Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
My son found all religions a turn-off. PlayStation was more fun on a Sunday morn.
Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
Not at all. Pluralism isn't a view at all -- it is a meta-view. Without having a view in the first place, you really can't have an appreciation of multiple views. First, you need a place to stand -- then you can move the world. It makes no sense to appreciate all views but have none yourself. Beliefs are experiential. Avoiding all such experience just means that you are equally ignorant of all beliefs, not that you are knowledgeable of them all.
Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
Not at all. Pluralism isn't a view at all -- it is a meta-view. Without having a view in the first place, you really can't have an appreciation of multiple views. First, you need a place to stand -- then you can move the world. It makes no sense to appreciate all views but have none yourself. Beliefs are experiential. Avoiding all such experience just means that you are equally ignorant of all beliefs, not that you are knowledgeable of them all.
Not sure you understand. I am an atheist. My view is there is no God. That's what experience has taught me. However, that's just my view based on my experience and I don't expect anyone else to agree with me and nor do I have any wish to argue anyone into agreeing with me. I am a pluralist in the sense that it doesn't matter a damn what people believe in, so long as that belief is arrived at freely. The whole point of a belief in something is that it serves the needs of whoever believes in it.
I would call myself skeptical, and I suppose that is a metaview. Not sure about needing a particular standpoint, I do appreciate bits of various religions, Christianity, Sufism, Zen, Chthulu, and I was a Christian. As Huxley said, railway engines can be explained by the elan locomotif, for me, many religions seem circular.
Not sure you understand. I am an atheist. My view is ...
I expressed myself poorly. I was not trying to suggest that you personally had this problem -- the "you" was meant as an informal "one" and was intended to indicate what I believe to be a flaw in your theory of education for children. The child will be unable to properly evaluate the pluralism offered without a foundation that includes belief in something. I would expect that it would be possible to have lost one's faith and still be able to appreciate other people's faith, but starting from a point of never having experienced faith at all would leave the child on about the same firm ground that he might have in evaluating, e.g., someone else's marriage from the vantage point of having read an article in a women's magazine.
That seems odd to me. One cannot evaluate multiple views without sharing one?
That isn't what I wrote. I said that you cannot evaluate an experience-based perspective meaningfully without having had a similar experience to compare it with. Given your equating experience with locomotives, you may still not agree. Nonetheless, I would prefer it if you were dismissing my actual point.
It sounds like all the arguments about gender. How can you claim to be a woman, if you haven't been inside the experience of being one? Question begging.
Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
Not at all. Pluralism isn't a view at all -- it is a meta-view. Without having a view in the first place, you really can't have an appreciation of multiple views. First, you need a place to stand -- then you can move the world. It makes no sense to appreciate all views but have none yourself. Beliefs are experiential. Avoiding all such experience just means that you are equally ignorant of all beliefs, not that you are knowledgeable of them all.
To a certain extent, I agree with this. Wem my belief, which was not at the forefront of my life but more an underlying inculturated but consistent part of it, faded away, I looked backand thought I am glad that I had a belief so that I knew exactly what I no longer had and clearly understood the reasons for its present absence. No guesswork was involved.
It sounds like all the arguments about gender. How can you claim to be a woman, if you haven't been inside the experience of being one? Question begging.
No, the comparison is how can you claim to be a woman if you've never experienced being any gender or sex?
Not sure you understand. I am an atheist. My view is ...
I expressed myself poorly. I was not trying to suggest that you personally had this problem -- the "you" was meant as an informal "one" and was intended to indicate what I believe to be a flaw in your theory of education for children. The child will be unable to properly evaluate the pluralism offered without a foundation that includes belief in something. I would expect that it would be possible to have lost one's faith and still be able to appreciate other people's faith, but starting from a point of never having experienced faith at all would leave the child on about the same firm ground that he might have in evaluating, e.g., someone else's marriage from the vantage point of having read an article in a women's magazine.
I don't understand your argument. Are you saying a child cannot make a decision about anything without having had prior experience of something similar to it?
But I disagree with you implied notion that the child has to be capable of properly evaluating something in order to arrive at a decision. That's like saying a child can't decide it dislikes Ginger Nuts unless it has had a prior positive experience of a McVitie's Digestive.
