Do you believe that Moses existed? King David? It's an interesting question to ask what it would even mean for these people to exist. This is actually one of the fun parts about reading the bible - in book of daniel it starts off historical - in babylon after the exile with king nebuchadnezzar and it mentions he had jewish subjects who needed to learn babylonian (this to me seems plausible for an ancient ruler to do) and the story involves one of those subjects although he probably didn't exist - in any case the story starts off plausible but somewhere along the line things just kinda veer.
If it is made up then someone at some point in history created pages and pages of fake genealogies. The OT is more progressive than the Greeks - who wrote centuries later - on disability and on the poor. If nothing else, considering its time period it's quite good on some issues.
Get the big ones right and I'll take a closer look.
You know those things by which to guide your life also without the Bible. You don't need the Bible for its content, you need it for the institutional justification of said content.
Without the Bible, you'd be yet another sucker "just trying to do the right thing". With the Bible, you'd be doing the exact same things, but you'd have the divine justification for them and feel righteous.
Great point! "Me beating those faggots to death wasn't that bad after all!"
That might describe someone, but it doesn't describe me.
I don't subscribe to the notion that wisdom and ethically appropriate behavior is known a priori. It is learned, and where that knowledge is found is varied. Maybe you acquired it from your parents, some role model, or a religion, I don't know. What I can say is that the Bible, for whatever historical reason, in Western society, became the vehicle for those most concerned and focused on finding meaning and purpose to our existence. From that piece of literature,with much creativity and bias, entire systems of often conflicting thoughts sprang forth.
My resort to the Bible for wisdom has nothing to do with delusions that God himself spoke it while Moses transcribed it. It has to do with it having been designated the human societal Western Constitution (so to speak) and the thousands of years of our best and wisest having wrenched meaning from it, even if the literal text no longer resembles the final interpretation.
One can wear many hats and walk between various language communities. When speaking as a “philosopher” I will say things a certain way, when speaking as a participant in meaning making, I will speak another way, when describing other people’s beliefs, I will speak a third way, when speaking for other people using their voice, I will speak in another, and on it goes.
Problematically, belief doesn’t mean the same thing in all of these varied contexts. To say that Jews believe that god abandoned them is both entirely too generally and yet not wrong. Whether god exists, whether god abandoned the Jews, etc. is an aside from the statement of belief. To the extent that the belief motivates action (or at least has explanatory power for some set of behaviors), it is largely irrelevant whether that belief satisfies your epistemic/truth conditions. For my part, I find that god language can be terribly useful in certain conversations. Even when god is dead, talking about/responding to god moves the ball.
I didn’t refer to myself a nihilist/absurdist lightly. Though it will gain me few friends around here, I believe rather little. I admittedly do lots of “acting as if” or “speaking as if,” but if tomorrow you told me I was a brain in a vat, I wouldn’t find some core “belief in” destroyed. We have the now and our experience of it - that is all. History, the other side of the world, etc. are all just ideas that are more or less useful in accounting for things we do experience. Suffice it to say, “All speech is political speech” is a pretty fair summary of my approach towards language. What accounts for “real” or “historical” is different than what accounts for “myth” or “fiction” only in-so-far as we assign one group of ideas to one genre and the other group to a different genre. Sure, you might say that history books can be “wrong” whereas fiction cannot, but that is only because you privilege one narrative over another. We have what is extent and our interpretation of it, what “was” or “could have been” is forever gone and is but a figment of our collective imaginations (or memories, if you like).
I’m not sure if any of that responds to what you want to talk about. As to whether nihilism provides grounds (strong or otherwise) for religion, imagine me gesturing to the vast amount of religious existential thought in the 20th and 21st centuries. People are getting on without god and recognizing that radical freedom is not liberty to do what you want, just the ability to do what you can. We created god (even if god created us) and we get to decide what that means. Volitional constraint combined with self-imposed/enforced obligation as negotiated in community is, on my view, where we find the substance of god creation. Sure, in prior centuries god was foisted upon us and we were beaten into believing that god was “out there” to be found/revealed/etc., but that was confused.
