What Is Religion?

When I brought back CCS as a system of thought that serves a positive purpose (and I mean positive as in good) what is the negative?

It might be the lack of philosophical awareness and the surface-level structure of most thought. Remember, a good chunk of people in Europe in the 17th and 18th C were debating philosophy. Does that have any relationship to what we see now in America? (IE: the debate between Reid/Hume that was anything but purely academic). In other words, regular people don't think anymore.

But what of a particular problem? Surface-level thinking is a general problem. But "thinking" about what?

Religion.

But what really is religion? Are you sure you know? It is actually so complicated, language-based, obscurant and lost historically that this question is not easy. What then is it based on?

The vulgar answer, usually from adherents, is that it is based on faith. My suggestion is that it is very rarely based on faith.

What is faith? The easy answer, that religious people don't like, is that it is a guess. They would claim that it is knowing something without information. You don't see or physically know God, you just feel he is there. Maybe it is a strong feeling. What I want to say is that no matter how you phrase it and cover it over, the word "guess" still works. If you don't like the word guess use the word intuition.

Is the history of religion and religious beliefs purely built on faith (guess or intuition)? Of course not. Every time a religious person speaks, they are providing a "reason" for their belief. Faith has nothing to do with reason. And the only people that understood this were philosophers (some religious and others not) like Kant. Either way, nothing can truly be said about faith coherently. Its best incarnation is private and the founding fathers of this country, among others, understood that.

Every time religious people outside of philosophy open their mouths about religion it is structured like a scientific argument. Is there a God? Yes, of course, look at all the design on this planet that supports life! Okay, argument by design. Wrong, but far from a guess. It is a scientific, reasoned premise about why life is not ... what? arbitrary? That is not a faith-based argument.

"Religion may not be completely true but it gives people a moral base," is what they say. This has nothing to do with faith. It actually has now lost its original structure as an argument attempting to prove God or religious truths. Here it is just pragmatism.

Who started life and the planet Earth, did it just appear? Again, not faith. Very scientific. Wrong, but attempting reason.

"Why do so many people believe if it isn't true?" Again, nothing to do with intuition. Very much to do with the fallacy of the masses. Either way, it is about statistics and using reason. Here also a failed attempt at commonsense.

So if its based on science, why call it religion? I don't know the answer to this, but I can tell you that if you take a line of reasoning from a religious person with their mouth moving, it will not stay in the realm of science. Eventually it will segue to another method of belief. Often it will circle back to a statement about faith - the real faith, guesswork - and have very little do with the original science question that they asked and answered. The fact that those two segments of the religious position are from different "ways of knowing" is very interesting.

Perhaps we could say that when a person takes up one method of knowing (science) and then has to move into another (guessing, intuition, even inertia) we might immediately suspect something at work that will produce conclusions that don't work. Ask yourself if the religious position has worked? That's up to you. But I want to say that when analyzing language it is interesting to weigh a method of persuasion by the consistency of its method.

* Ways of Knowing, See Peirce, article by the same name.

*Inertia, a way of knowing that entails momentum and nothing else.

*Argument by design, the suggestion that design suggests a designer. The reason here that it is scientific especially is because it demands that one go look for the designer and it doesn't suggest what that designer is, could be anything. Religion wants to kidnap the science part and then halt the investigation. Literally, anything could be behind the curtain ...