:up: I don't buy the idea that designators can ever function adequately without reliance on descriptions anyway.

The difficulty with science replacing religion is that it provides no basis for moral judgements, it is a quantitative discipline concerned chiefly with measurement and formulating mathemtically-sound hypotheses. — Wayfarer

I think the best basis for moral values is human harmony and flourishing. Science cannot tell us what to do, per se, but it may help to determine just what does and does not contribute to human flourishing, and it can also help dispel the superstitions which cause so much suffering, such as absurd religious reasons for not providing condoms to impoverished communities, or the genital mutilation of women.

Today, "unmarried man" may be defined as "a man who is not living in a relationship with another person". Therefore, a bachelor is a man not living in a relationship with another person. — RussellA

Yes, I understand that there are possible nuances, and that's why I brought it up; it shows that the statement "a bachelor is an unmarried man" is not analytic, because it is not definitively and unambiguously true.

So, you say a bachelor is a man not living in a relationship with another person. I take it you mean a sexual relationship, because surely a man could have housemates and still be counted a bachelor? But then what if the man has sex with his housemate? Does he then cease to be a bachelor? Or as I said before what if a man lives with his sexual partner three or four days a week?

Yes they can. As I described above here, "rituals" does not equal anything supernatural or spiritual. "Ritual" simply focuses on a repeating practice or act that ground the mind. It can be used as a purely health-based practice for better mental health in its basic function. — Christoffer

I agree that, for example, holy days can become everyday holidays. I was thinking of more elaborately symbolic ceremonies like the Catholic Eucharist becoming meaningless without their symbolic dimension.

Of course, people love festivals, because they love colour, dressing up, dancing and eating and so on. You don't really need any excuse to do those things. Here where I live such activities may be scheduled simply on, for example, the third Sunday of every month.

And this is what I mean, although, in too small communities, such inventions can have a tendency to incorporate newly invented spiritual ideas or become corrupt by a lack of scientific knowledge that is found on larger scale societies. — Christoffer

What is the problem with "newly invented spiritual ideas" and what has scientific knowledge got to do with celebrating, and how could the latter become corrupt through lack of the former? Your "vision" sounds somewhat like a scientistic prejudice.

I've attended Zen groups here in Australia where there was virtually none of that. You commit the fallacy of over-generalizing. And, I was not talking about the mindful ritualization of ordinary activities like eating, drinking and so on, which I don't count as "pomp and ceremony".

:up: Just to complicate matters, as I understand it brahman is thought as being both immanent and transcendent.

There is always some ritual or ceremony in all human dealings. I haven't denied there is much ritual and ceremony in some religions. All I said was I favour those with what I would count as no significant ritual or ceremony.

Does this count? — praxis

It certainly looks that way. What's your point

Some vague notion that religions all focus on the idea of oneness or transcendence is so slippery and inexact it would seem to be foundational quicksand. — Tom Storm

Can you point to any religion that does not have some notion of transcendence as central?

Communal prayer and meditation don't count as pomp and ceremony in my book. Of course, there will always be minimal observances. If you have an actual argument, please present it.

I will take the opportunity to argue again that the statement "bachelors are unmarried men " is analytic. — RussellA

Not to be pedantic, but does an unmarried man in a de facto relationship count as a bachelor, or must a bachelor live alone? Then what counts as living alone? What if his partner spends two days and nights a week in his dwelling? Three? Four?

Many don’t realize the nature of religion. — praxis

Right, and...?

Dharma and religion have overlaps but they’re not exactly the same. — Wayfarer

:up: I agree.

If removing any supernatural and spiritual elements then they are closer to what I described about the essential need for rituals, traditions, and awe in a non-religious way of life. — Christoffer

I'm not convinced the rituals and traditions can survive without the "supernatural and spiritual elements" that motivated them in the first place and without which they lose their meaning. I personally dislike ritual and tradition, and when attracted to religious ideas it has been to teachings like Daoism and Zen, which are mostly without pomp and ceremony.

That said, celebrations of, for example, the solstices and equinoxes, in the form of festivals with costumery, dance, music and food, is another matter. I live in a small hippie village, and such things are celebrated in entirely new, creative ways. The quality's not always great, but the vitality and enthusiasm is there, and no reliance on long-standing traditions.

Is there any compelling demonstration that people's lives are better with ritual and contemplation? How would we demonstrate this? — Tom Storm

I don't think we need to demonstrate the seemingly obvious point that, for those who desire ritual and contemplation, their lives will be better off if those are a part of their experience than if not.

