And believing that religious believers accept 100% of religious belief without reasoning about them is a misunderstanding.
I didn't say anything about religions and ideologies not using reasoning. Anyone who has read, say, Thomas Aquinas is perfectly aware that religious people can use all kinds of complicated reasoning to justify their beliefs.
What I did say is that the set of beliefs in question are "all asserted as justification for each other in what amounts to a logical circle". For example, Thomas Aquinas spent a lot of time building up a huge edifice of interlocking propositions about God, all logically related to each other--but they don't connect to anything else. They're just a free-standing, self-consistent logical structure that can't be justified in any way except by claiming that it justifies itself. It's not that Aquinas didn't use reasoning; as noted above, he did--lots of it.
For the specific example I gave (Thomas Aquinas), it's not really a question of the beliefs being "valid" or not; it's just that they have no practical impact at all, which means it doesn't really matter whether you believe them or not, at least not if the beliefs are taken in isolation.
However, it is a problem if people then try to use such beliefs to justify actions that do have practical impact. For example, consider the split between different branches of Christianity after the Council of Chalcedon over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios", which caused several wars over the next few centuries.
That's funny because a system that kept a civilization together for 1000 years is being claimed to have "no value" by someone who has no idea how to keep any society together and is mimicking the conventional wisdom of those overseeing a disintegrating society as a result of this ignorance.
Not only does the work of Aquinas have value, it has more value over the long run than anything being produced today, as no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100. Modern society is suffering from collapsing birthrates and social disintegration at an alarming rate, and we are pretending to be smarter than those who set the rules of a civilization that was far more stable and productive than our own, with far more profound accomplishments.
The fact that most people in a given civilization were Christians does not mean that the particular religious beliefs I was talking about were the ones that kept the civilization together. In fact, as the example I gave of religious wars over "homoousios" vs. "homoiousios" illustrates, those particular beliefs often caused problems that created huge rifts in the civilization.
> someone who has no idea how to keep any society together
If you are referring to me, I have no idea what you are talking about.
> Not only does the work of Aquinas have value
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree about that, at least as far as the particular beliefs I was referring to are concerned, since that's the particular work of Aquinas that I was discussing.
> no ethical system that we hold dear has a chance of keeping anything going for even three generations, let alone 100
Ethical systems are not the same as the kinds of religious beliefs I was talking about. Ethical systems have practical consequences that can be tested. I agree with you that many people today appear to have ethical systems that don't work well; we know that because they have bad practical consequences.
However, when you talk about keeping things going for 100 generations, we don't have any single ethical system that has done that. Ethical systems have changed many times over the course of human history.
It's somewhat orthogonal to your argument, but I'd doubt that most people in "Christian countries" (which is a heterodox notion) are/were Christians. Mostly people in the past seem to have followed a societal model, largely imposed as a firm of control.
Where I grew up in the UK the village vicar was not a Christian according to most definitions (they didn't believe in central tenets of the faith as espoused in all the main creeds).
Catholicism has a lot of things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity from basic things like having "special" people, to indulgences which are so contradictory to biblical teachings the only possibly way they were accepted is because most people were ignorant to Scripture. And of course those in power keenly maintained that ignorance.
That's only true if you consider the Bible as the only source of revelation, which is not the case for Catholics, where Tradition is equally important.
Catholicism still has things that are contradictory to biblical Christianity, such as priesthood of all believers, even if you accept other sources of revelation those sources would still be contradictory.
The powerful hoping to keep people ignorant seems like conspiracy/folklore.
Good luck testing one of the currently accepted "ethical system"-type religious beliefs.
The only kind of outcome of such a test that is "allowed" is full agreement with the ethical system. A lot of these systems are just as self-reinforcing and barely based in reality as Christian apologetics of Aquinas or Chesterton. The people holding these beliefs know this on some subconscious level and will viciously attack anyone who disagrees. It is only over time with many such "attacks" that a mass belief will die and be replaced by another one.
In fact, every one of these "ethical" religious beliefs came about the same way: it defeated another commonly agreed upon dogma.
This mechanism by the way is what runs civilization. One meme fighting another.
Git forks and merges still share a common ancestral history and are basically an evolution of the same idea. This is true of a real Git repo (it's one software project after all) and the kind of churches you are likely talking about (it's all just a theist religion after all). Christianity is a branch in the same repo as the ancient Roman gods. The Saturnalia feature is even there still :)
I was thinking more about ideas like: - can people be property? - is it a good thing to kill "infidels"? - can women vote? - can a 10 year old get married?
These are "religious" questions because there is no objective truth to the answer either way. It's all based on beliefs and consensus.
Before you downvote me into oblivion: the answers to all of these have historically been different than they are today. People in both times (past and present) would attack you if you disagreed with the status quo (there was even a certain civil war fought about the people=property one). I am not actually disagreeing with the status quo on any of the above.
However, it would be naive to think that we do not presently collectively believe some things that would be appalling to a future human. A good heuristic for these is: would I get attacked or mocked for questioning this?
See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
For me, it always felt like the interpretation of the Holy Books are changing through time as we understand science more and more. And it feels ironic to me.
Surely all christians today believe that tricking somebody with dubious pretexts into debt-based slavery (as often happens with human trafficking of sex workers, where women have to formally pay up their debts and incurring the costs that they captors incur in hosting them in sub-human conditions).
Um, no, it isn't. It's how Genesis was interpreted by most people of the Jewish and Christian religions throughout most of the time since it was written. What is a fairly recent phenomenon is people of those religions not interpreting Genesis (and the Bible in general) literally.
The simple reality is that it's always been this way and will likely be this way for a long time.