And even if that is true, the child has had experience of being an agnostic even if it hasn't rationalised what it believes as agnosticism. And I assure you that having maintained for many years that I was an agnostic, agnosticism is a faith position.
Continuing with the biscuit analogy, why not just give a child a plate of biscuits, insist it tries all of them, and then let it decide which variety is prefers.
It's a tricky area, with apparently various question begging claims. Presumably, parents who teach their children that Christianity is true, are confident that their child is equipped to make an epistemic assessment? How has he/she become skilled in this way? I think some secularists object, on the grounds that the child is not equipped.
It's also complicated by the non-rational aspects of religion. I remember nearly swooning at my first Catholic mass, at the age of 16, as the combination of music, visual imagery, spoken poetry, was heady stuff. But 40 years later I felt similar about Sufi singing and dancing. I guess I am a hopeless romantic.
It sounds like all the arguments about gender. How can you claim to be a woman, if you haven't been inside the experience of being one? Question begging.
No, the comparison is how can you claim to be a woman if you've never experienced being any gender or sex?
Interesting. Before I accepted that I was an atheist I was an agnostic. Could I have arrived at atheism without having previously been an agnostic? I don't know.
Even now I'm not a conventional atheist in that I accept the possibility of non-deistic supernatural phenomena.
But I would question the idea that a child raised with pluralism can't decide what it believes in because it has had no experience of belief. It's true the child will have had no experience of theistic belief (as was my case) but it will inevitably acquire a set of beliefs in some form or other.
It's a tricky area, with apparently various question begging claims. Presumably, parents who teach their children that Christianity is true, are confident that their child is equipped to make an epistemic assessment? How has he/she become skilled in this way? I think some secularists object, on the grounds that the child is not equipped.
It's also complicated by the non-rational aspects of religion. I remember nearly swooning at my first Catholic mass, at the age of 16, as the combination of music, visual imagery, spoken poetry, was heady stuff. But 40 years later I felt similar about Sufi singing and dancing. I guess I am a hopeless romantic.
I would say that it is only ever possible to make an assessment of something if one has one or more things to compare it to.
It's a tricky area, with apparently various question begging claims. Presumably, parents who teach their children that Christianity is true, are confident that their child is equipped to make an epistemic assessment? How has he/she become skilled in this way? I think some secularists object, on the grounds that the child is not equipped.
It's also complicated by the non-rational aspects of religion. I remember nearly swooning at my first Catholic mass, at the age of 16, as the combination of music, visual imagery, spoken poetry, was heady stuff. But 40 years later I felt similar about Sufi singing and dancing. I guess I am a hopeless romantic.
I would say that it is only ever possible to make an assessment of something if one has one or more things to compare it to.
I remember my Catholic girl-friend had a two year old nephew, and his parents were giving him a kind of early induction. Thus, pictures of Jesus on the cross elicited sad face, and so on. I don't know if he was equipped to compare and contrast with anything else. Of course, some secularists object to this. However, parents can fill their kids' heads with anything they like, including secularism. I suppose we reason that in adolescence, we are more equipped to discriminate, not sure about that.
I remember my Catholic girl-friend had a two year old nephew, and his parents were giving him a kind of early induction. Thus, pictures of Jesus on the cross elicited sad face, and so on. I don't know if he was equipped to compare and contrast with anything else. Of course, some secularists object to this. However, parents can fill their kids' heads with anything they like, including secularism. I suppose we reason that in adolescence, we are more equipped to discriminate, not sure about that.
Do you mean parents can fill their kids' heads with anything they like in the sense that that's what parents inevitably do? Or do you mean that parents have a right to fill their kids' heads with anything they like?
The first position is, unfortunately, true. The second position I strongly disagree with.
I'm not proposing to stop parents filling their child's head with anything they like during family time. But I would limit their ability to do so by banning faith schools and home-schooling.
NB. I would suggest that exposing a two-year old to any representation of the crucifixion qualifies as psychological abuse.
Yes, I wasn't all that pleased by seeing a 2 year old having that kind of instruction. But I thought that parents do have the right, e.g., to teach their child neo-Nazi propaganda. The alternative is heavy intrusion into private life. The question of education hinges on "about", i.e., teaching about religion, as against teaching that religion is true.
