What is Religion?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=Eben]
Trust *should *have evidence, and faith may or may not have evidence.
[/quote]
No. Faith never has evidence. That’s what makes it faith. And trust without evidence is either faith, or dimwittedness.

[QUOTE=Eben]
But in the sense of believing what someone says mainly because they claim to know something you do not can only be seen as the point where the words trust and faith are synonymous.
[/quote]
True, but that’s not when people do when they trust the words of a scientist about his or her speciality. Science has proven itself.

[QUOTE=Eben]
This is exactly why I started this thread. Your view here is, I think, very much the commonly held view for those who claim to be non-religious.
[/quote]
Unlikely; I’m weird.

And from your word choice - you aren’t one of those people who doesn’t believe in atheists, are you ? Who thinks that we “all really know” there’s a God ?

[QUOTE=Eben]
It’s a way of saying that someone else’s group/beliefs are groundless to the point of not even needing to be considered.
[/quote]
Yes, and they aren’t. Come up with some evidence for your beliefs, and then your claims deserve serious consideration; there’s no reason to take religion any more seriously than a belief in elves.

[QUOTE=Eben]
My point is that if we accept that that is what it means to be a religion, a stereotypical fundamentalist Christian will claim that science is religion and therefore not even worthy of serious study.
[/quote]
Well, they are dishonest and delusional people.

[QUOTE=Eben]
I’m looking (perhaps vainly) for the point at which we can say that the world religion becomes a useful category. For it to be useful it must actually have distinguishing properties.
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I gave you some.

[QUOTE=Eben]
I’m not sure I follow you here. It seems like you’re saying that the majority opinion should be regarded as the norm.
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It IS the norm. It might be right; it might be wrong, but it IS the norm.

[QUOTE=Eben]
This is a fallacy of thinking that there is such a thing a a majority opinion.
[/quote]
:dubious: How is that a “fallacy” ?

[QUOTE=Eben]
It’s kinda the point with AGW the extremism is that no one really knows how severe the problem is or what it would take to fix the problem, or what the cost would be to implement the fix.

I for one do not hear AGW proponents say “let’s all just hang out and see if the model proves out,” nor do I expect them to say such things. If they hold their beliefs to be true then they should act on them. Again, I’m not saying they’re bad people in any way for doing so. I’m just saying that faith (something that seems to be a key identifier for religion) takes a large part in being an AGW proponent, as with the other examples I’ve pointed out.
[/quote]
No, it doesn’t. All the evidence favors them. At this point, the real scientific debate is “how bad”, not “if”. It’s not faith when the evidence favors you; it’s their opponents who are acting on faith, or just dishonest.

22

Religion is almost undefinable because it seems you can find an exception to virtually every criterion. There are religions without deities. There are religions with no supernatural beliefs at all.

I think the best way to describe it is as a set of practices or beliefs based on axiomatic assumptions which are used to guide individual behavior and decisions. Or to simplify it, it’s living your life according to a central set of beliefs which may or may not be provably true.

23

In a short but informative thread from a while back, I tried to give my own definition of what makes a religion:

** A set of beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality, including the Meaning of LifeTM, the existence and nature of a Supreme Being and/or other supernatural beings, the nature of humanity, an afterlife, etc.

  • A set of vocabulary, symbols, images, metaphors, by which to understand and refer to such matters

  • A set of rituals, ceremonies, practices, formalizing its people’s relations with God/gods/the universe and with one another

  • A set of moral and ethical rules, principles, guidelines by which to live in light of all of the above

  • A community who share more or less all of the above*

To which I added:

*I’m not even sure whether a religion has to have all of the characteristics I mentioned, or just some of them.

And “a set of beliefs about … the existence and nature of a Supreme Being and/or other supernatural beings” could well include a belief that they don’t exist, or that we can’t know whether they exist, or that it doesn’t matter whether they exist.

I would say that, while atheism per se is not a religion, an atheistic religion is not necessarily a contradiction in terms.*

I think that’s still the best I can do to define/describe religion.

24

I’d say a religion must have two things. First, it offers a set of beliefs about the nature of the world and the purpose of human existence which includes more than what is purely physical or utilitarian. Second, it pursues that purpose is an organized way.

A belief system that satisfies only the first condition is spirituality but not religion.

25

Religion is a con game of monumental proportion.

26

Any sort of social organization that is devoted to a higher power is religious in nature. That would include various nationalisms, or ideologies such as Capitalism or Communism. Neo-Conservatism is religious in nature. I think it’s more about how the people cohere around the organization.

For instance, a corporation that sells insurance is not religious. A fanatical corporation that believes implicitly in the product expecting some sort of spiritual elevation from it’s use would be religious. A good example of a religious corporation would be Apple.

It seems to me that religion is more of a function of the devotion to the institution, and the method of organization than it is about a supernatural entity.

Then again, something like Daoism violates both the supernatural definition and my definition.

27

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
As I see it, a religion is a collection of related, faith based beliefs. It is not necessary for the beliefs to be supernatural in nature.
[/QUOTE]

I hate to say it but I think Der Trihs has hit it right on the money. :wink:

28

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
No. Faith never has evidence. That’s what makes it faith. And trust without evidence is either faith, or dimwittedness.
[/QUOTE]

So I take it you have personally experimentally verified every scientific advance that you believe to be true based on trust? Someone else claims that they have found evidence and a bunch of other people you trust claim that you can trust that person’s evidence so you trust it without having checked it out yourself? How do you know that they are telling you the truth?

29

[QUOTE=mswas]
So I take it you have personally experimentally verified every scientific advance that you believe to be true based on trust? Someone else claims that they have found evidence and a bunch of other people you trust claim that you can trust that person’s evidence so you trust it without having checked it out yourself? How do you know that they are telling you the truth?
[/QUOTE]

There is a difference between trust and faith. I trust science because it’s proven again and again that it produces results. Faith cannot make this claim.

