My views on religious doctrine and beliefs

[Angrboda]

As far as I'm concerned, when someone tells me they are from a certain religion, I don't assume anything more about them. I could make a few educated guesses about what they probably believe, but I see no point in doing so. I prefer to allow them to tell me, on an individual basis.

It makes no more sense for me to tell someone what their religious beliefs are than for other religious people to tell them what they "should" believe, as part of the religion. They may share common texts, but it's totally up to each person how they interpret the texts, how much weight they give particular parts of it, what they see as literal or metaphorical, and so on.

All that can be generalised is trends and popular current beliefs; that is mainly what I base my criticism of the religion on. A person might be in a minority with regards the interpretation of their religion, but that doesn't make them wrong, any more than the current majority being right due their numbers. Interpretations change over time anyway, religions are fractured into all sorts of sects, and even within a sect individuals disagree.

The only authority I recognize for one theist telling another they are "not a true X" is if it's a very specific sect of a religion, which has particular "required beliefs" or other criteria to be a member. There is then a clear case; otherwise it's just a load of people throwing No True Scotsmans around.

I'm reminded of Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation.

Indeterminacy of reference refers to the interpretation of words or phrases in isolation, and Quine's thesis is that no unique interpretation is possible, because a 'radical interpreter' has no way of telling which of many possible meanings the speaker has in mind. Quine uses the example of the word "gavagai" uttered by a native speaker of the unknown language Arunta upon seeing a rabbit. A speaker of English could do what seems natural and translate this as "Lo, a rabbit." But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: "Lo, food"; "Let's go hunting"; "There will be a storm tonight" (these natives may be superstitious); "Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage"; "Lo, an undetached rabbit-part." Some of these might become less likely – that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses – in the light of subsequent observation. Other translations can be ruled out only by querying the natives: An affirmative answer to "Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?" rules out some possible translations. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered much of the natives' grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, admit of multiple interpretations.

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"The second kind of indeterminacy, which Quine sometimes refers to as holophrastic indeterminacy, is another matter. Here the claim is that there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence. This claim involves the whole language, so there are going to be no examples, perhaps except of an exceedingly artificial kind."

— Peter Hylton, Willard van Orman Quine; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

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The three indeterminacies are (i) inscrutability of reference, and (ii) holophrastic indeterminacy, and (iii) the underdetermination of scientific theory. The last of these, not discussed here, refers to Quine's assessment that evidence alone does not dictate the choice of a scientific theory.

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Wikipedia || Indeterminacy of translation