All or Nothing
What is religion? Habits like habitual prayer, attendance of services, or almsgiving are not religion itself, they are only expressions of it. No, religion is something far larger: it’s a system of beliefs, that is, a given set of truths about the universe, applied to the particular. Thus the given is that all people are innately worthy of respect, and the application is that followers of a religion that believes this are commanded to respect all people. Religion is philosophy applied to everyday life, given flesh and blood through myths, guidance structures, and culture.
The biggest piece here is philosophy. The alms, the prayer, the dietary requirements and hierarchies are mechanisms for expressing the particular philosophy of a sect. While it’s true that a religion that fails to apply philosophy to the particulars of life is cold and dead, religion without philosophy, a system of beliefs, is utterly meaningless.
What then, is philosophy? It’s the ultimate, most abstract study of ideas.
Most of life is made up of the study of ideas. As toddlers we begin to grasp ideas themselves, and by the time we can form complex sentences, we’ve begun to have ideas about ideas. The idea of hungry combines with the idea that other individuals have feelings just like we have, and we form a new idea that baby Jack is hungry. With growth, we become capable of more abstraction, finally starting to have ideas that apply to All Matter, or All People. We become so facile with ideas that we use them as tools, manipulating them as equations to describe the flight of a ball or the growth of bacteria. At each step in our mental growth, we become more capable of taking given, disparate elements, and abstracting from them some unifying principle. This is the essence of thought: to discover the unity hidden in a set of givens. To have ideas about ideas is to discover the reason why Hamlet didn’t kill Claudius until act 5, to see how European opinion of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Battle of Antietam are all connected, to find what’s causing the migratory patterns of North American waterfowl to shift.
Day after day, we process raw terabits of input, whether it be sensory, instinctive or a revelation of reason or intuition, and with this raw material we form ideas. From the very moment our idea is conceived, in a burst of self-knowledge, we form an idea about this idea, judging its truth value against the ideas and data stored in our memory. We consciously perform this process hundreds of times a day, probably hundreds of thousands of times unconsciously.
Philosophy, then is the last abstraction on a long chain of abstractions. It’s the conscious comparison of ideas with reason, and with experience. In studying the ultimate ideas, we apply the most well-used human action in existence to the largest, most abstract ideas. Philosophy is ultimate thought. Religion, the expression of philosophy, isn’t just a set of arbitrary doctrines, as disposable as the belief that Livestrong bracelets are the best way to adorn a wrist, but the highest expression of a unified world-view, built up from millions of personal experiences and thoughts, and in most cases, millennia of communal development, culture and history. This is why religion is so important. It’s both the capstone and the foundation of the pyramid, the origin of truth as well as its most perfect expression. Alpha and Omega.
To say that no truth exists in the area of religion is to say that no truth exists in the area of philosophy, and to say this is to say that one can not have an idea about an idea without being wrong. To believe no truth exists in this one area is to say that no truth exists in any thought at all. It’s all or nothing.
The biggest piece here is philosophy. The alms, the prayer, the dietary requirements and hierarchies are mechanisms for expressing the particular philosophy of a sect. While it’s true that a religion that fails to apply philosophy to the particulars of life is cold and dead, religion without philosophy, a system of beliefs, is utterly meaningless.
What then, is philosophy? It’s the ultimate, most abstract study of ideas.
Most of life is made up of the study of ideas. As toddlers we begin to grasp ideas themselves, and by the time we can form complex sentences, we’ve begun to have ideas about ideas. The idea of hungry combines with the idea that other individuals have feelings just like we have, and we form a new idea that baby Jack is hungry. With growth, we become capable of more abstraction, finally starting to have ideas that apply to All Matter, or All People. We become so facile with ideas that we use them as tools, manipulating them as equations to describe the flight of a ball or the growth of bacteria. At each step in our mental growth, we become more capable of taking given, disparate elements, and abstracting from them some unifying principle. This is the essence of thought: to discover the unity hidden in a set of givens. To have ideas about ideas is to discover the reason why Hamlet didn’t kill Claudius until act 5, to see how European opinion of the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Battle of Antietam are all connected, to find what’s causing the migratory patterns of North American waterfowl to shift.
Day after day, we process raw terabits of input, whether it be sensory, instinctive or a revelation of reason or intuition, and with this raw material we form ideas. From the very moment our idea is conceived, in a burst of self-knowledge, we form an idea about this idea, judging its truth value against the ideas and data stored in our memory. We consciously perform this process hundreds of times a day, probably hundreds of thousands of times unconsciously.
Philosophy, then is the last abstraction on a long chain of abstractions. It’s the conscious comparison of ideas with reason, and with experience. In studying the ultimate ideas, we apply the most well-used human action in existence to the largest, most abstract ideas. Philosophy is ultimate thought. Religion, the expression of philosophy, isn’t just a set of arbitrary doctrines, as disposable as the belief that Livestrong bracelets are the best way to adorn a wrist, but the highest expression of a unified world-view, built up from millions of personal experiences and thoughts, and in most cases, millennia of communal development, culture and history. This is why religion is so important. It’s both the capstone and the foundation of the pyramid, the origin of truth as well as its most perfect expression. Alpha and Omega.
To say that no truth exists in the area of religion is to say that no truth exists in the area of philosophy, and to say this is to say that one can not have an idea about an idea without being wrong. To believe no truth exists in this one area is to say that no truth exists in any thought at all. It’s all or nothing.