I wasn’t just talking about religion; — Tom Storm

Notice I begun that part of my comment with "For example" and concluded it with, "And similarly with so many other things."

I know so many people who drifted from socialism to Buddhism, to Hinduism, to cultural Christianity, to New Age, to hitchhiking, to fruit picking, to unemployment, to drug use, to university, to sexuality, to military service, to music, etc, etc, and none of these things provided any real satisfaction. They were always looking to see what else they could explore what other beliefs were open to them. In the modern world (here at least), in the absence of certainty and clear pathways of tradition everything is "open". Even for those less wealthy, the cities are full of poor country folk who left their towns to experiment with different lifestyles and options.

The theme was whether the apparent multitude of options are in fact realistic options.
You can buy yourself a nice pair of shoes, but which don't fit you, they are too small. You can have them in your hallway along with all your other shoes, and have them for ten, twenty, fifty years, but they still don't fit. In other words, physical proximity does not automatically make for a realistic option. In the same way, people can approach religions or careers or marriages etc., stick around for decades, be miserable, but still fail to realize that they weren't ever a realistic option for them. I'm again referring to William James' heuristic for deciding what makes for a realistic option as he presents it in his essay "The Will to Believe", already mentioned here.

The case can be made that it is precisely this failure to realize what is a realistic option for a person or not is the "predicament of modernity".

I asked this because I face this question daily, even in my everyday life. The point is that any assessment of a system you find yourself in from the inside is very difficult. I even have a rule – not to provide legal services to my relatives (even though I'm a lawyer myself). Why? Because it's incredibly difficult to distance yourself from your own reflections on a legal issue when it affects your own life. With ordinary clients, it's easier – you can simply be honest, presenting the picture as objectively as possible, and then leave the solution to them. I think I'm not alone in facing this problem. — Astorre

This depends on the local laws; some legal systems have laws or regulations for state officials and lawyers to exempt themselves from a particular case.

Returning to the topic of the thread. For example, when we find ourselves in state X, is it possible to challenge its dominant approach to understanding reality, while essentially being an element of that state X? As you indicated above, it's possible (using the method of comparison with other states or history), but is it possible to purely compare, and are you capable of immersing yourself in a different paradigm just as purely?

The question is whether one should do that in the first place. How much (philosophical) sophistication is really necessary?

I think the pushback is the natural reaction to test someone's claims to authority. Especially religious people seem to think that they can go forth into the world, make claims to authority, and the world then owes them submissiveness.
— baker

That is how quite a few here will inevitably categorise any discussion of what they consider religion. As I said upthread, I think much of this stems from the oppressive, indeed authoritarian, role of ecclesiastical religion in historical Western culture. After all, religious authoritarianism is what Enlightenment humanism so painfully liberated itself from.

But on the other hand, that requires an implicit acceptance of that this is all that religion or spirituality can mean or amount to. — Wayfarer

No, it doesn't necessarily operate out of such acceptance.

I'm talking about this: If someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return?

Can you answer that?

Why is it that when religious/spiritual people make claims, especially when they claim to be the authorities for making claims about our inner lives, why must we bow our heads and be at least silent?

Why is this not a conversation, but an ex cathedra lecture??

Consider this passage from Edward Conze, a Buddhologist who was active in the mid 20th c in his essay on Buddhist Philosophy and it’s European Parallels.

Until about 1450, as branches of the… "perennial philosophy,” Indian and European philosophers disagreed less among themselves, than with many of the later developments of European philosophy. The "perennial philosophy" is in this context defined as a doctrine which holds [1] that as far as worthwhile 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; 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 sages 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 insight into the nature of the Real --through the Prajñāpāramitā of the Buddhists, the logos of Parmenides, the Sophia of Aristotle 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.

Ah yes.
If only religion/spirituality wouldn't be so much about coming up with excuses for why its exponents don't live up to the standards they themselves preach and claim to have attained ...
For example, just look at how the local authorities and the Buddhist community interpreted the recent sex + extortion scandal in the Buddhist monastic sangha.

Of course, this is highly politically incorrect and I wouldn’t expect many here would accept it - but I still believe that there are such degrees of insight and understanding, and that not everyone has them by default, as it were.

Sure, I'm not disagreeing. But I question the value and relevance of such "insight and understanding". In short, what if someone's "profound spiritual insight and understanding" is actually simply what it's like when one lives a comfortable life where one doesn't have to work for a living, as is the case with many religious/spiritual people? If a person gets to spend all their waking hours thinking about things and writing them down, yes, they better come up with something "profound".

Of course it is also true that spiritual hierarchies have often been the source of egregious abuses of power, but they’re not only that, even if that is the only thing that some will see when they look at them.

