What's your opinion on Liberal Religion?

[emjay]

in case I've offended you

No, not offended at all! Sorry if I went quiet there for a while. It was a busy day yesterday.

Also I'm taking time to ponder all this, because the general subject has been on my mind for a while, but I've never tried to work it out like this. I appreciate the feedback.

Certainly there is plenty of hypocrisy in the world, and we should call it that when we see it. Those who preach chastity while raping children are just evil. 

We could point at two types, maybe: those who pretend to believe a thing and then act against that belief. "God loves poverty so I need a new private jet," etc. 

Then there are people who don't believe but go through the motions as if they did. "I don't really believe there's a God who loves charity, but I give to my church's food drive anyway." Or "I don't believe in God but I had my kid baptized because it makes Grandma happy." 

The former are certainly hypocrites. The latter, if we can even judge that they are acting hypocritically, are doing so in a blameless way, I think. 

Oops, have to go now. More soon.

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.

Yes, I think that's right. 

Anyone who thinks of himself as Christian, at any point in history, will think that something about Christianity is true. He assents to the proposition that Christian tenets are true. 

And at any time and place, there will be some balance between people who think carefully about the tenets and people who are less interested in that kind of thing. For the former type, assent to proposition weighs heavily, but for the latter, ritual and lifestyle are most important, and the details of theology are for other people to worry about. 

So for example heretics, and the people who want to punish them, place great importance on assent-to-proposition belief. The whole fight about homoousion vs. homoiousian is purely about propositions, since nothing about it would require a change in ritual or ethics. Or there's Isaac Newton, who believed the Arian heresy but knew enough to keep it quiet to save himself grief. 

I guess what I'm arguing is just that most Christians aren't Isaac Newton. They accept the general truth of things but don't worry too much about theological issues. And I suspect that the more Christianity is dominant in a culture, the less people worry about it. If it's the medium in which we all swim, then we are more likely to accept it without sweating the details. 

I think that this is still largely true. As with the Buddhists I mentioned in my city, how they live it is still more important than what the tenets are. People who would definitely want a Buddhist funeral might very well have no idea what's in the Lotus Sutra. Whatever those words are that the priest is chanting, they are for the priest to know, and me to nod along to. If pressed, they might even say that reincarnation is silly, though they still want the funeral service. 

(My wife is a total atheist, but still says a prayer for her late father at our home Buddhist altar every night.)

In our own time, when science is considered the royal road to truth even among most Christians, the ratio of understanding vs. just accepting is probably about the same. The percentage of people in the airplane who can explain how airplanes work is probably quite small.

People like us, who debate on Internet forums  -- for fun -- which propositions we should grant assent to are the oddballs.

Thank you for this exposition; it really helps to clear the waters that you helped muddy in the first place (for me), regarding the nature of religion Seriously though, it's a very clear, coherent, and thought-provoking argument, so thanks.

That last line though, was ultimately the crux of this whole discussion for me and why your perspective seemed so strange at first; basically I find it hard to very imagine anyone not giving existential questions like these very serious, basically lifelong, consideration... as opposed to just taking them on faith from the get-go. Ie in my experience, and I assumed, everyone's experience, that inner questioner is not so easy to silence. But that being said, that was not the case when I was a child and young adult, there I pretty much accepted what I was told without question, and coming out of Christianity was a matter of cognitive dissonance, not existential questioning so this is harder to reconcile than it first seemed. Basically that's how I feel now, but it clearly wasn't always the case, and when it wasn't the case, indoctrination aside, then the sorts of arguments you've made about immersion - 'the medium in which we all swim' and deferring/appealing to authority make more sense.