Call it god, call it justice, call it whatever you want, but the universe does not weep if I die now, tomorrow, or never. Gussying up emotivism with appeals to reason, logic, and other intellectual contrivances to get people to more readily agree with you is lovely and all, but it doesn’t change the game. We decide what we ought to do. We use force - physical, social, emotional, etc. - to make the world what we want or change it into what we believe it ought to be. Sit with that. Let it linger. After awhile when you’ve calmed your mind of all the thoughts about objectivity and the magic that happens when you get to say “slavery is wrong” rather than “I believe slavery is wrong” you may momentarily embrace the peace that comes with knowing that things as they are are just how they are. In that moment, take ownership of the thought that comes after - that you want the world to be different. And then consider this - that that desire alone is sufficient warrant to make it so.
Here is the turn - that your warrant is not the same as my warrant and that what you want won’t compel me to want it, too. It is only through the process of social negotiation that we can arrange our desires in mutually beneficial ways. No magic. No god. No logical force of the universe compelling action A over action B. Simple. Honest. How it has always been and always will be. Sad that slavery isn’t wrong, but even worse that people have slaves. Sad that lots of horrible stuff isn’t judged poorly as a feature of the universe. Even worse that people do horrible things. Slavery IS wrong on my account, but not because someone told me. My values are enough.
I disagree. Completely. How do we process that experience? That is everything. The brain processes things; the mind is not an empty receptive vessel for the outside world. Read Stephen Pinker.
How do you process losing that baseball game? Or tennis match? Or a crush rejecting you? How do you explain it to yourself when you're recounting that failure to yourself later.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
What are you expecting from the universe? How caring do you need the universe to be for a death? Do flowers need to pop up when people die? Would that be caring enough for you?
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
You don't get it. I don't care if people agree with me. I'm not engaging with you for popularity points in the philosophy forum or to make internet friends. If I'm engaging you it's because I enjoy challenging/learning the boundaries of your thinking and if you can answer my queries then you've helped me gain a better understanding so thank you.
Show me that I'm legitimately wrong and I'll thank you for it. That's philosophy.
Granted this conversation is between us, but it isn't exclusively (or primarily) about us. When I speak of ethics trying to put lipstick on a pig, I'm not directing the comment at you personally. You are neither responsible for the field of ethics nor people's obsession with trying to make it more than what it is. My reference to getting people to more readily agree with "you" was truly an abstracted "you." Often ethics is used in answer to the question, "Why should I do what I don't want to do?" If your only answer is, "Because I want you to," a host of people seem to think that means the person will simply do what they want rather than that thing you think they should do. Ethics is a form of compulsion by way of logic/reason/divine will/etc. You "must/should/ought" presumes both agency and something capable of imposing obligations/duties/etc.
The only reason I am even discussing ethics in this thread is because you brought it up as something essential about religion. It more or less started here...
Quoting Moses
Went here...
Quoting Moses
Moved to this...
Quoting Moses
And was restated here...
Quoting Moses
If I misread you, I misread you. We all make mistakes.
My response is straightforward (so far as I can tell), that in realms of meaning making, people make meaning sui sponte/ex nihilio - it is not imposed on them by god, reason, or otherwise. Whether you speak of religion, ethics, or otherwise, the subject of the conversation has to be about the meaning makers. The "truth" of value claims does not exist outside of the preferences of people and it is therefore tautological/useless to point out that when people make value judgments, they are inherently unconcerned with the "truth" of the world outside of human preferences. We speak of ethics/religion in persuasive language precisely because getting others to share our values is what makes the things we value valuable to other people. To the extent actions are informed by values, there is no more to it than that. Appealing to antiquity/authority/god/logic/the universe/etc. is simply a method by which we persuade others (or ourselves), but that method is misdirection - you/I/we create meaning, not the things we appeal to.