Then tell me: On the grounds of what should one still have faith and still trust them, against facts?
I've been around religion/spirituality for over twenty five years now. I just got tired of inventing excuses and going along with the pretenses as to why the teachers and the "spiritually advanced" don't and don't have to live up the standards that they preach.

But I think there are disciplined structures, methods, and practices in these traditions that do traverse and replicate recognised states and stages in a way that popular devotional religions do not. Agree that these practices are not scientific in the third-person sense but I don’t know whether that makes them automatically and only doxastic (matters of belief).

They are matters of education. Practicing a religion/spirituality works in the exact same way as going to school or taking up some other course of education or training. It's supposed to transform the student, and in a standardized, predictable way.

You may not seek to impose a white nationalist Christian theocracy on the world, but many who benefit from undermining liberalism and secular culture certainly do. — Tom Storm

Right, but I think there is a quite robust argument to be made that it is secularism and liberalism that has spawned fundamentalism, elevated fideism, etc. The two are not unrelated. It's not unlike how the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and the Gilded Age spawned socialism. Even if one sees socialism as largely or wholly negative (and many do not), it would still be the case that it is precisely deficiencies in the existing system that strengthened it. Addressing these deficiencies (e.g., the erection of the welfare state, etc.) ultimately went a long way to addressing the excesses of the socialist movement, where reforms were made. Invoking the specter of Christian nationalism here might thus be likened to invoking the threat of Stalinism to oppose the New Deal in that, arguably, the New Deal actually made a sort of American Stalinism less, not more likely precisely because it addressed the issues that motivated Stalinism.

Then tell me: On the grounds of what should one still have faith and still trust them, against facts? — baker

Well, consider you examples. Similar examples could be drawn up to undermine faith in the scientific establishment, modern medicine, the liberal state, Marxism, or Enlightenment rationalism itself. For instance, there is no shortage of examples of doctors treating patients for illnesses they know they do not have and killing them in the process, or knowingly prescribing them addictive drugs in order to make more money.

Yet none of these traditions claim they are immune to corruption, so these examples don't result in a contradiction of sorts. Hence, it seems to me that the more powerful claim would not be that some cases of corruption exist, but that no cases of spiritual progress exist or that such "progress" is actually itself undesirable (the latter being the more common modern argument, in part probably because the former seems difficult to prove). That is, not "there are people who pretend to be saints," but rather "there are no saints."

Or else it needs to be explained why corruption is a specifically unique problem only for specific sorts of religious/philosophical/spiritual traditions, but presumably not all (since all such traditions have examples of corruption). For instance, is Russellian style atheism and the appeal to "man against the darkness," i.e., being good in a meaningless universe obviated by Russell's sorted personal life (or those of other advocates)? This is precisely the sort of argument religious folks raise—"the degeneracy of key athiests displays the inherent folly of their claims to a morality without God," and yet I think this alone is a facile argument because it can be applied against any ideology or ethos, from Marxism to Buddhism to modern medicine.

One might say for instance that, because the Providential nature of the Church it should be immune to corruption. However, Christianity itself has not tended to claim this, in part because Christ and the Apostles repeatedly warn of false teachers and simony across the New Testament and similar sentiments can be found in the Hebrew scriptures.

Likewise, with a faculty of intellectus or noesis (or similar notions in the East), the mere presence of error cannot be decisive, or else it should be equally decisive in proving that we should have no faith in discursive ratio and argumentation. For instance, Plato's warning against misology in the Phaedo is focused on the repudiation of more discursive and formal argumentation, which can prove misleading at times, and yet ought not be disparaged simply because such bad exemplars exist. So too, if such claims are caricatured as a sort of magical, exceptional knowledge, we are essentially already accepting the Enlightenment framing since this is often not how philosophies that embrace them tend to explain them (e.g., as Robert Wallace points out, the sort of "mystical knowledge" Plato often invokes is generally accessible to all or almost all to some degree).

Isn't it the case though, that almost everyone already agrees about what is morally right when it comes to the really significant moral issues such as murder, rape, theft, exploitation, torture and so on? — Janus

Not generally and not universally, though.
That is, people tend to be tribalistic in such matters: "It is wrong to rape _my_ daughter, but why should I care about what happens to your daughter?!"
People tend to condemn an act as wrong when it happens to them or someone of the same category as they are, but are far more relaxed when the same act happens to someone whom they consider to be outside of their category.

For Ayn Rand, for example, and don't underestimate her influence, lower class people should just endure oppression and exploitation by the upper class. Something she would never approve of for the upper class.

