I think religion (broadly defined) fills a number of roles. It sort of ties together the loose ends of our life’s experience; It gives us some sort of comfort or consolation in the face of life’s difficulties; and it provides a frame work of how should act (if only because of the first role I mentioned).
The ideal religion should be the best at fullfilling all three. I think the first is most important, then the second, then the third. I say this because I find that the first and second clearly combine in the third, and that a proper theory of the universe makes sense of life. A life that makes sense is comforting, thereby fullfilling the second role by adequately fullfilling the first. Thus the given hierarchy.
Well, philosophy (“waxing philosophic”) answers those needs too. For example the work The Consolation of Philosophy was written by an important Catholic (early Christian) theologian, but was written on philosophic principles, not religious.
Instead, on this board (not on this topic), I have been calling religion a response to the experience of God – which fits with the modern theological works I was acquainted with in college. (See The Idea of the Holy.) But it’s a defintion that also fits ancient religion as well.
The strange thing I just realised is that this does not mean that religion is necessarily consoling (unless your concept of God is).
What is the experience of god? Doesn’t that assume a religion of a sort? To posit a god is to explain a vague sort experience in the skeletal framework of a theistic religion. If that is not taken for granted, the nature of the experience can be further examined and differently explained.
Is the only way to respond to such an experience to call it “and experience of god”, and thus build a theistic religion?
While I am sympathetic towards most of the definitions posted here, oughn’t religion simply be defined normatively?
When we start splitting hairs with definitions, then we start to exclude various practices that are considered to be religions. The Greeks certainly didn’t devote much thought to the issue of souls – they simply called it some life-force that is associated with breath. The Chinese did pretty much the same. And neither group really had much of an afterlife to speak of. I mean Roman graves (following the greek tradition) were placed near roads so the dead don’t get bored! Hardly an idea of an ‘afterlife’.
Definitions should only be put in place if they are useful, correct? I mean, we aren’t actually making anything by defining something, but rather we are merely classifying it. If the classification is fairly self-evident at a normative level, I see no reason to engage in hair-splitting. The line between religion and philosophy is already quite blurred. Let that blur exist, it is OK.
But there are many useful definitions of religion. It is useful to refer to the superstitious occult religions, to say that religion is infantile. It’s useful to refer to theistic religions, to say that religion makes unfounded leaps of belief. It’s useful to refer to dogmatic religions to say that religion is not a considered point of view. And for my purposes, it’s useful to refer to the personal life philosophy religions, to figure out how one should come to ones religious conclusions.
As with most things, these are often describes by the shorthand “religion”. It’s evident that sometimes that can cause trouble because of the default definitons people use, but that doesn’t mean that all the definitions shouldn’t be used. Maybe we need a bunch of new words to capture them all.
Carleas, what do you mean by a “theistic religion”? A religion that is understood philosophically? I don’t know if it’s necessary, but as a religious humanist I see it as being desirable.
The experience of God and religion are intertwined like rational experience and learning are linked – one is the matter of the other. At least that’s how I interpret the pov I mentioned.
I see what you mean about differently explaining religious experience. Many athiests explain it away.
Ever wonder at the greatness, beauty, or the order of the universe? (Well, I guess some people on here don’t.) Has anything ever just gone right with your life after you do something good? The wonder puts you in contact with something greater.
Perhaps the personal life philosophy religions you advocate are inspired with the latter example? But the ones I see that are popular say little different than what has been affirmed, less egoistically imo, by traditional religion. But then, I suspect those are the sources from which the new doctrines have been distilled.
Nuke my opinions if you like.
By “theistic religion”, I mean a religion that takes belief in a god as one of its tenets, which not all religions do. If there is not the prior assumption of a god, an experience being called “an experience of god” is incoherent.
I think that the experience of wonder and beauty, the fact of good (though equally so the fact of evil, and the experience of fear and disgust) warrant explanation, and that is what I see as the purpose (even the cause) of religious beliefs. So in that sense, I agree with you.
But I don’t call the religious belief that it inspires in me ‘god’, because I feel ‘god’ has a lot of connotations that I would like to avoid (personal, emotional, observing, prayer answering, etc.). I don’t know that that is what you mean when you refer to god, but even if not I find the label of god counter-productive, as people get bogged down in it’s other meanings.
