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Author | Topic: Educated versus Popular Religion | |||||||||||||||||||||||
robinrohan Inactive Member |
My claim is that for all religions which have been around for a long time, there are two levels of belief, which I will call
"educated religion" (ER) and "popular religion" (PR). ER is the accurate version, but this is not saying that someone who embraces PR is not authentically religious, and it is also not to say that someone who purportedly embraces ER IS authentically religious. It depends on the individual. Religion is not just for the educated but for anyone, and it is for this reason that religion is suspectible to vulgarization, to all sorts of add-ons and traditions that are not important in a religious sense, and often ridiculous. This is the very nature of the "popular." What I set forth here is an explanation of a few concepts of ER, as I understand it (I did not make this up--it comes from reading ER texts in the Western tradition). Belief: Belief in this or that doctrine is not as important as it might seem in PR. What really matters is integrity of belief. The enemy of religion is not sincere atheism, and certainly not hard science, but thoughtless worldliness. Sincere atheism, in fact, is a kind of religion, so to speak, in that the non-believer is engaged with ultimate issues (this is a definition, if you will, of religion).Now there is a type of "smart-ass" atheism which is mere posturing, and means nothing from a religious point of view. Faith: This does not mean believing something with no evidence. What it means is maintaining one's open-mindedness about one's religious belief in the face of what appears to be contrary evidence. A mother loses her wonderful, promising child in a freak accident that is nobody's fault. She says to herself, quite reasonably, how could God do this? Either there is no God or he is a cruel being. When something traumatic happens, we tend to define the entire universe based on that traumatic event. Faith tells us not to do this--or at least to try not to. Look at the big picture. Do not define the universe by one incident, or one thought, or one feeling. However, other activities, not just trauma, can also have a distorting influence (an obsessive pleasure, for example). Evidence: Evidence for a religious belief is not scientific. It's the sort of evidence that we use in daily life to make decisions. Example of ER evidence: Conscience I'm not a believer, but leaving that fact aside for the moment, the most compelling evidence for me is "conscience." For the believer, conscience is something real, not a Freudian construct (which, after all, is also a non-scientific opinion). How do we know for sure that conscience is real? Obviously, we don't know for sure--ER belief is not about certainty--but what we do know is that you don't have to be religious to have a conscience--indeed, often a very sensitive conscience. We can talk all we like (sometimes very glibly) about how our moral views are merely subjective or merely culture-driven, or whatever other tag of relativity you choose to use, but if someone examines their feelings in an unbiased way, I think we will find that our ideas of justice seem pretty damned real. This to me is a very telling point (if somebody doesn't feel this, of course, it would mean nothing to them. I'm assuming that most people do). {the "argument from conscience" is elaborated very completely in the ER text, John Henry Newman's "The Grammar of Assent," which is not fresh in my mind and which I did not fully grasp anyway). Sometimes people tend to talk about our sense of right and wrong (or, figuratively, heaven and hell) in a very one-sided fashion. "It's a way of assigning our enemies to hell," they say sarcastically. They seem not to realize that it is also a way of assigning OURSELVES to hell. ER literature is full of accounts of feelings of guilt to the point of deep despair ("the dark night of the soul"). Conscience is not just about judging others; more importantly, it's about judging ourselves. So if we take conscience seriously, we realize that we live in a world that is thoroughly moral (by this, of course, I don't mean that the world is good). Now, the more I think of this, the more I find this idea rather unpleasant. I would prefer the world to be thoroughly aesthetic or something. But what I like will not do away with these strong feelings about justice and injustice. I can't explain these feelings away with the latest fad in pop psychology. I'll stop here. I'll just add that "sincere atheism"--though it is to be treated with respect--is considered by ER an undeveloped or immature religious view. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-06-2005 15:51 AM This message has been edited by AdminPhat, 01-09-2005 02:49 AM
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AdminJar Inactive Member |
Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
And so the point is, there's no point in criticizing PR from a theoretical standpoint. It's like confusing a sci-fi novel with science (the sci-fi novel might have a core of accurate science in it but it will also have a lot of imaginary ideas).
If you want to criticize religious theory, you have to address ER. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-07-2005 14:25 AM
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Hangdawg13 Member (Idle past 773 days) Posts: 1189 From: Texas Joined: |
Very well said! I agree to the letter on everything you have stated. I'm so glad to see an "unbeliever" with the humility to recognize these distinctions.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Thank you, Hangdawg. I'm glad you verified that ER is not something I just made up. I made up the label but not the tradition.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
This is according to my unexpert knowledge.
There are two qualities of the Bible that make it rather confusing: 1. It was not written in chronological order as presented to us in the Old Testament (or Torah). 2. It consists of different genres of writing: historical narrative, religious poetry, and MYTHOS (to borrow a term of a commentator). Mythos is a story written to illustrate a general idea, the details of which are not meant to be taken literally (the story of Jonah and the whale is an obvious example). These qualities of the Bible are very important when we consider the book of Genesis. The oldest parts of the Bible are those that depict Yahweh as a tribal god, in competition with other gods (such as Baal). These parts were written before the rise of monotheism. However, the first chapter of Genesis describes a monotheistic God. It is a later addition. The first chapter is also mythos. The idea is that this monotheistic God is also God the creator of the universe. The details of how he did that are not meant literally.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
And so the religious development in the Old Testament does not match the chronology. We have a monotheistic Creator of the Universe being degraded into a tribal god.
This is not the way religious development works. What happened was that a later writer, a monotheist, added the part about the creation of the world onto a historical account of a tribe (or tribes) which included accounts of the tribal god. So the idea in PR about the world being 6000 years old, computed by adding up generations, actually refers to a computation about the history of Hebrew tribes, not the history of the world.