In some ways it all goes back to the Greeks, are things god beloved because the gods love them or do the gods love them because they are god beloved? There is always the infinite regress if value has to be justified by something other than the act of valuing. Existential religions (which is what I was referring to above) get that. They do not make bones about it. They (and their members/adherents) are OK with being the meaning makers and do not have to carry on the farce of claiming that something/someone else creates meaning. How humanistic/atheistic/etc. X makes meaning with a dynamic tradition is the exact same way that anyone else does. The way that a religion can exist in that context is identical to how it can exist (or did exist) in any other context.
In this way, and exactly as @Banno knew at the outset, the "concept of religion" is what we make of it and there is nothing essential keeping it in its place in the firmament. Pearl clutching over language and/or conceptual purity through times/communities/etc. is adorable, but things only seemed fixed as long as we could maintain the pretense that they were. The very article that he posted was about this tension:
Neither do I, but it seems that it is evolutionariliy advantageous to take for granted that wisdom and ethically appropriate behavior are known a priori. From what I've seen, people generally consider it at least neurotic to have doubts about what is moral and what isn't. Morality is generally regarded as something one "either has or doesn't have", not something that can be learned (psychopaths/sociopaths "learn" morality, but it's not a natural part of who they are).
Then this is the institutional justification of the Bible's content for you: it's reception and role in Western society.
I see no value in the Bible, given that it can be interpreted in a million ways, in mutually exclusive ways, and that in any particular personal interaction between people where the Bible is used, the interpretation that prevails is the one given by the person who holds more power than the other person(s) involved.
...of the worst! :snicker:
I don't even know what that would look like. Do you believe that God ever spoke to Moses? If not, do you believe that Moses existed?
If the book is a work of fiction then the authors possess moral insight beyond the current day. It's fascinating how they juxtapose insanely good, progressive moral insight (especially for ~800 BCE) with something incomprehensible. For example God holds King David accountable for Uriah the Hittite's death (this is very sophisticated moral insight, especially for antiquity to hold a king accountable for such a relatively minor infraction) but the punishment is the death of his unborn son. It's just this balance of brilliancy with incomprehensibility which makes this an insane work of fiction. Other cultures choose warriors and princes as their heroes, Jews take a guy with a speech impediment who gets help from his priest brother and the two make a decent team. I also love how it begins with such a strong supernatural element in the Torah but if you read past that things slowly become more "normal" until you reach the ~6th century BC and by around that time you're just into historical accounts like Ezra-Nehemia. I can't quite pinpoint where things turn "normal" and that's what fascinates me. King David straddles this line.
Quoting baker
This is not how the Bible describes morality (at least the OT). If you read the OT it basically just tells you to follow the rules. Doesn't matter who you are or how nice you are - follow the rules, be good, don't be bad. Simple. Obey God. You can sometimes question or argue with him. The bible doesn't care what people label themselves as or what their demons are or whatever; do this, don't do that. That's morality for ya.
It is a work of fiction. That's just the case.
Biblical interpretation is based upon thousands of years of interpretation following the final editing of the Bible, much of which is based upon an "oral tradition" that is largely a made up back story for the Torah. Then add to that the highly creative midrash method of interpretation, and you can pretty much derive whatever you need it to say. None of this is to suggest that Biblical interpretation is in constant flux because most traditions rely heavily upon prior interpretations.
How about book of ezra? book of nehemiah? do you believe that the babylonian exile happened? do you believe nebuchadnezzar existed? i don't currently believe in oral tradition/"the oral torah."
and by believe i don't mean 100% true, i just mean that it can be considered as a reliable/reasonable historic account. let's start with our benchmarks and go from there because nebuchadnezzar does mention at least one hebrew king.
It would, on my view, be an act of petulance to insist that the wedding was non-religious because no one there was concerned about beardy-head. Not just can the concept of religion include religious communities that traditionally did not include god worship/belief, but it can also include religions that have changed from including it to not including it. Essentializing concepts is as silly as essentalizing discrete words.
