RE: My Almighty VS your argument against it
May 4, 2022 at 9:24 pm
(This post was last modified: May 4, 2022 at 9:39 pm by vulcanlogician.)
(May 4, 2022 at 5:00 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: Just underneath the surface there, is the idea that religion is something that's done to people, not something they do. No one has ever been tricked into a religion. A persons religion is a description of their deepest and most genuinely held normative beliefs shared by a community.
What about kids raised in the Twelve Tribes cult? In that case, religion is undeniably something that's done to people.
Is that a fringe case? Sure. But coercion like that goes on, albeit in more dilute form, in evangelicals and other "mainstream" religious practices.
At it's best religion can be a description of deeply held (communal?) normative beliefs. (I actually quite like that definition.) But, all over the place religion is entwined with descriptive statements about reality. Descriptive statements that are highly suspicious. Hell, even the normative claims are quite often poorly constructed. But, at least it is conceivable, in principle, to have a religion with solid, defensible normative beliefs. And a like-minded community would make the common normative beliefs more useful.