Or look at the concept of tragedy: historically, in ancient Greece, tragedy was reserved for the royal family. Whatever happened to commoners could not qualify for "tragedy", even if it was nominally the same action.

As to how many people change their minds, have you ever heard an argument to support the position that murder, rape, theft, exploitation or torture are morally permissible?

It goes along the lines of, "It's morally permissible when they deserve it". And they "deserve it" when they are the wrong skin color, the wrong socioeconomic status, the wrong age, the wrong whatever.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence. — Janus

No. I think the "problem" with religion is that it requires a level of street smarts that few people naturally have.
In order to successfully navigate religion, one has to have a refined sense of what to take seriously and what not, how to read between the lines, how to have a private life that is completely detached from one's religious life.

As it happens, I was in a bookshop in October looking at DB Hart’s translation of the New Testament when a couple of fellow browsers asked me about the text. They were young Christians and we got talking. And guess what? In their view, liberalism had failed, Nietzsche was right about the death of God, secular culture had collapsed, and people were flailing in contemporary culture because their lives lacked a spiritual dimension. The solution: Christianity and Trumpism. — Tom Storm

Trumpism is already happening anyway. Look at a forum like this: even his fierce critics are using the same methods he does.

Maybe. The quesion I keep asking is if there's a big hole in modernity, just who chooses what we fill it with? — Tom Storm

Again, Trumpism. Who chooses it? The hunger for power, for stability, for domination.

The problem is that religion asks people to believe things for which there is no evidence.
— Janus

So says A J Ayer. There is abundant evidence for the efficacy of religious beliefs and practices in the lives of the religiius. — Wayfarer

Of course there is abundant evidence of such efficacy. But what exactly is it that is efficacious, is another matter.

On the other hand, there are also many studies and reports of people saying how religion makes them miserable.

Moreover, it is questionable whether the positive effects of religion and spirituality can be replicated by people who first turn to religion as (young) adults, as opposed to people who were born and raised into religion.

David Bentley Hart says, in Atheist Delusions, that after the Roman Empire’s pagan social order collapsed, Christianity stepped in and changed things in ways that many moderns take for granted—human dignity, equality (in some form), charity, care for the vulnerable, the idea that the strong have moral obligations toward the weak, the notion that human beings are more than cogs in an imperial machine.

You have got to be kidding. Or your baseline for human interaction is very, very low.

Furthermore in religious epistemology, knowing is not merely an act of detached cognition based on third-party observervation, so much as participation in a transformative way of being. Truth is verified not only by correspondence between propositions and facts, but by a reorientation to the nature of existence towards that which is truly so in the holistic sense — the change in being that follows from insight. As Gregory of Nyssa or the Upaniṣads would say,
to know the divine is to become like it.

And so what?
So you know the divine. Then what? Are you beyond paying taxes? Beyond traffic laws?

Then tell me: On the grounds of what should one still have faith and still trust them, against facts?
— baker

Well, consider you examples. Similar examples could be drawn up to undermine faith in the scientific establishment, modern medicine, the liberal state, Marxism, or Enlightenment rationalism itself. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Those are irrelevant in comparison to the scope of religion. Whether one is wrong or right about science, medicine, the liberal state, etc. has no bearing on one's eternal fate. But with religion, everything and eternity is at stake. Which is why the secular and the religious are not comparable.

Yet none of these traditions claim they are immune to corruption

When it comes to religion/spirituality, the possibility of "corruption" is either off the table, or it has got to be deliberate.
Genuine mistakes are not possible when it comes to religion/spirituality.

You can't go around killing people in the name of God, and then say, "Oops, looks like I was wrong after all."

You cannot seriously expect people to believe that a religion can preach, say, abstinence from alcohol (to give a less loaded example), and then their exponents get drunk -- and to then write this off as a genuine mistake. Doing so demotes religion to yet another expendable ideology, as opposed to being the source of (one's connection to) eternal life and happiness.

I am not sure I understand. What exactly is it about appeals to eternity that make them different in kind so that false/wicked/corrupt exemplars should be fatal to a tradition's claims?

Second, religions make many claims that aren't related to eternity, would these be invalidated to? Or perhaps more to the point, your critique seemed to target all co-natural, contemplative knowledge, and yet many philosophical traditions that appeal to this sort of knowledge do not make the sorts of eschatological and soteriological claims common to Islam or Christianity. So, are they to be dismissed due to false exemplars as well? For instance, would this be fatal to any sort of strong virtue epistemology? Or would it apply to all traditions that put a heavy emphasis on praxis and contemplative knowledge (and so Platonism, the Peripatetics, Stoicism, etc.)?