I believe the entire work is selling a point of view, namely of the heroic tales of the Hebrew people. Whether there are moments of accuracy, I don't know, and I don't think it's terribly important. Recording history for the sake of accuracy is a modern phenomenon.
Have you read the OT cover to cover?
If the OT is propaganda for the Israelites, why is a good portion of the OT prophesying destruction for the Israelites because they've strayed from God? Why are most of the kings described as bad/evil kings? The kingdom of israel constantly looks bad, and Judah is only marginally better. If you were to say that it's God propaganda I would agree with you.
I'd consider it an act of petulance to insist a theistic religious service was atheistic because no one was concerned about beardy-head, largely because I do not believe in a corporeal deity, so i would think the physical description misplaced and somewhat mocking.
Quoting Ennui Elucidator
I hear you saying that belief in god is not part of your religion. What belief is part of your religion? What view should I hold to be able to preach from your pulpit?
Actually one way to decipher authorship is to look at who is being made to look best, so if the Northern Kingdom is looking bad, you might suspect someone from Judah wrote it. But sure, God's constant interaction with the Hebrews is what the saga is about.
If you're trying to argue from the text that it must be true else why would it be written as it is (or something along those lines), I'm really not biting. The Torah is a book or many sources sewn together over thousands of years. I don't really see that as a point of contention outside fundamentalist circles.
Ok, we agree the Babylonian exile happened? so when the Babylonian exile ended in 538 bc the jews went back to Jerusalem and rebuilt it. that's basically ezra-nehemiah. there is no divine intervention. most of it is boring details like who helped rebuild what. a ton of the text is genealogies. there's a political conflict with the arabs.
you don't start with the torah, that's no fun. you start the other way and ask yourself when exactly do things become supernatural/unbelievable.
Quoting Hanover
sure, and the tl;dr of it being follow god, don't be disobedient. anytime the Israelites stray they get hit. sometimes the prophets will go into detail about the practices; one i remember was 'father and son sharing woman' and they mention cannibalism and child sacrifice. worshipping other gods is among the worst crimes; don't you dare abandon our value system.
The mocking was towards those that think modern religious folk actually care about beardy head. Like 2,000 years ago they may have had a point, but I'm pretty sure everyone is in agreement since about 1,000 CE or so that god is non-corporeal. Regardless, whatever view the anti-religious have about what god of necessity looks like for theists, it is wrong.
Quoting Hanover
Good old orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy in a modern form. Take the thirteen principles of faith and flush them (it was heretical in its own time). In general, you don't have to believe anything to preach from my pulpit - you just need to not be too much of an asshole and not cross certain lines in the sand, e.g. women are inferior or racism is cool. The issue is not so much what you say, but a) is it interesting (or perhaps is it said by the right sort of person) and b) within the scope of the context of the preaching? So if you want to come in and preach about how you should believe in Vishnu, you'd probably not be invited back, but people might listen intently to the parts that are presented well. In any event, no one polls the audience at the end to ask what any individual audience members believes or what the community has decided is dogma.
My religion is unabashedly about the community and the community's language. Within that language, there is room for discussion about virtually anything. The leadership/people deciding who gets pulpit time are greatly inclined towards particular sorts of language and topics, but if you can make the case that what you have to say is valuable (or at least likely to be valuable) to the community, you can probably get a chance to say it. You may, however, have to speak during non-prime time and do all of your own arranging/advertising/etc. if insufficient people are interested in helping you.
As if there were only one sort of religion.
Earlier we (...I...) got to the point of listing ritual, transcendence and hope as central to the notion of religion.
The question then was why science does not count as a religion, since may invoke all three. The reply was that science failed to address the transcendent; a far too limited perspective on who scientists are and what they do.
I blame Moses. To much reliance on legislation.
You can list lots of things and then ask what qualifies, but the easy answer is that science is not a religion because that isn’t how we use the word or understand the concept. Science (or at least the natural sciences) is the systematic study of the natural world - religion is not. The aim of those doing religion and those doing science are not the same. One can study religion, but that is not doing religion. One can study science, but that is not doing science.