But we find a similar thing in language: the word “dog” without the experience of dog is also incoherent. Yet, we have the word “dog”. At some point there was an experience of God, with or without language. Puzzle that out. Was there an Adam who started out with both, or did man come upon his religious words through other words?
What is wrong with personal, emotional, observing, prayer answering Deity? What do you mean by “other meanings” of “god”? I don’t understand your position.
But our concept of ‘dog’ is much clearer than our concept of ‘god’. And besides, ‘dog’ and 'god are very different concepts. A dog is just another animal, but a god fills as somewhat unique role in our thought
: we are familiar with things that are powerful (physically, mentally, etc.), and we wonder what the most powerful thing is; we are familiar with creation (birth, construction, etc.), and we can ask what the first creator was. These types of exercises do not require experience of god to create a fuzzy concept of god (and they do not have a parallel for concepts like dog).
We can use the name “God” to refer to whatever we believe to be the origin. But I don’t see any reason to believe that that origin is in anyway personal, and though I could be pantheistic, and call the whole universe “God”, I find that it imbues the thing I seek to label with qualities I don’t have reason to believe it has.
It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with qualities such as ‘personal’, ‘emotional’, ‘observing’, or ‘prayer answering’, but I have found no reason for them, and find them to come more from desire than reason (the universe would seem a friendlier place if you thought that it had a plan that was ultimately good).
Actually, according to scholastic philosophy, you do need the light of God even to think. Everything you think is God. So you do need God to know these requisites for thinking about God.
What you say about seeking knowledge of the greatest thing sounds almost like Aquinas’ fourth argument for God’s existence:
As for not seeing the need for a prayer-answering God, there might be reasons to believe in such things. Just now I wonder if God creates emotions and thoughts about himself in man, whether He must not also be the origin and end of these human characteristics as well.
a religon that accepts all and considers very few actions evil is a good religon. However, were creating the religon… The creators creatures are creating religon of there own! That in itself is a paradox!
This reminds me of what the philosopher Aristotle said about the opinions of the many:
In general their opinions come somewhere near the truth, but few actually hit it dead on.
I see this applying to both points you mention.
Most actions can serve a good end – but they don’t always.
And from where do we get good inspirations about God, but from God?
(Unless you mean Joseph Smith and his LDS church. That IS a paradox!)
(Welcome to the boards, godfather89.)
Isn’t that circular? It seems like scholastics who could not conceive of how thought could happen without god used god to explain thought. God, once postulated, has been used to explain many things that were at the time unexplainable.
But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Why postulate god? Why not postulate that humans are ignorant, and that we will learn (haven’t we?)? What makes god better than alternative explanations, or better than no explanation at all?
This is essentially what we have done. Early religions used the ‘gods’ to explain things that their limited technology could not. The changing of the seasons. The harvest. Life, death - concepts to a pre-scientific society that could only be explained by the favor and/or disfavor of the ‘gods’.
I don’t think the wording of the definition of religion is important, when you say ‘religion’ I think everyone knows what you mean - however it is just like saying “home” - a word that to each person has their own idea of what their personal home is like, but we can all agree that the defining characteristics of the word is equivalent.
Looking at our own history, however, to the ‘ancient’ peoples as it were, how often was ‘god’ or the ‘will of god’ ( or gods ) used as an explanation? Ancient Greeks & Romans had entire myths and stories that explained every aspect of life - and the gods were all prominent players in them. We’ve grown a lot as a people since that time, yet you still hear people using “god’s plan” or “god’s will” as a reason to explain things happening.
And maybe it is god’s plan, but if I give the benefit of the doubt to one of these claims, then I need to accept that we have summer and winter because Persephone is trapped in Hades. Except that we know that we have seasons because of the earth’s movement around the sun. We have “learned” as Carleas says, over time and our own development, the true reasons for things previously attributed to divinity. As time progresses I can only assume that we will discover even more about ourselves and our world that will clarify other claims even further.
Carleas, Anzha,
It my understanding of the history of religion that when mankind was ready for it, philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, and later the scholastics) started working with ideas reasonably, and with that mankind’s ideas about God.
I have seen in this site’s discussions how philosophies tend to filter down to two alternatives: a spiritual universe or a nihilistic universe – and that is what makes the spiritual explanations better ones.
mrn