I guess I just don't see the connection. And if one takes this seriously doesn't it essentially raise up "anti-metaphysical" Enlightenment thought by default since it becomes immune to false exemplars (which abound in every tradition), but does not make "eternal claims?" (Plato for instance makes many claims about eternity and the nature of the soul's relationship to it).

In a sense, Christianity enabled the enlightenment, by engendering a moral stability. — Punshhh

My point is that Christianity provided the moral framework which enabled the development of Western civilisation. Wayfarer put it better than I could. Can anyone suggest an alternative that would have achieved that, I wonder. — Punshhh

-----
As a precursor, I hold great admiration for Jesus Christ, but deem Christianity per se to be the most violently hypocritical religion that has so far existed. A long story, but as just one example: A good deal of Christians who hold Christ’s spirit within—thereby revering and honoring Christ’s being (rather than the institutions that followed and their traditions)—are currently imprisoned, this for their opposition in peaceful protests against things such as nuclear proliferation. Maybe needless to add, this imprisonment takes place within a culture that is largely of a Christian-institution ethos. (How many Christians go about "turning their other cheek"? Etc.)
-----

Was not the Age of Enlightenment directly enabled by the Renaissance, and was not the Renaissance directly resultant of knowledge regarding ancient pagan cultures (arts, philosophies, sciences), which were preserved in the East (namely, in Byzantium and in the Islamic civilization), immigrating its way into Western Europe, this, primarily, following the fall of Constantinople—this via learned Easterners that then desired a better life? (The Crusaders, dating centuries prior, brought back some knowledge from the East, but, last I checked, by no means knowledge of ancient pagan cultures.)

This narrative, which to me so far chimes true to historical reality, would then stipulate that the Enlightenment was indirectly enabled not via the prevalence of Christian institutions but via the rediscovery of ancient pagan art, literature, myriad philosophies, sciences, societal structures (such as that of Athenian democracy), and the like.

As to what would have been of Europe in absence of institutional Christianity, here's one possible alternative: If Cleopatra would have succeeded in converging the Egyptian empire with that of Rome’s … one might have had Renaissance-like thought, art, politics, etc. throughout Europe’s history sans the so-called Dark Ages (which roughly lasted about a millennium or so, a considerable time span).

In sum: For reasons just given, I don’t find any grounds to uphold the validity of the narrative which maintains that the institution of Christianity has been any form of salvation for the West—be this intellectually or ethically. And, to come full circle, I say this while holding a great deal of veneration for Jesus Christ per se (but not for the institutional, trinity-pivoted Christianity which was birthed during the first Council of Nicaea circa 325 CE due to political strife, this for reasons partially aforementioned).

I like many of your perspectives. Still, I want to give emphasis to the following: The resolution to the “meaning crisis” cannot be authoritarian religion (such as institutional Christianity has historically been) if one does not desire a contemporaneous, and likely far more global, “Dark Ages” to ensue. And, in my take so far, viewing Christianity as having in any way been the West’s salvation can only speak in favor of authoritarian religion—whether it’s a readopting of an old one (e.g., Christianity) or else the adopting of a newly created one.

If I was overly harsh in all this, my bad. But I do find all this relevant to the thread’s topic.

BTW, as I've previously mentioned in this thread, as far as resolutions go, my own take is that the resolution should take the form of readily questionable philosophy, and not unquestionable religion.

I am not sure I understand. What exactly is it about appeals to eternity that make them different in kind — Count Timothy von Icarus

The scope, what is at stake. Eschatological and soteriological traditions have the most at stake, precisely because they claim to be eschatological and soteriological. They chose that themselves.

so that false/wicked/corrupt exemplars

It's not that they would be "false", "wicked", or "corrupted", it's that they are actually accurate, desired exemplars, the what-is-actually-intended.
It's that when they say one thing and do another, this discrepancy is actually deliberate, not a mistake, not a failing. That there is a talk to be talked, and a walk to be walked, but they are different things.

People often say one thing and do another. If they are ordinary, mostly unreligious people, one may write off such discrepancies as genuine mistakes or genuine failings. But not when it comes to people who hold a formal position in their religion, or who otherwise declare themselves to have the authority to judge others. With such people, the only reasonable assumption is that they have thought things through and that when there is a discrepancy between what they preach and what they do, it was intended.

Second, religions make many claims that aren't related to eternity, would these be invalidated to?

I'm not talking about invalidation, falsification, or dismissal. It's that so many religious/spiritual claims aren't actually intended to be taken seriously or at face value.

This seems to be the most accurate way to describe what religious/spiritual practitioners do.

For instance, would this be fatal to any sort of strong virtue epistemology?

Or would it apply to all traditions that put a heavy emphasis on praxis and contemplative knowledge (and so Platonism, the Peripatetics, Stoicism, etc.)?