30

[QUOTE=mswas]
So I take it you have personally experimentally verified every scientific advance that you believe to be true based on trust? Someone else claims that they have found evidence and a bunch of other people you trust claim that you can trust that person’s evidence so you trust it without having checked it out yourself? How do you know that they are telling you the truth?
[/QUOTE]

It’s always lame when theists pull out this canard. Science does not operate from authority. Proposed “advances” in scientific knowledge are always pesented publicly and are subjected to peer review. Anyone is free to look at the evidence for themselves. Now you may protest that most people don’t personally vet every article in every journal, but one thing we can put our trust in is that lots and lots of other people are trying very hard to refute or find holes in any new claims. If you think scientists all just agree with each other all the time, you don’t know much about it.

And aside from that, science has a track record. It is justifiable to place trust in something which has historically been reliable before. I would also say people’s trust in science is not blind or absolute. it’s always at least somewhat conditional. There is never any assumption that science can’t be wrong.

Faith has no track record, no evidence, no opportunity for review and no allowance for possible error.

31

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
It’s always lame when theists pull out this canard. Science does not operate from authority. Proposed “advances” in scientific knowledge are always pesented publicly and are subjected to peer review. Anyone is free to look at the evidence for themselves. Now you may protest that most people don’t personally vet every article in every journal, but one thing we can put our trust in is that lots and lots of other people are trying very hard to refute or find holes in any new claims. If you think scientists all just agree with each other all the time, you don’t know much about it.
[/QUOTE]

I am not talking about the scientist’s relationship to science, I am talking about the lay person’s relationship to science.

The problem here is you are using the word faith incorrectly. “Faith”, doesn’t have a track record by definition. Faith and track record don’t belong in the same sentence, it’s a meaningless phrase.

32

[QUOTE=mswas]
I am not talking about the scientist’s relationship to science, I am talking about the lay person’s relationship to science.
[/QUOTE]

So am I.

33

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
So am I.
[/QUOTE]

So do you trust your ability to understand what scientists tell you, or do you have faith in your ability to do so?

34

[QUOTE=mswas]
So do you trust your ability to understand what scientists tell you, or do you have faith in your ability to do so?
[/QUOTE]

I don’t have faith in shit. I know for a fact that nothing can get accepted by the scientific community unless it can be proven to a fare-thee-well. I trust the process, not the people.

35

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
I don’t have faith in shit. I know for a fact that nothing can get accepted by the scientific community unless it can be proven to a fare-thee-well. I trust the process, not the people.
[/QUOTE]

Is that your final non-answer?

36

[QUOTE=mswas]
Is that your final non-answer?
[/QUOTE]

The answer is full and complete. Sorry if it doesn’t satisfy you.

37

[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
The answer is full and complete. Sorry if it doesn’t satisfy you.
[/QUOTE]

Sure, it’s full and complete, to a different question.

The problem here is that faith deals directly with the individual person’s relationship to truth. You immediately go into talking about peer review and then draw a specious comparison.

The problem is you guys have taken a political stance that places people of ‘faith’ into a category that is by default, beneath you. As such, you are incapable of using the word correctly, because you have an attachment to the word as a perjorative, rather than simply as a synonym for trust as it is used by people who do not share your bias.

38

[QUOTE=mswas]
So I take it you have personally experimentally verified every scientific advance that you believe to be true based on trust? Someone else claims that they have found evidence and a bunch of other people you trust claim that you can trust that person’s evidence so you trust it without having checked it out yourself? How do you know that they are telling you the truth?
[/QUOTE]
Because I’m using a computer based on scientific principles to type this - and it works. And thousands of other examples I’ve encountered over my lifetime. Science works, and scientists have proven themselves to be reliable and self correcting when it comes to error. As opposed to religion, which has proven itself to be in error again and again, until these days it is mostly reduced to making claims about things no one can check out - because whenever it does otherwise, it’s wrong. Religion has proven itself unreliable, has failed again and again in it’s claims, and has zero evidence for it’s claims.

In other words, I trust science because it has proven itself worthy of trust; it works and has evidence for it’s claims. Religion has nothing; it has to be based on faith, not trust, because it has no evidence, nothing to back it up. Religion is sterile and empty by nature, and the only reason people have to believe a word said in it’s name is faith. not trust, but faith - because trust can be lost when it’s pbroken, when it’s shown to be unfounded; faith has no foundation, and ignores disproof.

[QUOTE=mswas]
The problem is you guys have taken a political stance that places people of ‘faith’ into a category that is by default, beneath you.
[/quote]
Not political, intellectual. By denying reality, the faithful place themselves on a lower intellectual plane. The only way to pretend that we are on the same level, is to pretend that there is no value in facts, in reason, or even simply in being right; faith is about the denial of facts, the denial of reason, and the denial of truth.

39

Semantics. The last refuge of the answerless.

40

[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
As I see it, a religion is a collection of related, faith based beliefs. It is not necessary for the beliefs to be supernatural in nature.

As for the difference between a cult and a religion, I’d say that the defining feature of a cult is the attitude of it’s followers. If the Pope ordered all Catholics tomorrow to drink poison, no doubt a few would; the vast majority wouldn’t. In a cult, many or most would, and have. A cult is a group of fellow believers characterized by the prevalence of extremism among them.
[/QUOTE]

I agree with all this, and add that in most cults there is a specific, directed attempt to achieve that even greater level of direct control over people’s lives. The Pope may try to scare you from Rome but he doesn’t actually show up at your house with a flamethrower.