thread: 2011-07-11 : Hooray for Religion
On 2011-07-12, Jaywalt wrote:
Not entirely coincidentally, the belief vs. practice thing is at the center of an ongoing debate in the study of Chinese religion (generally called the "orthopraxy/orthodoxy" debate), which centers on whether it matters if practitioners of Chinese religion believe in it or not. The traditional answer is no, it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you conduct the ritual properly (i.e. "orthopraxy"), but there are, of course, several much more complex answers than that. Christianity and Islam put so much emphasis on faith that it's sometimes important to remember that belief is not the core of all religious practices.