People often say one thing and do another. If they are ordinary, mostly unphilosophical people, one may write off such discrepancies as genuine mistakes or genuine failings. But not when it comes to people who have a formal education in philosophy. With such people, the only reasonable assumption is that they have thought things through and that when there is a discrepancy between their words and deeds, it was intended.



There is an eagerness to absolve religious/spiritual people of all responsibility -- for what they teach, for what they say, what they do. We are supposed to let them get away with murder. We are supposed to trust them unconditionally, regardless of what they say and do. And where has this gotten us?
It's high time we turn this around.

Invoking the specter of Christian nationalism here might thus be likened to invoking the threat of Stalinism to oppose the New Deal in that, arguably, the New Deal actually made a sort of American Stalinism less, not more likely precisely because it addressed the issues that motivated Stalinism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, it would be hard to overestimate how true this is. Factionalism breeds extremism. When we misrepresent another position in order to make it appear extreme, we are ourselves the ultimate creators of the extremism that will inevitably arise because of our misrepresentation.

For example, we've seen bad faith accusations of "Christian nationalism" for a long time, and now we're getting bona fide Christian nationalists. We've seen bad faith accusations of "Nazism" for a long time, and now we're getting bona fide Nazis. The same thing happens on the right with accusations of "Communism," although that is an older phenomenon.

Right, but I think there is a quite robust argument to be made that it is secularism and liberalism that has spawned fundamentalism, elevated fideism, etc. The two are not unrelated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, it's a fairly frequently made argument and I think it's a reasonable point It's often argued that fundamentalism is a reaction to modernity. That's certainly Karen Armstrong's take.

Invoking the specter of Christian nationalism here might thus be likened to invoking the threat of Stalinism to oppose the New Deal in that, arguably, the New Deal actually made a sort of American Stalinism less, not more likely precisely because it addressed the issues that motivated Stalinism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I would have thought that white Christian nationalism is one of the strong groups behind the current US President. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation by Kristin Kobes Du Mez charts this influence across 75 years. Interestingly she's a Christian herself and deeply concerned. I think she would agree with Hart that it's closer to a heretic cult. And the false teaching you referenced above.

f someone can come along and challenge me, why shouldn't I challenge them in return? — baker

No reason. This entire milieu revolves around it.

The premiss of the OP is to explore the historical causes of the divisions between religious/secular, mind/matter, and so on, whereas many of the contributions just exemplify the very division at issue.

When we misrepresent another position in order to make it appear extreme, we are ourselves the ultimate creators of the extremism that will inevitably arise because of our misrepresentation. — Leontiskos

We are predisposed to accuse others of making wrongful accusations against “us”. Identity is replacing ideology, which long ago replaced reality.

If we could remove all hyperbole and metaphor from political speech today, I wonder how many words would be left standing. Conspiracy and bad intentions are sought and discussed ad nauseam, by overlooking the plainly spoken, the actual deed, and the heartfelt belief.

This wouldn’t matter if life was one long political rally and campaign to inspire reelection, but our elected officials are supposed to be negotiating laws and policies, and executing these policies (and budgets) - not just garnering cheers at rallies and protests, “beating” the other party, and “winning” election.

Instead of recognizing our laws and policies the substance of politics, we would much rather argue how each other is Hitler (Trump) or like Mao (Bernie), or like the Messiah (Mamdani) or like Satan (Mamdani); we are the starving and helpless “working class” who are eternally oppressed by the corrupt, greedy untouchable kings.

Or we are just anxious (like all animals with a nervous system) and dramatic because it plays well on instagram.

We, in the west at least, (maybe not as much in the east, and not so much in the Middle East), we have no sense of what improvement might actually look like, no clear goals, no clear enemies and no clear friends - no sense (anymore) of the unique identity and place in history the west must occupy. Instead, we are eating ourselves alive, handing scraps over to anyone who knows how to seize power. We forget why the constitutional republic was invented - to restrain political power and empower the single citizen against both the government and all other people - so that the individual could remain strong and contribute to the community that individual helps to shape. We are testing this lifeline down and giving it away (while the rich make money off of it.)

But now, there is zero tolerance for meaningful political discussion between opposing factions; there is just exaggerated posturing set to withstand inordinately zealous assault. Throwing grenades to forestall artillery while crafting secret nuclear missiles.

And it is all civil unrest, internecine sabotage. No one wants to forgive or forget anything, or sympathize with the fellow participants in this predicament - we all, instead, only want justice, and have already pronounced judgment.

The predicament of modernity comes from moralizing against each other while admitting there is no good and solid ground for anyone to stand on in the first place. We should focus more on the fact of the predicament than on the many distractions that disable focus at all.