Sure, the scope of what people doing science broaches on some of the same topics as religion, but science strikes as being instrumental rather than meaning making. Merely doing ritual (keeping a lab notebook, reading the journals, cleaning your beakers) and being aware of the potential for limitless time and space (transcendence) doesn’t get you to religion. Hoping for something doesn’t get you there either.
Science, to the extent that it creates meaning in a communal/institutional way comes awfully close. There is indoctrination, dogma, shared values, broadly understood goals, etc. None of that, however, is science or doing science in the abstract.
The label of "religion" seems important for your religion, where you object if someone degrades you to less than a religion and calls you a Saturday meet up group, right?
I'll concede too much energy is expended over labels and the fight over form and not substance is a wasteful one, so I'll grant yours is also a bona fide "religion" if that brings greater joy, but, really, the distance between you, and say the Satmar, is such a vast sea, it's odd to think you fall in the same category.
To psycholoanalyze (why not, right?), yours appears a struggle to preserve tradition without having to acknowledge faith and a demand that yours is as authentically religious as theirs.
Because science doesn't address the ought.
Yes, the how but not why.
Quoting Banno
The difference between the proto-Jews engaged in 400 BCE practice and the Satmars is vast - it seems strange to call them both a religion (or Jews). To my knowledge, however, one doesn't have to be a Satmar to be religious or a member of a religion. I'm not exactly sure what help the Satmar provide here except to say that the Satmar look sufficiently religious to you that anything that doesn't obviously strike you as Satmar like isn't religion. I guess if that is your starting point (contra actual use of the term "religion") I don't have much to say. Yes - virtually no one looks like the Satmar.
The argument isn't about whether my religion is as authentically religious as theirs (after all, I am not arguing for any notion of authenticity), but whether the concept of religion allows someone to assess whether a particular usage of the word is "wrong."
The particular argument of whether one sect of Judaism or another is the true expression of Judaism is entirely aside from why I mentioned what I did. I simply pointed to an actual practice of people engaged in what was pretty undeniably a religious act. To look at that occasion and say "that was not religion" seems (at least to me) to require an awful lot of intellectual gymnastics and outright bad faith. Whether the Satmars are actually Jews given their anti-zionist stance isn't the least bit instructive on whether something that for all intents and purposes looks like a religious ceremony ceases to be one merely because it is explicitly existential/absurdist.
The psychoanalysis is not really about why some people engaged in religious practice see themselves as being religious or their group a religion, but why it is so important to you that they either aren't a religion or, if they are, it is only begrudgingly the case. It is not so different than why it is important for scientists (and science generally) to be inside or outside of the "religion" bubble. What does the term "religion" do that makes definitive inclusion/exclusion so important to people?
Use of the term doesn't change what people are actually doing. It may influence what they do going forward, but "naming" doesn't do magic and suddenly render something with some characteristic that it didn't have before (or remove some characteristic that it did have). I know the law sort of perverts the notion of language as non-magical (things can be lawful or not with significant future consequence riding on that determination), but what social structures are implicated by deciding that something is religion?
While I get the sentiment of this comment, I imagine you know how off base it is. You can discuss any of those things as long as you don't attack the fundamental dignity/equality of actual people. There are members of the group that voted for Trump (both times) and support border walls. There are also anti-women/choice folk in the mix. Sure, we are communally more protective of certain groups and more explicitly inclusive of certain groups, but we are not just some Democratic support group by another name. Modern religion and the Democrats are not synonymous. It may be that Democrats have some of the same values as certain liberal religious communities, but that is no different than Democrats having some of the same values as certain conservative religious communities. As it turns out, the same people can be both members of a religion with particular values and members of a political party with particular values. Those communities can even be in conversation with one another by way of their mutual members.