Yes, I wasn't all that pleased by seeing a 2 year old having that kind of instruction. But I thought that parents do have the right, e.g., to teach their child neo-Nazi propaganda. The alternative is heavy intrusion into private life. The question of education hinges on "about", i.e., teaching about religion, as against teaching that religion is true.
We could say that parents have the opportunity to teach their child anything they like and some abuse that opportunity. I would agree the alternative, such as heavy intrusion into private life or children being taken away from parents (which I think happened in the Kibbutz system) is often worse.
I would see a state and secular education system as a necessary addition and sometimes corrective to parental teaching.
I agree, the 'about' is key here but would argue that scope is equally important.
Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
My younger brother and I were both raised in the Episcopal Church, and we have both remained faithful as adults. But we visited other churches on occasion as children, and were well aware of other religious traditions. In my years as a musical mercenary, I sang at a variety of churches, and spent a very Biblical seven years in a synagogue choir. I am a believer in exposure to other faiths, but I always came home after checking them out. Each to her own taste.
Indeed. And it's eminently teachable. Only those who are afraid their child will end up with views, values, and beliefs they disagree with or think less valid could possibly disagree with pluralism.
My younger brother and I were both raised in the Episcopal Church, and we have both remained faithful as adults. But we visited other churches on occasion as children, and were well aware of other religious traditions. In my years as a musical mercenary, I sang at a variety of churches, and spent a very Biblical seven years in a synagogue choir. I am a believer in exposure to other faiths, but I always came home after checking them out. Each to her own taste.
Indeed, though your experience was restricted to varieties of Juedo/Christian faith which is hardly pluralism.
Are there varieties of faith: e.g., Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Hinduism, Wicca, Daoism, atheism, etcetera, that you regard as plain wrong or grossly inadequate? Or do you think they are legitimate for those who hold them, but simply not to your taste?
What is this "legitimate" term? It implies there is some legal authority all ready to forbid or compel. Which works if you're talking to God, but sets up a fellow Shipmate to look like an arse however they reply.
What is this "legitimate" term? It implies there is some legal authority all ready to forbid or compel. Which works if you're talking to God, but sets up a fellow Shipmate to look like an arse however they reply.
Legitimate probably wasn't the best word. I meant something like, equally valid. There are self-defining Christians who regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship and there are self-defining Christians who regard all faith paths as valid inasmuch as they lead to the same place and there are many self-defining Christians who are somewhere in between. Where someone is on the spectrum has relevance to how they would feel about the faith their child grows up with.
There will always be a line to be drawn. I would have issues if a school taught a 'religion' as equally valid to Christianity if it taught that it was OK eg to kill animals or people to sacrifice them to any 'god', even if the parents thought it valid and taught it to their children.
There will always be a line to be drawn. I would have issues if a school taught a 'religion' as equally valid to Christianity if it taught that it was OK eg to kill animals or people to sacrifice them to any 'god', even if the parents thought it valid and taught it to their children.
That's Islam and Judaism off the table for starters then.
There will always be a line to be drawn. I would have issues if a school taught a 'religion' as equally valid to Christianity if it taught that it was OK eg to kill animals or people to sacrifice them to any 'god', even if the parents thought it valid and taught it to their children.
That's Islam and Judaism off the table for starters then.
There will always be a line to be drawn. I would have issues if a school taught a 'religion' as equally valid to Christianity if it taught that it was OK eg to kill animals or people to sacrifice them to any 'god', even if the parents thought it valid and taught it to their children.
That's Islam and Judaism off the table for starters then.
AIUI Judaism doesn't practice animal sacrifice because there is no Temple, not because it's not OK. Were the Temple rebuilt, my understanding is that they could restart.
Are there varieties of faith: e.g., Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Hinduism, Wicca, Daoism, atheism, etcetera, that you regard as plain wrong or grossly inadequate? Or do you think they are legitimate for those who hold them, but simply not to your taste?
Those are not the only alternatives (quite apart from the oddity of the word legitimate in this context that Lamb Chopped has picked up on).
You conceded earlier that Allah in Islam is the same God as described in Christianity: they describe the same referent. (Matters are more ambiguous if neither is real; the identity or non-identity of fictional or otherwise unreal characters being not a matter of simple fact.) So Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot rationally regard each other as plain wrong even as they think the differences are down to more than just taste.