Thus I am a religious person? — praxis

Like you I don't think we can see beyond what our experiences allows, and I also acknowledge altered states of consciousness. But I don't believe in a transcendent higher power, and don't see the possibility of ultimate salvation, although I do see the possibility of liberation from attachment to dualistic thinking. Am I a religious person? I don't think of myself as such, because I don't think any of this is ordained by a higher transcendent power, rather it's just in the nature of the human condition. Some even question whether Daoism or Buddhism qualify as religions.

No worries, mate. :smile:

I think fallacies are most useful in self-reflection. It's good to point them out in that spirit -- rather than in an attempt to prove something. — Moliere

:up: I agree.

I wonder too what counts as transcendence? Is intelligibility itself transcendent? Are the logical axioms? Maths? Morality? Do we go by Kant, Aristotle or Wittgenstein on this one? — Tom Storm

I'd say intelligibility, logic and maths and morality are, if not empirical, then transcendental, not transcendent unless you impute a higher realm where they find their genesis.

Obviously, people can believe in something transcendent without belonging to a religion, without knowing anything about any religion. I suppose you would call that a personal religion?

Religious thinking is always hierarchical thinking.

Which indicates that its essence is about order and control. — praxis

I would not say that the essence of religion is about establishing order and control, although of course religion has been used politically to try to maintain order and control. For example, the teachings of the Gospels were distorted by the Church in order to hold onto and extend its powers.

As I see it, the hierarchical nature of religion is more to do with the idea of powers and intelligences higher than the earthly. So, yes, there can be personal religion. where the faithful seek for higher wisdom through discipline and meditation or prayer, or other practices without attaching themselves to any particular organized religion.

Right, South Korea seems to be an example of a political leader being treated as a kind of god and savior. Also, the notion of dialectical inevitably in Marx, which he adopted (and inverted) from Hegel, being a kind of teleological notion, seems to smack of transcendence, but both Marx and Hegel would have declared the teleological principle to be immanent, rather than transcendent, that is not prior to the dialectic but inherent within it. But then it is still a move beyond the merely empirical, so it's not a black and white issue.

Just to complicate matters further, this reminds me of Deleuze, too, with his idea of a plane of immanence; he styled himself as a transcendental empiricist, and was a great admirer of Spinoza, referring to the latter as "the prince of philosophers". Spinoza notably rejected the idea of a transcendent deity, and Deleuze followed Duns Scotus (as did Heidegger) who argued against Aquinas in declaring the univocity of being, and thus rejecting the idea of a heirarchy of being and the ideas of "ontotheology" (Heidegger's term) and transcendence.

Interesting. I think I agree. Can you say some more? — Tom Storm

I say that religion consists in believing in some kind of transcendent reality, because I can't see how a religion could exist which accepted only the empirical. Accepting only the empirical could perhaps be thought of as ideology, but not religion, insofar as religion always seems to incorporate a hierarchy of authority and a soteriology of some kind.

I think it is in essence the strawman fallacy. — Pantagruel

Interesting point, the Motte and Bailey fallacy could be seen as a kind of reversal insofar as it seems to consist in defending rather than attacking a strawman.

I've seen the accusation that a Motte and Bailey fallacy is being committed used on these forums to strawman the opponent's argument, which kind of complicates things; it's never cut and dried, so we might say claiming a Motte and Bailey fallacy is sometimes itself a Cut and Dried Fallacy or a Strawman Fallacy or a Shifting the Goalposts Fallacy

Then you have the ultimate: the Fallacy Fallacy. Claiming the opponent is committing a fallacy often seems to consist in avoiding the heavy lifting involved in actually mounting a cogent argument or counterargument.

You need to explain why religion is needed to believe in something transcendent. — praxis

The belief in something transcendent is the essence of religion as I would define it. (Note, I draw a distinction between thinking the transcendental and believing in some form of transcendence). Religious thinking is always hierarchical thinking.

I think the need to believe in something transcendant can only be satisfied by religion, and I think that need is inexplicably there in some people and absent in others. I think if you could somehow wipe out all existing religions and knowledge of them, religion would be reinvented.

That’s like saying that if the need for a drug is felt humanity will not be better off without it. If the drug was never know it would not be missed.

If you mean something else I think you may need to elaborate on the nature of the need that you mention, and why only a religion can fulfill it. — praxis

I think the drug analogy is weak. Religion is not an addiction, but a way of life, the need for religion is not like the need for a drug, and a religious life is not intrinsically unhealthy or inherently unhappier than a secular life; in fact, some studies have shown the opposite. Some people are simply attracted to that way of life, and others not. And the numbers of those who are is significant, so it's not a peripheral social phenomenon. Religion is also socially engaging, not isolating like the use of hard drugs of addiction.

