The foundation of humanity's ideas:

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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At the causation thread we talked about “cause” a little bit.
The idea of “cause” as something real, the idea of objects as real things, these are fundamental human belief systems.

Example : In the passed humanity did not know what caused life; they did not know about cells and DNA. When they say what makes something grow, they talked about causes of growth ignorantly, with incomplete outer-perspective ideas. Later they learned some of what the whole process requires and contains, but they’re generally still ignorant about it, not knowing what’s really going on, and only blame the most obvious effectual cog of the whole process. Neither a tree causes the seed, nor does a seed cause the tree.

Also, an “object” is only a temporal glymps of a whole and ever-changing process, like a photograph does not show the whole reality just one moment. “Static” objects are actually all moving, and also because they are not an independant cause and were not independandly caused, they do not have an actual “self” or an “individuality” and are thus not “a” thing, but instead more realistically a part of a whole process which exists on many levels.

If a truth is incomplete it is like a half-truth and is not really true, just like a person cannot walk with only one leg.
Since all human knowledge and general thought is so based upon examples of incomplete ideas such as cause and objects, the foundation of humanity’s ideas is incomplete and so what is built on those foundations is often also incomplete, full of misinformed and half-formed opinions. It requires faith to believe and act at all, and knowledge is thus a religious venture, part of the metaphysics of the greeks.

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I would have to agree with most everything you said there, but, could you clear this up for me:

Did you mean to say incomplete, or are you saying that essentially all knowledge may as well already be considered complete in the sense that it will never be fully realized?

I’m confused. #-o

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I meant to say incomplete there, both times. But I did not type it strait, and ](*,) I’m ni a drunk-tard.
(Staggers around and smacks into a wall)

Edited O.P.

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Religion does not depend on knowledge? I would say that religion revolves around knowledge, however, it is an encapsulated often esoteric type of knowledge. What I mean is that a Christian is revered for his/her thorough knowledge of Biblical texts. The same holds for a Muslims knowledge of the Koran - and let’s not forget the Upanishads that Schopenhauer was so fond of.

Generally, a religion will develop a knowledge base that is held in great esteem and often not questioned, but may change slightly or incorporate variations over time. To the adherents of the religion, their knowledge is truth and very necessary. It may not be objective knowledge, but it can usually be argued that NO knowledge is objective and is subject to the interpretations of the knowledge aqusitionists (how’s that for a word?) that are communicating that knowledge. Add to this the fact that we can constantly debate definitions and terminology infinitely and it’s surprising that we can ever agree on anything.

Every religion I have ever known, though, lives and dies on it’s perception of knowledge, so it is more than necessary.

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Ok, thanks for clarifying. Not to press the issue, but, Chemistry is a form of knowledge and it can be completely negated without harming religion. Jesus turned water into wine - whoever wrote that could care less about chemical properties. I’m sure that many other forms of knowledge can be negated too without much harmful affects to religious believers. However, you can’t negate all knowledge - that’s just silly. Thought itself would be meaningless at that point.

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Metaphysics is about right and wrong, real and unreal.
That’s what religion is and was like, too.
Moral truths and universal physical truths were not in separate fields, in most cult-ures, because each is about a physical/reality process, real events and real situations.

The Big Bang is just as much a supernatural miracle, if not far more fantastic, than the idea of water being turned into wine. Also the Big Bang has never been observed or proven. It’s an example of “scientific” things not being literal experience, and literal experience is not necissarily “true” either, ever.