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GreyOwl Inactive Member |
robinrohan writes: And so the point is, there's no point in criticizing PR from a theoretical standpoint. It's like confusing a sci-fi novel with science (the sci-fi novel might have a core of accurate science in it but it will also have a lot of imaginary ideas).If you want to criticize religious theory, you have to address ER. While I agree with almost all of this, I'd like to point out that (using your analogy) people aren't always criticizing the science in a science-fiction book, although that does happen sometimes. A lot of times they are criticizing other people's claims that the science in science-fiction novels is real science and not fiction at all. So from that viewpoint, it seems that many people agree with what you're saying, even if they don't consciously realize it at first.
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Phat Member Posts: 18310 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
Hi, Robinrohan! I edited your first post to highlight the point that you are making about ER and PR. I am not quite clear on some of this. Lets throw a few word definitions around and clarify our discussion, OK?
1) Does ER mean that religion is a philosophy of early man that is studied by us? Is our study based on our own educated relativism?robinrohan writes: You seem to assert that education defines accuracy. This is true in most cases, but it depends on the definition of truth and on the belief that an individual has in God as a person and the weight of this source of knowledge apart from human wisdom. ER is the accurate version, but this is not saying that someone who embraces PR is not authentically religious, and it is also not to say that someone who purportedly embraces ER IS authentically religious. It depends on the individual. Based on Websters, the very term "religion" is a relative construct.
Websters writes: religion \ri-li-jen\ n 1 : the service and worship of God or the supernatural 2 : devotion to a religious faith 3 : a personal set or institutionalized system of religious beliefs, attitudes, and practices 4 : a cause, principle, or belief held to with faith and ardor religionist n 2) Define what you see as the definition of PR? This message has been edited by Phatboy, 01-09-2005 02:59 AM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Yes, you're right, Phatboy. I was not very clear. The idea of the topic came from my reaction to people who were criticizing religion. The way they criticized it gave me the idea that they didn't know much about it (not that I do, really!).
By ER I was referring to an intellectual tradition. My label makes it sound like it is something official, but it's not. You will probably not hear some of the ideas of ER in a church (possible but not likely). PR is the popular version of Western religion held by uneducated believers. That sounds a little snooty but I did not mean it to be.Somebody does not have to be educated to be sincerely religious, of course, and of course just because you are educated in religion, this doesn't necessarily mean anything as regards your spiritual condition. We can't judge what anybody else's spiritual condition is. Somebody might have vague and fuzzy notions about the doctrines they believe, and they might hold some beliefs that ER would claim is absurd, but this says nothing about their spiritual condition which has to do with integrity, not clarity of thought or knowledge. My point was not to criticize PR, but to criticize those who would attack PR on an intellectual basis. They should criticize ER instead (of course, there are no cut and dried divisions between these two categories I made up). It seemed to me that the criticizers were using PR as a strawman--I don't mean they did this intentionally but that's what it amounted to. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-09-2005 13:29 AM
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
GreyOwl writes: it seems that many people agree with what you're saying, even if they don't consciously realize it at first. Not quite clear to me. You mean the believers agree with what I said?
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
The part of PR that would deviate from ER:
1. the belief that the Bible is divinely inspired, that it is literally true in all parts, or that it is inerrant.2. the belief in miracles, either in the past or the present. 3. In Roman Catholicism, the belief in the infallibility of the Pope when making doctrinal decisions. 4. In Judaism, the belief in the rules for daily living being something other than symbolic and arbitrary (the rules about eating are not 100% arbitrary; part of these rules have to do with causing animals minimal pain). 5. the belief in petitionary prayer. 6. the belief that an attempt to describe the nature of God, such as the doctrine of the trinity, is anything other than a symbol for what cannot be described. This message has been edited by robinrohan, 01-10-2005 01:32 AM
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arachnophilia Member (Idle past 1366 days) Posts: 9069 From: god's waiting room Joined: |
1. It was not written in chronological order as presented to us in the Old Testament (or Torah). want even more confusing? sometimes time spans don't add up. there's a huge problem fitting judges between dates we "know" for the events in samuel and the exodus. the book takes several hundred more years than exist between those two dates. judges must have been a record of concurrent events, told in a linear order. imagine how confusing that is. but we do the same things with movies today.
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GreyOwl Inactive Member |
This whole idea of PR vs. ER reminds me of Daoism, and the differences between Philosophical Daoism (which I would equate to ER) and Religious Daoism (which would be PR). Of course, where Daoism differs from the major Western religions in this regard is that religious Daoism has deities (many of them, in fact) whereas the philosophical Daoism has none. In the Western religions, you don't see the belief in God vs. non-belief in God as a difference between PR and ER (although one might be able to make the argument that this would allow yet a third category...?). There are those that equate the concept of the Dao to the God of Western religions, but I don't think this is entirely accurate because the Dao is meant to be symbolic, and not an actual entity, at least in philosophical Daoism (which does not believe in anything "mystical"). Not sure if all this is completely relevant or not, but it got me thinking.
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robinrohan Inactive Member |
Greyowl, I don't know what "daoism" is, but if it's like Eastern-style religions in general, I believe it very much fits the ER/PR categories. Polytheistic Hinduism corresponds to PR and "intellectual"--or whatever we call it-- Hinduism corresponds to ER. I really don't think there is a need for a 3rd category, because Western ER is not that different, I feel, from Eastern ER. However, I am very tentative about this because I don't know much about Eastern religions. That's why I limited the idea initially to the Western religions.
In other words, I think you are exactly right.
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