RE: Reflecting on Atheism.
November 18, 2013 at 2:39 am
(This post was last modified: November 18, 2013 at 2:47 am by arvind13.)
Genkaus:
You have already made up your mind about who I am and where I'm coming from. I'm not an 'apologist', i already told you why i am doing this discussion. its for a purely scientific purpose and a personal interest in a certain kind of research
It doesn't really bother me that you are disagreeing with what I'm saying. I really don't. What bothers me is that you don't understand what I'm saying. I would rather that someone understand what I'm saying and disagree, rather than not understand what I'm saying and agree.
So in some sense, I consider it my failure. Because I have failed to make you understand what I'm saying.
so maybe i'm not explaining it properly. I'll try again.
First of all, we can never study beliefs. We can only study actions. We infer beliefs from actions. Why do we do this? Because of the idea (in western culture, especially) that actions are expressions of belief or intentional states. Whether they are or not is a discussion for another time. I'm not going to argue about it.
so when a Christian or Muslim says I go to Church and pray because I believe in God, we don't really know if that particular individual really believes or just says he believes. We don't. There is no way of knowing or affirming an individual's belief state.
But what we can do is study Christianity. There is a phenomenon in this world called Christianity. There are many aspects to Christianity: bible, prophet, Chruch, certain practices, worship, eschatology, commandments and laws.
and they are not discrete unrelated parts. all of these different parts cohere together to form something called Christianity. that is what i mean by a structure (I will get into what that structure is in the next post, because its too long for this post. It will make things a lot clearer).
and within the structure of Christianity, throughout history Christians have put lots and lots of emphasis on what to believe, whether that belief is true or false, and they even have means of excommunication based on belief. Only if you believe so and so can you be a Christian otherwise you're not
each of their practices have doctrinal justification based on belief. and there are tracts justifying the belief itself; theological arguments
This is in stark contrast to the Indian/Asian traditions. The landscape in the West is littered with the battered corpses of literature dealing with the truth and historicity of the Bible, Biblical events, and its figures. It has always been important that at least some of the Testament ‘stories’ are true, known to be so, and indubitable. This attitude towards the scriptures, and issues generated thereby which grip the intellectuals of the West to this day, hardly disturb or excite their counterparts in India. The questions about the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of their texts are irrelevant within the Indian intellectual tradition.
there are no doctrines of the sort in Christianity which say that we do this and this practice because of this and this reason/belief. and this is the true belief. this is false etc. Sure, people come up with all sorts of reasons and beliefs as to why they do a certain practice. But the fact that any reason or no reason at all is equally acceptable is indicative that beliefs aren't important to these traditions. Throughout Indian history, all the intellectual energies went into developing, modifying and creating different rituals and practices, with the focus being on the practice itself, not on the belief or principle behind the practice.
infact, the attitude encouraged in such a culture is that if you perform a ritual without desires, goals, or reasons it is exalted and admirable. Detached action is the highest form of action. This attitude is not unique to India, but also found in the Chinese and Japanese traditions.
Whereas in the Christian and Islamic history, 95% of their effort and energies went into developing theological arguments of the truth of their beliefs, the correct interpretation of beliefs so on and so forth.
You talk about the 'fact' that Indians have gods and doctrines and theology and pretty much the same structure as Christianity.
The real issue is that the so-called facts missionaries collected about Asian cultures are the base-point for western and westenrized scholars. When they explain/describe Indian and Asian traditions, they are explaining the facts that missionaries (later, anthropologists) have collected. No fact is neutral, as philosophy of sciences show: every fact is theory-laden, in this case laden with christian theology and its secularized variants (in the current case). So, what western scholars and the western educated are doing: they are trying to understand Christian-theology-laden descriptions of Indian/Asian culture. So, one has to study the western culture and its common sense.
You have already made up your mind about who I am and where I'm coming from. I'm not an 'apologist', i already told you why i am doing this discussion. its for a purely scientific purpose and a personal interest in a certain kind of research
It doesn't really bother me that you are disagreeing with what I'm saying. I really don't. What bothers me is that you don't understand what I'm saying. I would rather that someone understand what I'm saying and disagree, rather than not understand what I'm saying and agree.
So in some sense, I consider it my failure. Because I have failed to make you understand what I'm saying.
so maybe i'm not explaining it properly. I'll try again.
First of all, we can never study beliefs. We can only study actions. We infer beliefs from actions. Why do we do this? Because of the idea (in western culture, especially) that actions are expressions of belief or intentional states. Whether they are or not is a discussion for another time. I'm not going to argue about it.
so when a Christian or Muslim says I go to Church and pray because I believe in God, we don't really know if that particular individual really believes or just says he believes. We don't. There is no way of knowing or affirming an individual's belief state.
But what we can do is study Christianity. There is a phenomenon in this world called Christianity. There are many aspects to Christianity: bible, prophet, Chruch, certain practices, worship, eschatology, commandments and laws.
and they are not discrete unrelated parts. all of these different parts cohere together to form something called Christianity. that is what i mean by a structure (I will get into what that structure is in the next post, because its too long for this post. It will make things a lot clearer).
and within the structure of Christianity, throughout history Christians have put lots and lots of emphasis on what to believe, whether that belief is true or false, and they even have means of excommunication based on belief. Only if you believe so and so can you be a Christian otherwise you're not
each of their practices have doctrinal justification based on belief. and there are tracts justifying the belief itself; theological arguments
This is in stark contrast to the Indian/Asian traditions. The landscape in the West is littered with the battered corpses of literature dealing with the truth and historicity of the Bible, Biblical events, and its figures. It has always been important that at least some of the Testament ‘stories’ are true, known to be so, and indubitable. This attitude towards the scriptures, and issues generated thereby which grip the intellectuals of the West to this day, hardly disturb or excite their counterparts in India. The questions about the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of their texts are irrelevant within the Indian intellectual tradition.
there are no doctrines of the sort in Christianity which say that we do this and this practice because of this and this reason/belief. and this is the true belief. this is false etc. Sure, people come up with all sorts of reasons and beliefs as to why they do a certain practice. But the fact that any reason or no reason at all is equally acceptable is indicative that beliefs aren't important to these traditions. Throughout Indian history, all the intellectual energies went into developing, modifying and creating different rituals and practices, with the focus being on the practice itself, not on the belief or principle behind the practice.
infact, the attitude encouraged in such a culture is that if you perform a ritual without desires, goals, or reasons it is exalted and admirable. Detached action is the highest form of action. This attitude is not unique to India, but also found in the Chinese and Japanese traditions.
Whereas in the Christian and Islamic history, 95% of their effort and energies went into developing theological arguments of the truth of their beliefs, the correct interpretation of beliefs so on and so forth.
You talk about the 'fact' that Indians have gods and doctrines and theology and pretty much the same structure as Christianity.
The real issue is that the so-called facts missionaries collected about Asian cultures are the base-point for western and westenrized scholars. When they explain/describe Indian and Asian traditions, they are explaining the facts that missionaries (later, anthropologists) have collected. No fact is neutral, as philosophy of sciences show: every fact is theory-laden, in this case laden with christian theology and its secularized variants (in the current case). So, what western scholars and the western educated are doing: they are trying to understand Christian-theology-laden descriptions of Indian/Asian culture. So, one has to study the western culture and its common sense.