I’m curious about your reasoning that humanity wouldn’t be better off without religion. Can you explain why? — praxis

As long as the need for religion is felt, humanity will not be better off without it. I doubt that need is going to disappear.

:up: Yep, I don't believe religion is going away any time soon. And I also don't hold the view that humanity would be better off without it.

:up:

Control is the basic point of any ideology including religious ideology; and that's why I questioned whether you hold an ideological view that recommends actively discouraging and/ or working against religion, or whether you are just hoping it will die out. If the former I would think that misguided, and if the latter, then I think you will be disappointed.

If we have trouble with a particle, we have some issues in understanding matter as revealed by physics. — Manuel

Yes, and we have even less intuitive sense of what a field is.

Still a whole lot to learn about experience by way of science, but, again, compared to physics, I think it's substantially less problematic, by quite a margin, I'd wager. — Manuel

I agree, with the caveat that what can be known phenomenologically is not coterminous with what can be known scientifically.

I tend to think the idea of the insentient nature of matter goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Judaism and Christianity, but it's a nuanced issue to be sure, and I'm no expert.

The example of blindsight demonstrates one aspect of this; that, although the person functions as a sighted person, without the qualia of sight, it doesn’t feel to them that those sighted functions belong to them. It was instead just some qualia-less physical processing that the person was unaware of, like their liver function.

If the same applied to all qualia, then there would be no sense of personhood. — Luke

:up: Thanks for linking this.

I think this is right; we have a commonsense picture of matter, and a scientific notion of its equivalence with energy, and related formulations of information in terms of entropy, which is itself understood in terms of dissipation of energy, so I think the latter scientific ideas are, if anything, more conducive to seeing consciousness as being compatible with matter than the bare commonsense view.

So in philosophical mode my question in place of Humphrey's would be something like, "what is it about a scientific view that makes phenomenal experience look so puzzling?" — Jamal

Is it a scientific view that makes it look puzzling, or just the commonsense view of matter as being "inanimate", not to mention insentient and insapient?

Well, you could make it illegal I suppose, or brainwash people against religion from childhood. Might not be totally effective, but would no doubt vastly reduce the ranks of the faithful.

I wasn't talking about killing people.

:up:

Eternalism is the belief that through the appropriate rituals and practices, one can return forever in favourable states of birth (including heaven) rather than seeking emancipation from the whole cycle of re-birth. — Wayfarer

That may be one interpretation: the one I am familiar with is that eternalism posits an immortal self, with nihilism being the idea that there is no self, immortal or otherwise.

Regardless of terminological issues, if there is no self which survives the death of the body, then impermanence is the reality for us..

I say let religion die. — praxis

What if it won't die? Kill it?

Whereas the identification with 'what decays and passes away' (in their terms) binds to the 'wheel of saṃsāra' (detachment from same being the aim of 'daily spiritual practice').

As I understand it, Gautama eschewed identification with what is permanent as much as identification with what passes away. In other words,, he rejected both the views of "nihilism" and "eternalism" as constituting obstructions on the path to liberation.

Right, I first used the word 'blindness' but it was in response to what seemed to be implied in what you refer to above as "popular rejection", as though it was a mere following of fashion coupled with a fixation on "things of this world" at the expense of the "higher other".

It seems plausible to think that acceptance of another world above this one was mainly on account of it being the authoritative dogma, as well as being motivated by fear of death and wishful thinking that there might be a world more perfect than this one.

I agree that there could have been (probably mostly covert) willful rejection of Christian dogma, but I would not call that "blindness" because in my view some people, even uneducated people, are capable of great practical wisdom, sense of justice and general good will. and if they have acquired the habit of thinking for themselves, will reject any views which seem to contradict what they understand as good sense, rejection based simply on discordance with life experience.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the possibility or non-possibility of there being a higher intelligence". I suppose you are referring to a personal god, a god who is cognizant of and caring about human life, and has a "plan" in mind for us? Or do you mean that some poelpe are of greater intelligence than others?

If you mean the former, then I would question whether we have any generally convincing rational reason to believe such a thing. If you mean the latter, I'd say that's certainly true, but that those of lesser intelligence have no reason to follow those of greater intelligence other than blind admiration or else actually being able to understand and be convinced by whatever views the person of greater intelligence recommends.
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Science cannot solve all the problems inherent in the human condition. Organized religion is an attempt to pacify, if not solve, those kinds of problems that science cannot help with. It very well may help many people to live happier lives than they otherwise would, but it will always remain a 'bandaid' solution if it is not attended by spiritual, that is ethical, practice. Religion will be around as long as there are people afraid or incapable of thinking for themselves and developing their own ethical ideas and practices.