Obviously, many people have been gravely hurt by the religions. The history of religion in historical Europe is marred by episodes of appalling violence and repression - the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Cathars, the religious wars. The institution of the Papacy was a model for authoritarianism. There is no question about that, but it was not only that. David Bentley Hart makes the case eloquently in his book Atheist Delusions, which I’ve already mentioned. The social institutions of universities, hospitals, organised charities, and much else besides, grew out of the soil of Christian culture. The ideas of Christian humility, ‘all believers equal before God’, was also profoundly influential. (India still has a caste system to this day.) James Hannam makes an excellent case for how medieval Christian scholars laid the foundations for modern science in his book God’s Philosophers. Of course they all drew on an amalgamation of theology with Greek philosophy, which is foundational to the genius of Western culture.

As an undergrad, I was struck by the fact that so much of characteristically modern philosophy (starting with Descartes) was shaped around the unspoken premise of ‘anything but God’. It was a pervasive but largely unspoken theme. As I’ve explained many times, my own quest was shaped by 1960’s counter-culture and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, which at that time I did not associate at all with religion as such. But then I went on to study world religions and the perspective of the perennial philosophies and began to realise that the enlightenment I thought was the sole prerogative of the East was also to be found in Christianity (mainly via the early 20th C scholars of mysticism, Dean Inge and Evelyn Underhill.) It changed my view considerably, and there are now many Christian philosophers whom I hold in high regard (although I must confess a considerable degree of scepticism in regard to Reformed Theology.)

In any case none of this is an appeal to a ‘return to a golden past’. But religious symbolism inevitably portrays, in symbolic form, many of the archetypal factors and forces that underlie everyday thoughts and actions. They need to be understood and re-integrated, rather than fought against due to the animus we’ve inherited from the religious conflicts of the past. That’s where Vervaeke’s lectures are exemplary.

Obviously, many people have been gravely hurt by the religions. The history of religion in historical Europe is marred by episodes of appalling violence and repression - the Inquisition, the slaughter of the Cathars, the religious wars. — Wayfarer

Is there a religion in the present era that exemplifies the good?

There's a typical forum style of argumentation I think of as 'the coconut shy'. A coconut shy, as you will recall, is a popular sideshow attraction, whereby coconuts are put on poles, and punters then try to knock them off by throwing tennis balls at them, thereby winning a prize.

This is one of those kinds of questions. :wink:

- :up:

But now, there is zero tolerance for meaningful political discussion between opposing factions; there is just exaggerated posturing set to withstand inordinately zealous assault. Throwing grenades to forestall artillery while crafting secret nuclear missiles. — Fire Ologist

Yes: a rhetorical arms race.

that true teaching is

based on an authority which legitimizes itself by

the exemplary life and charismatic quality of its exponents.

Maybe we set our own sights too high, just as we shoot ourselves in the foot. We ask ourselves for someone among us to be the authority on how to live, as we practice and teach daily how not to live.

But don’t we need only one example? Jesus, or Siddhartha Buddha? Isn’t one such life enough to inspire all that falls short? I guess there are so few, it seems to permit us to doubt all there is to say about the good.

The way I see it, each generation starts all over building the goal for all of humanity, and each individual within each generation has to do this for him or herself as well. We despair because the task is monumental, and Sisyphean.

But why assume it is impossible? It seems to me we can be made good, so we should seek to be made good. We don’t even have to know what the good absolutely is to bow to the good anyway, and emulate it. We are made good, and then we know what it is. We are made good by accident, after believing we can be good on purpose.

I can see why you’d say that, but as it says in Matthew, “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” That sentiment applies equally to politics and religion. It’s a fair question to pose: if religion is a superior alternative to the secular, where might it be found operating in a way that appropriately demonstrates this? And I am open to the fact that this can be demonstrated.

More broadly, I've noticed that the "Aristotle" of the antique Greeks and that of modern "virtue ethics" might we well be two different philosophers. The modern version allows some sort of "telos" for man, in that certain things are "good for him" because of "the sort of thing he is," but seems to have a much greater difficulty making any sort of argument for some desires being "higher" versus "lower," or securing the notion that the rational soul must lead, train, and unify the sensible soul and vegetative soul (logos ruling over and shaping thymos and epithumia). But as far as I can tell this radically destabilizes virtue ethics, since now man is merely loosely ordered (on average) to an irreducible plurality of goods which "diminish when shared." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah. Peter Simpson sees this as a kind of epistemic reversal, where instead of reasoning from virtues (with Aristotle), one reasons from happiness. Cf. "On Virtue Ethics and Aristotle."

