thread: 2011-07-11 : Hooray for Religion
On 2011-07-17, cc wrote:
Josh, what I'm saying is basically your first section: that there is a distinction between beliefs as moral or ideological positions and beliefs as understandings of the world. It gets very confusing when these two are both referred to with the same word.
The problem is that religion as such contains both kinds of "belief". For example the well known argument about whether god made the world in six days. It could be that a person regards that claim as merely a statement about how the world works; from that position, its not hard to say, ok that was just a metaphor, they were not six literal days, as new (geological) information came to light. Other people believe this ins the fullblown ideological sense; its a statement of truth and cannot be contradicted. Theres no easy way to predict how a person exposed to these claims will choose to take them, and different people reading the same text come to different conclusions.
And in both cases, social reinforcement plays a significant role, so there is a difference between the position taken on this topic adopted by a person living today, with all the scientific evidence we have available, and someone who believed that position a few hundred years ago. Or between someone who grows up in a sect that affirms one of the these positions or the other.
