This matter of religious belief

I want to sketch a few ideas here on the question of belief, faith and knowledge.

Now generally religion has a bad rap in the Western world, and I understand why. Wars, schisms, persecutions, and institutional corruption rife, etc. No argument from me.

Nevertheless I am someone who has had spiritual and religious experiences, so I don't share the view that all religion is simply delusion. It has become something important to me and it is really not going away anytime soon. It is part of human life.

Now I think there is a really important point that has been lost in the religions of the West, and there is a reason why it was lost.

This idea of 'believe and be saved' and 'religion as blind faith' is really fundamental to Christianity. I don't want to ridicule or criticize this idea as it is important to Christians and I have no desire to antagonize them. But it has only ever been a specific aspect of religion, which for various historical factors has been made the predominant factor in Christianity in particular.

Have you ever reflected that Jesus Christ seemed to give a lot of advice for someone in whom all you ever really needed to do was 'believe'? He was always recommending attitudes, courses of action, urging people to consider this, think about that, follow me, give away your possessions, and so on and so forth. 'Consider the lilies of the field'. 'Go woman and sin no more'. And many other sermons and parables.

But this very quickly became, after Paul, just BELIEVE. It is all you can do, and furthermore, anything you TRY and do of your own will, will only result in your own damnation.

Now it is a fact that in the early days of Christendom, there were many competing sects and schools in Christianity with many different doctrines and attitudes. Among them were the gnostics. The gnostics were differentiated from the pistics (the ones with the sign of the fish). Gnostics were more interested in understanding Jesus than just 'believing' in Him. The pistics were 'the faithful'.

Now I am not writing to stick up for the gnostics, or to say that they were right and the others were wrong. As it happens, the others won the day, and the gnostics were mainly suppressed. (In fact, the Gnostic bishop Valentinus came within a whisker of being elected Pope, but missed out.) All this has had enormous consequences in Western history.

Fast forward to Martin Luther. He invested absolutely everything in faith. All man could do was read the Bible, and believe it. That was it. Don't do this, and you burn in hell. Do anything else, and you burn in hell. The evangelicals still mainly believe this. The hard core will cheerily tell you that everyone of other faiths are destined for hell, along with many others, for reasons that you and I will never understand.

So religious dogma has triggered a tremendous backlash in Western civilization. I notice many people are really affected by it. Mention anything slightly religious, and it triggers a very hostile reaction. And I think we are all paying the price for the institutionalized neuroticism of Western Christianity and the many dreadful things that have been done in its name.

I want to say to all the people traumatized by Christianity, that this is not necessarily what religion means. Blind faith might actually be OK for some - those, for whom simple belief and piety is good and proper. But I don't think this was EVER the whole of religious expression, as it has come to be in the West. There is a variety of religious experience and expression, not to mention the various spiritual aspects of Western philosophy, which comprises a spectrum of outlooks and attitudes. There are many ways of understanding and many ways of experiencing. There are many different types of people with different aptitudes, outlooks, learning styles, background, and so on. And they need different kinds of teachings.

Now as I have mentioned, I have had religious or spiritual experiences of my own. A hundred years ago, I probably would have been Anglican. As it happens, I practice Buddhist meditation. I have spent a lot of time studying and reading religion and spirituality. And I am finally learning how to be religious, in my own way. It has been a great thing to learn, for all the reasons that religious people say - a sense of inner peace and a better disposition. Too many people, from too many cultures, have testified to this, to simply write it off as delusional. There really is spiritual awareness, and even though it is quite simple, it must be sought out. I had to ask the question and look for an answer. No doubt it just opens up for some people, but I had to look for it.

Now I learned something about how to be religious from India. They know how to go about it there. They are much better at it than many Westerners. It is not even really that Indian philosophy and religion is much better than Western - in some ways it is not. It is just that it is very much still part of life, and also that India is naturally pluralistic, and therefore tolerant of diversity. There is this enormous sense of threat and menace that is the undercurrent of Western religion, this shadow cast by the past and the fear of damnation. India is a riot of doctrines, beliefs and practices ranging from the sublime to the...well, very colorful. Even though there are many with secular and atheist outlooks in India too, this natural spirituality is still very much a part of life, and it has helped me a lot.

So now I have learned to look at the whole question again with new eyes. I think that is what is needed. I sincerely believe that those who are most militantly opposed to religion of any kind are nursing an injury. (Those who are just completely indifferent to the whole thing are something else again.) But there is no use railing at the sky. It achieves nothing.

Anyway, that is what I wanted to say about it. I suppose it is controversial from a number of perspectives but it is how I feel about it. I hope someone finds it helpful.

I sincerely believe that those who are most militantly opposed to religion of any kind are nursing an injury.

neither can the divine be excluded by science or by reason

Science can't exclude the existence of anything. That doesn't really give a special place for the divine. We also can't exclude the existence of Santa Claus, Keebler Elves, Captain Crunch or the Super Mario Brothers.

Science can't exclude the existence of anything. That doesn't really give a special place for the divine. We also can't exclude the existence of Santa Claus, Keebler Elves, Captain Crunch or the Super Mario Brothers.

There's no evidence of any of those things existing, and so the burden of proof lies on those people claiming that any of those things exist. It most certainly isn't science's responsibility to disprove every silly character someone conjures up.

That was my point, thanks.

It was? And I thought you said that science cannot exclude the existence of Santa Claus.

What's your point?

I think he means that science can exclude all of those characters as not having existed, since there is no evidence of them having existed.

You seem to have meant that science cannot disprove the existence of Santa any more than science can disprove the existence of the divine. The thing is, we can know that many of these purported characters do not exist.

I can hold a justified belief unicorns do not exist based on evolutionary and other scientific reasons, lack of evidence, etc.. And if it is true that unicorns do not exist, then I do know that unicorns do not exist.

What's your point?

Not having evidence of something doesn't exclude its existence

My point is that you, on one hand, are saying that science cannot exclude the existence of Santa, but you agree that we should not bother mount an expedition in search of Santa. If you think the first, then why do you think the second?

You're right, that would be committing the argument from ignorance. To believe something is false, simply because it has not been proven true.

But science deals with evidence, and so science can exclude those things which have no evidence. Science has nothing to work with otherwise! See what I mean?

But what is the argument for demanding certainty rather than knowledge? I know of no good one.

Let's reconnect this tangent back to the discussion at hand. The old canard of "science can't prove God doesn't exist" was used as a plea for open-mindedness. I pointed out that there was nothing special about God in that respect as compared to, say, Count Chocula. If you use that excuse to be open-minded about God but nothing else, that's inconsistent.