Category: Religion
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The Divine Job Description
For Spencer who, though he no longer believes that the Mormon God concept is instantiated, yet believes that as a concept it remains a worthy contender in the arena of God concepts. What jobs would a being have to perform to qualify as God? I count four sorts of job, ontological, epistemological, axiological, and soteriological,…
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John Hick’s Religious Ambiguity Thesis
John Hick maintains that . . . in this post-Enlightenment age of doubt we have realised that the universe is religiously ambiguous. It evokes and sustains non-religious as well as religious responses. (An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent, Yale University Press, 1989, p. 74) Hick identifies non-religious with naturalistic and religious…
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Wittgenstein on Religious Faith and Superstition
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Peter Winch (University of Chicago Press, 1980), P. 72: Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting. Although Winch's translation is correct, I would translate ganz verschieden as 'entirely different.' For in American English…
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Some Putative Counterexamples to My Definition of ‘Superstitious Belief’
I hazarded the following definition: Belief B is superstitious =df (i) B is or entails erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of the natural world; (ii) B makes reference to one or more supernatural agents; (iii) B involves a corruption or distortion of a genuine religious belief. The conditions are supposed to be individually necessary…
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Defining ‘Superstitious Belief’
Superstition is a form of pseudo-religion, a degenerate or distorted form of religion. But what exactly is it and how does it differ from genuine religion? Let's start by asking what sorts of item are called superstitious. There are (at least) superstitious beliefs, practices, and people. Perhaps we should say that a person is superstitious…
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Superstition: More Examples
A reader comments: You write that “Superstition in this first sense seems to involve a failure to understand the causal structure of the world or the laws of probability” and that it is a “necessary (but not sufficient) condition of a belief's being superstitious is that it entail one or more erroneous beliefs about the…
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Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem…
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An Example of a Religion Without Superstition
John Pepple has written an excellent post in which he sketches a religion free of superstitious elements, thereby showing that there is nothing in the nature of religion — assuming that religion has a nature — that requires that every religion be wholly or even in part superstitious. Here is his sketch: 1. God exists.2.…
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On the Mormon Concept of God
I should thank (or perhaps blame) Spencer Case for sidetracking me into the thickets of Mormon metaphysics. But I have no cause to complain seeing as how my motto is "Study everything, join nothing." Earlier I made a preliminary response to some of Spencer's concerns about the "facelessness" of the full Anselmian conception of deity. Here…
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Obama’s Assault on Religious Liberty
Quotable: Here is what is particularly worrisome: the state seems no longer satisfied with a slow but steady evolution toward secularity; it is aggressively forcing Catholic hospitals off the stage, for it is creating for them an impossible situation. If they cave in and provide insurance for these verboten procedures, they have effectively de-Catholicized themselves;…
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John Hick
John Hick has negotiated that mysterious transition that awaits us all. Here is one take on his passing. I saw him in action only once. I recall him questioning whether Jesus ever claimed to be God. An ill-mannered colleague of mine attacked him for that, churlishly. Hick retained his equaninimity, projecting a superiority that was…
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Religion and Superstition
Julian Baggini asks: Can a religion survive being stripped of its superstitions? Baggini does not tell us explicitly what he understands by 'superstition,' but the context suggests that he takes the term to apply to any and all supernatural elements in a religion, whether these be beliefs, practices, or posits such as God and the soul. The supernatural,…
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Is Religion for the Weak?
We haven't heard much from Jesse Ventura recently, leastways not on the topic of religion, but I recall him some years ago saying in effect, 'Religion is for the weak!' at which provocation various religionists jumped up and retorted, 'No it's not!' Such knee-jerk opposition avails nothing. Ventura is in fact right. What Ventura doesn't…
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Cottingham, Wittgenstein, and the Religious Impulse
John Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (Routledge 2003), p. 52: . . . the whole of the religious impulse arises from the profound sense we have of a gap between how we are and how we would wish to be . . . . This is not quite right, as it seems to…
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Dennett, Anthropomorphism, and the ‘Deformation’ of the God Concept
One of the striking features of Daniel C. Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Viking 2006) is that Dennett seems bent on having a straw man to attack. This is illustrated by his talk of the "deformation" of the concept of God: "I can think of no other concept that has undergone…