My resort to the Bible for wisdom has nothing to do with delusions that God himself spoke it while Moses transcribed it. — Hanover
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). — baker
If the book is a work of fiction then the authors possess moral insight beyond the current day. I — Moses
It is a work of fiction. That's just the case. — Hanover
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. — Moses
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. — Ennui Elucidator
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. — Ennui Elucidator
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. — Moses
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. — Hanover
But sure, God's constant interaction with the Hebrews is what the saga is about. — Hanover
i would think the physical description misplaced and somewhat mocking. — Hanover
What belief is part of your religion? — Hanover
Earlier we (...I...) got to the point of listing ritual, transcendence and hope as central to the notion of religion. — Banno
. . .
This strategy gives rise to a third kind of polythetic approach, one that stipulates that one property (or one set of properties) is required. Call this an “anchored” polythetic definition. Consistently treating concepts as tools, Wittgenstein suggests this “anchored” idea when he writes that when we look at the history of a concept,
what we see is something constantly fluctuating … [but we might nevertheless] set over against this fluctuation something more fixed, just as one paints a stationary picture of the constantly altering face of the landscape. (1974: 77)
Given a stipulated “anchor”, a concept will then possess a necessary property, and this property reintroduces essentialism. Such a definition nevertheless still reflects a polythetic approach because the presence of the required property is not sufficient to make something a religion. To illustrate this strategy, one might stipulate that the only forms of life one will consider a religion will include
(A)
a belief in superempirical beings or powers
(thereby excluding nationalism and capitalism, for example), but the presence of this property does not suffice to count this form of life as a religion. Consider the properties set introduced above that also includes
(B)
ethical norms,
(C)
worship rituals,
(D)
participation believed to bestow benefits on participants, and
(E)
those who participate in this form of life see themselves as a distinct community.
If the threshold number is still three, then to be a religion, a form of life would have to have three of these properties, one of which must be (A). An anchored definition of religion like this would have the benefits of the other polythetic definitions. For example, it would not produce a clear line between religion and nonreligion but would instead articulate gradations between different forms of life (or between versions of one form of life at different times) that are less or more prototypically religious. However, given its anchor, it would produce a more focused range of cases.[15] In this way, the use of an anchor might both reflect the contemporary cosmological view of the concept religion and also address the criticism that polythetic approaches make a concept too vague.
. . . — SEP on Concept of Religion
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. — Banno
. . . As if the writer of the article, or the other folk who posted here, or I, did not think "what we need are the essential characteristics..."
The point is to determine what they are.
— Banno
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.
— Banno
. . .
So a family resemblance can be put in disjunctive normal form, but is extensible or retractible, changing the criteria with use.
— Banno
. . .
In the academic study of religions, discussions of monothetic and polythetic approaches have primarily been in service of developing a definition of the term.[13] How can alternate definitions of religion be assessed? If one were to offer a lexical definition (that is, a description of what the term means in common usage, as with a dictionary definition), then the definition one offers could be shown to be wrong. In common usage, for example, Buddhism typically is considered a religion and capitalism typically is not. On this point, some believe erroneously that one can correct a definition by pointing to some fact about the referents of the term. One sees this assumption, for example, in those who argue that the western discovery of Buddhism shows that theistic definitions of religion are wrong (e.g., Southwold 1978: 367). One can correct a real or lexical definition in this way, but not a stipulative definition, that is, a description of the meaning that one assigns to the term. When one offers a stipulative definition, that definition cannot be wrong. Stipulative definitions are assessed not by whether they are true or false but rather by their usefulness, and that assessment will be purpose-relative (cf. Berger 1967: 175). De Muckadell (2014) rejects stipulative definitions of religion for this reason, arguing that one cannot critique them and that they force scholars simply to “accept whatever definition is offered”. She gives the example of a problematic stipulative definition of religion as “ice-skating while singing” which, she argues, can only be rejected by using a real definition of religion that shows the ice-skating definition to be false. However, even without knowing the real essence of religion, one can critique a stipulative definition, either for being less adequate or appropriate for a particular purpose (such as studying forms of life across cultures) or, as with the ice-skating example, for being so far from a lexical definition that it is adequate or appropriate for almost no purpose.
— SEP on the Concept of Religion
That sounds like a hip coffee shop with a liberal vibe, where you can talk about pretty much anything on the Democratic platform, avoiding Trump, pro-life, and border walls I'm guessing. — Hanover
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? — Ennui Elucidator
when you referenced those who might refuse to consider your group a religion as being petulant. — Hanover
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. — Moses
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? — Moses
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. — Hanover
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. — Hanover
. 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. — Moses
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. — baker
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. — baker
Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.