Right and wrong are a spectrum. And even if one thinks one's own religious tradition is more likely to be right in more ways that doesn't mean one can't think other religious traditions may have something to teach one.
Also, there are ways and ways of being wrong. I think Mormonism is fatally flawed from a philosophical perspective: I think all the standard atheist arguments about evidence work against the Mormon god in a way they don't work against orthodox theistic traditions. On the other hand right-wing American-style fundamentalism of the sort that supports Trump seems (from its outward appearance) spiritually bankrupt which is a different way of being wrong.
It’s not a spectrum. One can think something incorrect/mistaken/not corresponding to reality without attributing it to demons. Your formulation again forces people into choosing standpoints that make them look like arseholes.
What is this "legitimate" term? It implies there is some legal authority all ready to forbid or compel. Which works if you're talking to God, but sets up a fellow Shipmate to look like an arse however they reply.
Legitimate probably wasn't the best word. I meant something like, equally valid.
Isn't 'valid' an odd word for an atheist to use? I would imagine from your POV all are equally invalid; by contrast, for an adherent of a religion theirs is the one which is valid - since theirs is the one they believe in. Is this so controversial?
It’s not a spectrum. One can think something incorrect/mistaken/not corresponding to reality without attributing it to demons.
'Spectrum' was perhaps a lazy word to pick. What I meant is that if orthodox Christianity is true then Reform Judaism is mostly true, Islam also mostly true but not quite so true, and Aztec polytheism is more or less entirely mistaken. Whereas Colin Smith was writing as if he thinks that a Roman Catholic is obliged to think everyone from the Greek Orthodox and Anglicans to the Aztecs equally valid or equally invalid.
To complicate things further it's not just in one respect that religious systems can be more or less similar. Mormonism is superficially close to orthodox Christianity; deeper down it is utterly unlike and much closer to, say, Norse polytheism.
Confucianism meanwhile is so unlike Christianity that it may as far as I know be not even in competion and as compatible as Aristotelian philosophy.
I was actually responding to Colin, not you, here:
Legitimate probably wasn't the best word. I meant something like, equally valid. There are self-defining Christians who regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship and there are self-defining Christians who regard all faith paths as valid inasmuch as they lead to the same place and there are many self-defining Christians who are somewhere in between. Where someone is on the spectrum has relevance to how they would feel about the faith their child grows up with.
My problem with this was the idea that you either "regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship" or you "regard all faith paths as valid" or some intermediate spot. This leaves no place for me or quite a few other Christians IMHO. If I believe that my Muslim neighbor is sincerely mistaken, but at the same time do NOT regard his faith as demon worship, where does that leave me? I'm not in the middle. I will never "progress" to thinking all faith paths valid. That position is IMHO logically self-invalidating. Either one is right, or all are wrong. That's because they are mutually contradictory, so all cannot be right. Logic is the problem here, not the evilness or otherwise of my heart attitude toward non-Lutherans.
Then I have no idea what you were attempting to communicate.
As far as I know it might be just as easy to incorporate Confucianism into Christianity as it was to incorporate Aristotle. I say 'easy'. Obviously not that easy: it took a philosopher-theologian of Aquinas' ability to do it.
But it's harder to see how one could incorporate Buddist philosophy into Christian theology without losing something important to one or the other, just because they are closer and deal more with the same areas.
But it's harder to see how one could incorporate Buddist philosophy into Christian theology without losing something important to one or the other, just because they are closer and deal more with the same areas.
This comment made me think this thread as a whole maybe takes these traditions as more unified and static than they actually are. All of the great world religions and philosophies are rich and multi-stranded - with not just differences in theology, but also different 'charisms' (as a Catholic might say) for religious orders and so forth. And they do change and find different expressions over time. I find it difficult to imagine a coherent or valuable synthesis of, say, Calvinist Reformed theology and Vajrayana Buddhism. But Robert E Kennedy is both a Jesuit priest and a Zen roshi, Sister Elaine Macinnes is a nun and a Zen master; and Laurence Freeman, John Main, and to some extent Rowan Williams have IMV done a creditable job finding resonances between some Asian traditions and the spirituality of the Desert Fathers.