-

Here’s the interesting bit. On Taylor’s picture, my own neo-Aristotelian view, which is the one Gellner would likely dismiss as an irrational “creed,” still inhabits the immanent frame in a closed way (naturalist), and yet it isn’t therefore disenchanted. Thinking otherwise would be another instance of the dimensional collapse mentioned earlier. Because it accounts for "strong evaluations" (see note below), a virtue-ethical orientation to eudaimonia, and for intrinsically meaningful forms of life, it amounts to a re-enchantment without transcendence.

So, for Taylor, disenchantment vs. re-enchantment doesn’t line up with naturalism vs. transcendence. — Pierre-Normand

I'm not sure I would call Aristotle a "naturalist." That seems not only anachronistic, but perhaps also incorrect. I don't see a lack of transcendence in Aristotle, even if his idea of God was not the Christian God. He does admittedly distinguish the practical man and his moral virtues from the philosopher and his contemplation, but the contemplation of the philosopher looks to be "transcendent." I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' attribution of Platonic themes to Aristotle is quite apt in this way.

They may not be paying heed to what Putnam sees as a required "collapse" of the fact/value dichotomy.

Eudaimonia cannot survive the surgical operation that separates understanding what we are from what it is that we ought to be and do, and this can justifiably be viewed as a loss of immanence or transcendence depending on which side one locates themselves in Taylor's immanent frame. — Pierre-Normand

I think this is important, and I think the way you pointed up the unification of Aristotle's speculative and practical reason is instructive, but modern man seems to have crossed a Rubicon and can no longer "collapse" the "dichotomy." I would be interested to know where Putnam writes about this.

:up: If we had had another religion or no religion Western culture would have developed differently to be sure. The same goes for Platonism, Aristotle, the Stoics, etc., etc. As we know from complexity theory, even small differences can compound to later produce much greater differences.

"It is wrong to rape _my_ daughter, but why should I care about what happens to your daughter?!" — baker

I don't believe that is characteristic of most people at all. People are outraged at the rape of other people's daughters or sons, are generally outraged by any rape at all.

I'm not sure I would call Aristotle a "naturalist." That seems not only anachronistic, but perhaps also incorrect. I don't see a lack of transcendence in Aristotle, even if his idea of God was not the Christian God. He does admittedly distinguish the practical man and his moral virtues from the philosopher and his contemplation, but the contemplation of the philosopher looks to be "transcendent." — Leontiskos

This is a very interesting point. For Aristotle, how does the practical man provide a foundation for his virtue if not through contemplation?”

Practicing a religion/spirituality works in the exact same way as going to school or taking up some other course of education or training. It's supposed to transform the student, and in a standardized, predictable way. — baker

I just noticed your post now, but what you said in it, seems completely at odds with this conclusion. Karen Armstrong says something very similar:

Religious truth is ...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.

Which is, admittedly, how they must seem to many contributors.

Why is this not a conversation, but an ex cathedra lecture? — baker

Is it? I have not been aware of lecturing. I presented an argument, and am prepared to defend it, but only up to a point. The reference to Edward Conze's essay was intended to illustrate a point. But then, I suppose you take that as an 'appeal to authority', which naturally has to be shot down.

(Moral) virtue is for practical life. For Aristotle the philosopher is not as much in need of moral virtue because he is less engaged in practical life (politics, commerce, etc.). The philosopher is more interested in intellectual virtue. One comes to know (moral) virtue by recognizing one's role models and then in turn coming to discern the individual virtues that such role models possess, and for Aristotle the "role models" will tend to be commonly held, at least by and large.

So one learns about virtue by recognizing particular people who are excellent and happy people, and who one naturally wishes to emulate. But the "foundation" for Aristotelian virtue is very much tied up with practice or "habit." Only by doing something consistently will one become good at it. A virtue is an excellent-making quality of a human being. If one wishes to be an excellent human being then they must have the virtues, and the virtues are had by practice or familiarity. Then, for Aristotle happiness is had via excellence, but excellence is not sought as a means to the end of happiness. It's almost as if Aristotle would say that happiness is excellence seen in a particular light. For a simple example, the man who is an excellent soccer player is brought joy by playing soccer, but the joy and the activity of playing soccer well aren't really two different things. It's not as if he plays soccer well and then goes to the sideline to wait for someone to bring him his joy as a reward.

Although my overall knowledge of Aristotle is pretty slight, this is one of the passages that has stayed with me (previously quoted)

But if happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia) 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 (νοῦς nous), 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 [θεωρητική, theoritikós) — The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11

The suggestion, in Aristotle, and indeed in Greek philosophy generally, is that nous, the instrument of reason, is able to discern immaterial truths, those being the universal forms or ideas. 'In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the faculty that enables rational cognition. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which animals possess. For Aristotle, discussion of nous is connected to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same rational ways. Derived from this it was also sometimes argued, in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it also came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it'.