Not saying this as proof that the world is definitely going to shit, the point is that it I don't think we've achieved some new level of eternal civilisation that couldn't possibly fail. Every civilisation believed that right up until the point it stopped being true, so we should be on the look out for threats and not assume it will all end up OK.
Value changes with time. Horse whips had a lot of value at one time. Now, not so much.
Religion is prevalent in many societies, and it isn't the same religion. This talk of the value of aquinas ignores the fact that all his reasoning only really applied to christian religions. Yet other religions without deities or with many of them provided the same social structures christianity has.
Consider, for example, China. Just as old and grand as European civilization with a religion mostly focused on the mandate of heaven given to their leaders.
Now consider modern China, which is an atheist state that's been thriving. Certainly, not without problems, but it's hard to argue their civilization hasn't become a major world power.
Your stance seems to be that a set of unprovable axioms you prefer to have faith are somehow superior to some other set of unprovable axioms that some other people may choose to have faith in. You might have all sorts of perfectly reasonable justifications for the axioms you have faith in, but if you want to claim your beliefs transcend faith then you’ll have to present a logical proof that survives the munchausen trilemma.
Interestingly, this also describes all of math, logic, and philosophy.
One of the more interesting axioms or assertions is whether there exists free will, which is, by any interesting definition, a supernatural entity.
Which is totally fine, as long as people accept that God exists the same way math exists.
Many do accept that love exists in the same way math exists.
Like the CAP theorem, you can only have two without substantial compromise.
When ancient texts list God as Love, they note that Love is an act of (free) will (free will being considered a supernatural entity, even today).
Free will is placed high on the hierarchy, which has interesting consequences. E.g. humans are free to do horrible things, and are free to choose not to love. If humans had no free will and were all instinct, there would be no love.
Your explanation makes it out that free will is inherently prone to evil and suffering. If so, that would make free will somewhat inherently evil even though it arises from God. Strikes at the heart of omnibenevolence.
Either there's a limit to his ability or a limit to his goodness. No amount of hand waving can remove that.
If He is all good but can create creatures that corrupt his good works… You see the logical conundrum there, right?
I would understand if you don't WANT to see it. It feels wrong to see it. But it's there if you're being honest. You can ignore it. Many do. It's still there despite any aversion to it.
How so? I can think of at least one interesting definition by which free will is a perfectly good physical process going on in human brains, not supernatural at all.
Depends on which definition of free will you are using. Some definitions are compatible with determinism.
Also, even if we go with a non-deterministic definition of free will, "non-deterministic" is not the same as "supernatural". Quantum mechanics is not deterministic.
Math is based on fundamental global laws which exist and can be checked from everyone and they can come up all with the same math.
We could isolate a baby and it could create the same math while it couldn't create the same religion.
Isolating a human is analogous to removing oxygen. Few would argue that someone brain dead could create anything.
My comparison is based on sciencse vs. fiction. 1+1 = 2 is a reality which works in german, africa, usa and everywhere else. There might be a difference on how those symbols (1, 2...) look like but the axiom is true and valid and is discoverable.
In religion its not.
Concept of god exists but it looks different depending on your believe. Multiply gods, one god, good god, bad god...
Even the stuff written down is based on someone who wrote it down and still people interpretate it totally different.
Never seen someone implying they are right that 1+1=3 if the interpretation of 3 is not 'next after one'.
That said, the Peano axioms seem less nebulous that the varying axioms relating to the existence of god, as that concept can change so much from person to person.
An isolated baby could derive simple math but also similarly deduce there is a greater entity out there.
Whereas the axioms of math will be substantially similar to the point that any modern mathematician would recognize it. We see this on ancient tablets where folks were calculating the square root of 2. Or any of the cultures all around the world that had no significant contact with one another that deal with pi. Sure we'll see base-12 number systems as with the Babylonians or base-20 as with the Maya, but the underlying principles and lessons are largely IDENTICAL.
The worlds of math and the metaphysical could not be more different in that regard. Rather than being a very shallow statement, it is one of the most all-encompassing and profound in all of human history. It gave rise to the principles of the scientific method: humans are biased, so multiple people performing the same steps should come to the same results and predictions made based on those results should yield their own repeatable consistent results.
I had a discussion about this topic with a more hard core christian: I said 'look if it is a good god, it doesn't even matter if i worship her right?' and he said 'nope, its written that you have to worshop'.
So one believe doesn't equal to another believe.
Your underlying base changes based on your believe.
"An axiom, postulate or assumption is a statement that is taken to be true, to serve as a premise or starting point for further reasoning and arguments." this is not true for two religions being created independently from each other while this is very well true for science.
https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...
Most of the "beliefs" you refer to actually don't have to be beliefs at all. They have no practical consequences; they don't change anything about what the person who claims to have them actually does. Such beliefs don't have to have their evidence weighed because they make no practical difference. When people say they "believe" them, they don't mean they're actually using them to decide their actions; they are just signaling.
For most beliefs that do have practical consequences, people do weigh evidence for them. However, this does suggest a clarification to the characteristics I gave for religions and ideologies: that they start from beliefs that are in the "don't have practical consequences, so saying you believe them is just signaling" category, but then use them to justify beliefs that are in the "do have practical consequences, so should be judged by weighing evidence" category.
A belief that does not affect your actions, but implies or causes a belief that does affect your actions. Well, that does affect your actions. :)
But serioulsly, joke aside, that was an interesting concept
With religion, there is no such presumption or expectation.
These are vastly different situations.
There is a difference between belief and faith.
Had they reasoned about them, most 2000 year old customs would have hardly survived.
So if Osiris was said to have red hair in one passage and was blond in another then they may have been referring to different people, one statement was a metaphor, he has hair of both colors at the same time, he had each at different ages, he dyes his hair at some point, etc. And of course people feel such ideas are worth fighting over.