Modern religion is both older than the current state of political affairs in the US and is more geographically diverse than citizens of the US. I'm not sure why being an American in conversation with an Australian invites reducing the conversation to just American concerns/ideologies/etc. Religions, being religious, etc. writ large do not require a particular political allegiance. Yes, some religions fit better with particular sorts of political ideas than others, but that coincidence does not indicate something essential about religion or politics collectively.
I agree with this, and I also don't mean anything pejorative to call a group non-religious. Framed this way, this conversation becomes a purely esoteric linguistic argument that invokes discussions about usage, context, essences, and prescriptive usages, but we would be limited within that esoteric context where none of this actually matters. In other words, this is pure philosophical navel gazing.
If someone commits to a prescriptive use of the term "religious" to require the existence of a deity and that negates your atheistic group from being a religion, but makes it more akin to a fraternal organization, I wouldn't consider that reclassification a relegation, but just placement into a separate category.
My misread (if there were one) occurred when you referenced those who might refuse to consider your group a religion as being petulant. That seemed to me to mean that how you were classified mattered on some social level. For example, if you wish to call my SUV a car and not a truck, I really don't care, unless you mean to say that car drivers are lesser than truck drivers.
Maybe I missed the point. To the question, is your group a religion? It's like anything else. It depends upon how you mean to use "religion." Sometimes it might be, sometimes not. As to @Banno's question whether science is a religion, same answer. Regardless of the answer, though, I don't think you can say anything more from that, as if to suggest the scientifically minded are at all like the religiously minded in other contexts simply because we found a way to sort them into the same bucket in a particularized instance.
I spent a few hours yesterday trying to determine whether a person were an "insured" under a particular insurance policy, which, of course provided its own set of definitions and exclusions. At the end of the analysis, I think reached a correct conclusion, but I wouldn't suggest that the person would have been an "insured" under a policy with differing language, and the question would have been even more uncertain had I been interpreting the term "insured" from common everyday usage and not from pre-defined terms. Whether the person would have been an "insured" in varying contexts means nothing though in terms of who that person is.
The point there was that there are usage conventions that can be gestured to even if not well defined. It would be like someone saying that a game of soccer is not a game of soccer because the ball was wrong (too big, too small, not quite round, not the right pressure, etc.), the field inappropriate (not on grass, wrong dimensions, etc.), players wrongly constituted (number, positions, etc.), and governed by incorrect rules (no offside, no strict boundaries, etc.). Like all of that can be true, and still a group of kids kicking a ball around and scoring by shooting through two garbage cans qualifies as soccer. The same is true if a kid is playing FIFA on her TV - not actually soccer as envisioned but never-the-less a game of soccer. At some point, if you are dealing in good faith in conversation you simply acknowledge the obvious - that people are using a word in a way not quite like you might have imagined, but sufficiently within the ballpark that its use is more informative than misleading.
Or perhaps differently, it is ultimately a language community's judgment that decides which usage endures and/or is acceptable regardless of a particular individual's willingness to accept it.
Interesting difference in our positions though. You say that you have no delusions that God communicated the Torah to Moses on Sinai. My position I think is even more skeptical; I don't know what such a thing would look like. If we were with Moses on Sinai and heard a booming voice coming down from the clouds would that be God? Maybe we're delusional? Or maybe it's not God? I don't know what it means to talk to God.
As for the texts could there a bias towards Judah and against the kingdom of Israel? Sure, but that's not particularly important to me. I guess I just don't understand why someone would go through such lengths to write historical fiction/lies about an event that actually happened and that they were presumably there for. Do you hold this level of skepticism for other historical accounts? When we find ancient greek texts about e.g. the construction of a public place like a library or a temple do you just assume it to be lies? I get that you can doubt the supernatural but a good portion of the bible is not supernatural, and often when they mention the supernatural it's about praying or seeking guidance, not direct divine intervention.
@Banno you could say that Hanover and I are playing the God language game now (Judeo-Christian edition.) I don't disagree with the conclusions you reached in the OP.