While not denying the majority of what you’ve said, the focus on Christianity seems to me to be somewhat shortsighted. I’ll try to succinctly explain why:

The ethos and mores of democratic governance have no historical grounding in Christianity, nor in any Abrahamic religion for that matter, but does have solid grounding in the pagan culture of Athens.

Paganism, be it Greek, Roman, or Egyptian, was to my knowledge always tolerant of differing and novel religions and spiritual practices. This so long as homage was also given to the respective pantheon of the governing body. In contrast, Abrahamic religions, Christianity included, deem all differing and novel religions and spiritual practices as heretical at best, as the beliefs of nonbelievers or "infidels", with labels of “devil worship” or else of “demonic practices” punishable by eternal damnation in Hell not at all uncommon, even in today’s age. Hence, as historical facts go, paganism at root was (and yet remains) very tolerant. Whereas Abrahamic religions at root in no way are. (E.g., there is no recorded history I’m aware of wherein pagan wars were fought on account of whose deities or spiritual beliefs were real or else true. In contrast, Christianity is overflowing with wars justified precisely on these grounds.)

As to pursuit of what can get termed spiritual enlightenment, ancient pagan societies (to be clear, of the West (added because some Christians consider Buddhism and the like to be pagan religions as well, if not outright demonic)) were by comparison to Christianity replete with these—and were never to my knowledge considered heretical, this unlike is the case with Christianity. I’ve mentioned the Oracle at Delphi before, this as one well enough known example. Maybe more poignant, however, are the Eleusinian Mysteries, which lasted from who knows when in antiquity until 392 CE, when they were banned by Christian edicts. I don’t think the significance of the Eleusinian Mysteries, on their own, can be easily overstated. Cicero, an extraordinary intellect who was himself an initiate of the mysteries, for example had this to say about them:

Cicero said of the Mysteries that Athens had given to mankind "nothing finer..., and as they are called an initiation (initia), so indeed do we learn in them the basic principles of life, and from them acquire not only a way of living in happiness but also a way of dying with greater hope" (De legibus, 2.36). — https://digital.library.cornell.edu/collections/eleusis

I'll keep this short.

All that said, as with many another, I value religious tolerance and the separation of church and state. There is no "the true religion" to me; and for those who have faith that their own religion is the only true one out there, I can hardly comprehend how they wouldn't be enamored by an outright theocracy. To be clear, to me, all religions (and at least some forms of atheism to boot) can be viewed as relatively unique paths on a mountain toward it's zenith, with the zenith not being a deity (including any omni-creator deity) but what gets termed as "The Good" (or, more atheistically addressed, "absolute objectivity of awareness/being"). And yet, this view I uphold of itself can well be labeled heretical, if not far worse, by many if not the majority of Christians who "keep the faith", so to speak. I say this form experience. And it's not quite what Jesus Christ had in mind, such as via his parable of the Good Samaritan.

Again, I don't sponsor authoritarian religions. And the institutional religion of Christianity by and large has all the barrings of such ... as in its yearning for theocratic governance (more or less the historic norm of Christendom) rather than for democratic governance and the spiritual tolerance generally required for it.

Yes, great stuff. :up:

So we could draw this back to the OP a bit (which is quite good):

But if happiness (εὐδαιμονία, eudomonia) 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 (νοῦς nous), or whatever else it be... — The Nicomachean Ethics 1.1177a11

We could reasonably think of Descartes' legacy as truncating the being of humans, and leading to an anthropology where "the highest virtue" is ratiocination or a kind of calculation (in much the same way that calculators manipulate numbers or LLMs manipulate text). The modern virtue of ratiocination is admittedly instrumental, for it is meant to provide power over nature, which in turn serves the ends that were deemed ultimate at that time. From there we get reactionary pendulum swings away from this virtue and this anthropology, such as in the Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the story continues...

:up: Institutionalized religion seems always to become politicized, and hence corrupted, coming to serve power instead of free inquiry and practice.

I'm not sure I would call Aristotle a "naturalist." That seems not only anachronistic, but perhaps also incorrect. — Leontiskos

For sure. I was thus characterising my own neo-Aristotelian stance and not Aristotle's own though I think his is more amicable to a relaxed naturalism than modern scientistic or physicalistic views are.

I would be interested to know where Putnam writes about this.

His essays on that theme were published in 2004 in The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. (I had the opportunity to read most of them before the book was published either because he made the manuscripts available online or he published them separately, I don't recall which.)