RE: What's your opinion on Liberal Religion?
November 25, 2021 at 1:59 pm
(This post was last modified: November 25, 2021 at 2:05 pm by emjay.)
@Belacqua, in case I've offended you by my post (since I seem to have cleared the room, which sadly I sometimes do, not thinking things fully through before I say them), I didn't mean to, I apologise. Hypocrisy is a strong word, and with only negative connotations, thus making it very hard to apply to a positive/neutral case... but I couldn't think of a better word to describe the sort of disconnect between belief and behaviour that we're talking about here (or what I thought we were talking about here). On reflection, since the word hypocrisy is all about pretense, it's probably invalid for at least the positive and neutral use cases; eg I am not pretending to believe in God when I take part in Christian traditions in my country, nor is someone pretending to believe in God if they believe that the path to God is more through ritual etc, nor in the case of people deferring or appealing to the authority of higher ups in their church as per your medieval examples of the Catholic church... none of these are about deliberate pretense, so the word hypocrisy is inappropriate.
Basically as long as someone has some sort of belief in God (or whatever is at the centre of the religion in question), alongside belief in your second sense/behaviour, whatever the ratio is between them in terms of perceived importance, then I have no issues with that. I just had issues when I thought you were advocating a much more binary split between the two... the idea that someone could be part of a religion without any belief whatsoever in whatever is at the centre of that religion. But I think you've clarified that you didn't mean that when you said: "[...]I don't mean to claim that there has ever been a hard-and-fast split, in which what one holds to be true is irrelevant.[...]"? If so, I apologise, it's just unfortunately the way my mind works to be particularly rigid/literal and binary in it's interpretations/categorisations, often having difficulty with context/nuance... so in that respect what you said about 'Exaggerated for emphasis' is probably not the best tack to take with me in particular, going forward, if we have conversations in the future ;-).
Finally, I will say that it still looks like the issue of hypocrisy can still raise it's head here, but it would now seem only in a secondary sense... ie a non-believer appropriating a religion to justify their own, most likely nefarious, ends, such as you can imagine thugs with no belief whatsoever in God still using it as a pretence for justifying homophobic violence... but I accept that that's a separate issue, and not at all what we were talking about here.
Basically as long as someone has some sort of belief in God (or whatever is at the centre of the religion in question), alongside belief in your second sense/behaviour, whatever the ratio is between them in terms of perceived importance, then I have no issues with that. I just had issues when I thought you were advocating a much more binary split between the two... the idea that someone could be part of a religion without any belief whatsoever in whatever is at the centre of that religion. But I think you've clarified that you didn't mean that when you said: "[...]I don't mean to claim that there has ever been a hard-and-fast split, in which what one holds to be true is irrelevant.[...]"? If so, I apologise, it's just unfortunately the way my mind works to be particularly rigid/literal and binary in it's interpretations/categorisations, often having difficulty with context/nuance... so in that respect what you said about 'Exaggerated for emphasis' is probably not the best tack to take with me in particular, going forward, if we have conversations in the future ;-).
Finally, I will say that it still looks like the issue of hypocrisy can still raise it's head here, but it would now seem only in a secondary sense... ie a non-believer appropriating a religion to justify their own, most likely nefarious, ends, such as you can imagine thugs with no belief whatsoever in God still using it as a pretence for justifying homophobic violence... but I accept that that's a separate issue, and not at all what we were talking about here.