I haven't entertained the possibility sufficiently enough to ask myself what it would be like to talk directly to God. It would be like asking me to actually consider what it would be like if Winnie the Pooh were a non-fictional book and that would lead me to start contemplating what it would be like to interact with a sullen talking donkey.Quoting Moses
You're imposing a modern standard of historical reporting upon ancient civilizations. The idea of seeking objective truth cleansed of bias with all sources checked and verified is a modern scholarly ideal which suggests a virtue in recording truth for truth's sake. There is nothing particularly virtuous, however, about maintaining historical accuracy above all else, especially when the writer never pretended to be doing that and the reader never expected it. That is, none of these ancient writers were lying in that they intended to fool anyone and none of the readers were fooled because they knew the intent of the writers.
What I'm saying is largely accepted, which is that we can't trust the historical accuracy of ancient texts, but that has nothing to do with our ancestors being liars.
For more on this, see https://www.historynet.com/can-trust-ancient-texts/
It's not hard for me to imagine myself talking with e.g. a donkey or winnie the pooh. If you told me that you talked with God I would have questions. I don't know what talking with God would be like or how I would know it was him.
Quoting Hanover
This discussion is getting too broad and we would need to go book by book for me to add my input. I can't meaningfully comment. Many of the books are not meant to be historical accounts, some are poems and others advice. In my previous post I was only talking about Ezra-Nehemiah which is the most historical/non-divine of all the books.
Sure the writer might be biased and sure we can keep this in mind when reading it. When you're reading with the bigger picture in mind questions like whether a writer favored Judah over the northern kingdom can be considered, but this should hardly be the main focus unless we're simply reading for history. I mostly read for ideas, not for explicit details about things. In any case neither judah or the northern kingdom comes out unscathed; both places are very evil at some point. the book makes sure to let the reader know that the israelites are far from saints and that they're not inherently morally better than their neighbors (Aish HaTorah ought to take note.) a lot of the lessons are very sound and applicable.
Some of the battlefield casualty number seem absurdly high (120k in a day). One passage mentioned martial law, scorched earth tactics, psychological warfare...and this is around 730 BCE in a battle vs the Assyrians (2 Chronicles) that presumably also has Assyrian sources behind it. It's not that I uncritically accept everything but certain ideas can really resonate and astound me that ancient writers were able to capture.
Religion as self-aggrandizement?
I suppose if the story would be about, say, Vikings, people (with a Western background) would not bat an eyelid. Historical veracity is just not something one expects in the Viking stories. This is not to say that one expects lies from them. Rather, there is a specific culture of how we approach Viking stories: that the important points are the moral insights, or the tales of bravery, loyalty, and such.
In contrast, the biblical narrative has established itself in Western society as having the relevance of a life or death matter, a matter of eternal life and eternal suffering. Choose wrongly, understand the Bible wrongly, and you will burn in hell for all eternity. No such threat is made in Viking stories; or if it is, it's not popularily known. It is because of this threat that we are bound to read the Bible differently than Viking stories, or The Lord of the Rings. It's why we take the Bible seriously, or at least start from the position that it should be taken seriously.
Of course, the Jews are here in a special position, because they don't have a comparable notion of heaven and hell as other mainstream Abrahamists do.
yeah, there is very little eschatology in the old testament and I'm sorry if you were taught that everything is about getting into heaven/avoid hell. I'd be dismayed with religion if I were taught that way. The OT is a guide to life, not death.
Quoting baker
Yep, and we see this around the time of king david -- warriors with great but questionable feats. It's mainly about the values and morals displayed (there is some tremendous moral insight here, especially for antiquity - namely, kings are held to be very accountable for even small sins). However if you go further into the future and keep reading (david is around 1000 bc and the OT ends around 500 bc) the details become much more mundane and even quite tedious at times. The ot details actual historical events and often provides plausible accounts of them; nothing divine. Divine intervention is not pervasive. The Israelites often lose in these fights (and we want to see them lose because they have strayed.)
I'm not too familiar with viking stories so you might need to enlighten me a little there. The central message of the OT though is basically "be good, don't be bad." The extravagant descriptions of hell come later.