Spinoza's Religion
blog.apaonline.org
blog.apaonline.org
“Spinoza and Kierkegaard are very different thinkers in many ways, but I see them as connected in this resistance to objectified religion. Spinoza’s insistence that religion is a virtue – as you put it, a way of life – resonates with Kierkegaard’s view that religion is a matter of “how” rather than “what.” It is a matter of how you orient your life; how to relate to yourself, to other people, and to God; how you think and feel and act.”
What void? We have the science that you can explore to fill the "unknown/void".
Religion (a formal model for belief in and worship of what can't be known) can't fill this void, nor can science. But forms of spirituality that adopt less formal organizing principles might -- such as respecting the constructive power of myths and memes that seek to further humane principles, like justice or kindness, to shape a better world.
Deism of the kinds that Ben Franklin or Thomas Jefferson (or Spinoza?) adopted venture into this space somewhat, in presuming a creator god who serves as a guide for humans to make a better world. But because such models of 'worship' are seldom systematic nor do they specify the regulations people crave to assure compliance (and their final reward), they tend not to attract acolytes, and so are hard to sustain as a ongoing social movement. But such models of belief (and respect) may be needed nonetheless.
BTW I’m not disagreeing on the fact that some things are necessarily unknowable, but mostly in the sense of the incompleteness theorems and other inherent limitations of information processing and the physical laws of nature.
Faith is the ultimate thought-terminating cliche. Its malware for the human brain.
The good parts of religion/spirituality are the rich cultural traditions which have been the birthplace for many philosophical ideas.
But the only way for those cultural traditions to continue evolving is to rid themselves of the malware of faith.
Whether a person is optimistic or pessimistic in the face of unknown is a matter of faith. Values/morals, even outside of an organized religion, are still a matter of faith (not that they'll be rewarded, but that they're somehow better, even in situations you'd be advantaged by disregarding them). That there is value in life, in expression, etc, are all matters of faith, as for every bit of rational evidence that there is benefit in them, there is also rational evidence that there are issues in them. The fact philosophers don't end up in the same place indicates there are, at minimum, different axioms over what is valuable or necessary in the first place.
Whether faith happens to also include a concept of god is immaterial; most if not all of us operate under concepts just as immaterial but which nevertheless we believe in.
Lostcolony, I believe you are using a far more nebulous and encompassing definition for the word compared to dqpb who I think operates with a more concrete and narrow definition.
If dnub cares to explicitly call out religion, as a specific subset and distinct from faith, the arguments I'd make are largely the same. I see very little difference in the evidence between "I believe there is a knowable God(s) who would have me be kind", "I believe there is a concept of 'god' that would have me be kind", and "I believe being kind is the 'right' thing to do"; none of them rely on refutable claims.
Maybe what you mean is 'blind faith', i.e., a rejection of evidence contrary to what you want to believe, to which I will again point out is not unique to religion, by pointing to politics, and the quote of our past president "what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening", and the millions willing to accept that.
1. When faith is claimed to have a direct physical effect. For example, faith healing in which ones faith conjures divine intervention, or in the Christian Science sense where faith directly alters your physical reality, or in The Secret where faith in having something "attracts" it to you, etc. The malware in this idea is that it corrupts the very concept of evidence. If you try to find evidence that it doesn't work - by having faith and not observing the proposed effects - it's nullified by saying you just didn't have enough faith.
2. When faith exploits our innate social impulses. For example: Jesus died for your sins, how cruel of you to deny him. Or if you don't have faith you will be excluded from the club of Heaven and you will be permanently separated from all your friends and family who were true believers. Or when not having faith alienates you from your existing friends, family, and community. The malware here is that it short-circuits your natural process of observe->think->decide and turns it into observe->consider-social-contract->think->decide. If someone presents you with a good argument for why something is or isn't true, but it violates the social contract of your faith (ensuring your initial impulse is to feel guilt and fear), then you are short-circuited from thinking.
Back to politics, QAnon is an obvious example, but even something as 'comparatively' sane as trickle down economics suffers both of those as well (for the first, "it's not working" - "we just have to cut rich peoples' taxes more! And quit spending so much on social services!"; for the second, "we should tax the rich more and spend it on social services" "What are you, some sort of socialist?! This is -America-, the best goddamn country in the world! Love it or leave it!").
Having raised a child, I think the will to explore is natural and innate, and confidence in oneself is developed and reinforced through experience.
Even without these, one doesn’t need God to understand the concept of variation.
That is not the same you might argue, and you'd be right of course. But there are so many overlaps that is certainly motivated to call it similar: We are weaned into a secular disdain for religion - at least in many parts of the world - just as the Inuit are weaned into their food culture. It is not primarily a function of our superior intellect that we look down on religion, it is a function of our age and time. We will eventually abandon our present hubris for something else, just as people under the monotheistic era departed from the previous animistic and polytheistic beliefs.
So what is unhealthy about it? wasn't the monotheistic religions a big step forward that allowed for greater societal cohesion and (in most places) a rule of law? Isn't a secular society a much better place than before, where beliefs are not passed down from above in a unintelligible language and jealously guarded by the elites that profited from the system?
Well the key term is probably "step forward" as opposed to right and wrong. It is not like the Inuits are wrong in their eating habits - but uninformed and biased people might be prone to think so. It is not like the polytheists were wrong, in spite of the persecution they endured. And it is not like we are right in our present thinking either - a step forward in many respects, yes. But we will one day also be ridiculed for our primitive assumptions about reality - by the biased people of the future.
Provided we all survive the present at all, our present and ubiquitous self-righteousness sure looks poised to snuff out whatever future we may dream of.
Huh?
Greece. Rome. Polytheism could accommodate monotheism. Monotheism could not accommodate polytheism or different monotheisms. How is intolerance a step forward?
The same actually applies to the terms "forward" or "backward"; we are steeped in a belief that originated in the zeitgeist of intellectual Europe in the early 1800s (Comte et al) that society always moves forward, i.e. to a better place than before. It was supposed to be a secular set of objective values applied to the historical progression of epochs, but it has turned out to be as arbitrary as any other that touts as superior and eternal the finicky values of their own specific time and place. When I use the term it mostly just represents the arrow of time, with no further valuation.
Many people feel like this kind of reasoning will cause them to lose their moorings, but it is really the only viable antidote to the ubiquitous self-righteousness that is ultimately putting us all at risk. It is not like nihilism, because it leads to the conclusion that it is better to have an understanding for, and come to terms with other people, be they from times gone by, with beliefs that may seem strange, or from the other side of the globe.
Both monotheistic and polytheistic.
> … didn't even have writing…
Greece. Rome.
> When I use the term ["forward"] it mostly just represents the arrow of time, with no further valuation.
Except that the term you used was "a big step forward" which certainly suggests more than "the arrow of time".
I think you're just attacking faith because you think it's a purely religious concept and you feel your smarter than the religious. But it really isn't a purely religious concept. Anyone who's had faith a friend would let them down ought to know that .
Rhe kind of confidence that you have here, the kind that makes you certain a majority of the world are fools for practicing religion-- that's the real thought-terminating cliche. It's the same thing as the religious person who thinks they know everything and can condemn all to hell because they're so certain they're right and everyone who thinks differently is wrong. And it really is a tired cliche
Our social impulses are the result of several billion years of evolution. The primary reasons are reproduction and survival.
I didn’t invent these ideas by the way. For reference, I would take a look at the fields of Biology, Psychology, Anthropology, etc.
My pet theory is that an alien species planted religion in humans as a KPI to determine when we’re rational enough to be worth interacting with.