And as the fact of all these different intra-tradition schools shows, each of them has its own innovators and evolutions. It's not as though 'pluralism' in any deep sense can consist of showing kids a bunch of shrink-wrapped solutions and then expecting them to choose amongst them once they've attained some notional marker of competent individual judgement. I think of it more as introducing them to a range of approaches that allows them to think with and through the tradition they've been raised in (for surely we are all raised within a tradition of some kind, however ill-defined it may be) and to find a coherent path for their lives; not as a selection of orthodoxies they agree or disagree with in their entirety.
Are there varieties of faith: e.g., Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Hinduism, Wicca, Daoism, atheism, etcetera, that you regard as plain wrong or grossly inadequate? Or do you think they are legitimate for those who hold them, but simply not to your taste?
Those are not the only alternatives (quite apart from the oddity of the word legitimate in this context that Lamb Chopped has picked up on).
You conceded earlier that Allah in Islam is the same God as described in Christianity: they describe the same referent. (Matters are more ambiguous if neither is real; the identity or non-identity of fictional or otherwise unreal characters being not a matter of simple fact.) So Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot rationally regard each other as plain wrong even as they think the differences are down to more than just taste.
Right and wrong are a spectrum. And even if one thinks one's own religious tradition is more likely to be right in more ways that doesn't mean one can't think other religious traditions may have something to teach one.
Also, there are ways and ways of being wrong. I think Mormonism is fatally flawed from a philosophical perspective: I think all the standard atheist arguments about evidence work against the Mormon god in a way they don't work against orthodox theistic traditions. On the other hand right-wing American-style fundamentalism of the sort that supports Trump seems (from its outward appearance) spiritually bankrupt which is a different way of being wrong.
Of course there are more alternatives. That's why I said etcetera. There are more alternatives than I could reasonably list in a forum.
What I am trying to get at (and clearly failing to do) is the idea that all faith paths are equally good, equally useful, equally meaningful, for the individual follower. Given we have no way of objectively measuring the truth of any one faith it seems to me that their value to the individual is the only useful measure.
If someone agrees with that position then they will have no problem with their child following a different faith path to the one they follow. If they believe their faith path is the only one, or the most favoured one, they will disagree.
I firmly believe that all faith paths, including atheism, are equally good, useful, and meaning for the individuals who hold them.
It’s not a spectrum. One can think something incorrect/mistaken/not corresponding to reality without attributing it to demons. Your formulation again forces people into choosing standpoints that make them look like arseholes.
I know that!
Some Christians do argue that but they are a minority. Christians who believe all faith paths are equally valid are also a minority. Between them are many different positions. I'm not attempting to get anyone to make a ridiculous standpoint. I just want to know where they stand.
My problem with this was the idea that you either "regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship" or you "regard all faith paths as valid" or some intermediate spot. This leaves no place for me or quite a few other Christians IMHO. If I believe that my Muslim neighbor is sincerely mistaken, but at the same time do NOT regard his faith as demon worship, where does that leave me? I'm not in the middle. I will never "progress" to thinking all faith paths valid. That position is IMHO logically self-invalidating. Either one is right, or all are wrong. That's because they are mutually contradictory, so all cannot be right. Logic is the problem here, not the evilness or otherwise of my heart attitude toward non-Lutherans.
It leaves you somewhere in between. Somewhere in between is where the great majority of believers in all faiths fall.
However, I do believe all faiths are equally valid because I do not believe we have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. Therefore the only measure of any belief is its subjective usefulness to the individual.
I don't think your belief is wrong; I think it's exactly right for you. Similarly, my atheism is exactly right for me.
I think you sincerely want your subjective truth to also be objectively true and apply to everyone regardless of whatever subjective truth they hold. I think that is an error.
However, I do believe all faiths are equally valid because I do not believe we have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. Therefore the only measure of any belief is its subjective usefulness to the individual.
The therefore is interesting. We don't have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. But the rules of formal reasoning apparently hold. As do the categories of utility and of the individual.
I think the premise would be more interesting if pressed further.
However, I do believe all faiths are equally valid because I do not believe we have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. Therefore the only measure of any belief is its subjective usefulness to the individual.
The therefore is interesting. We don't have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. But the rules of formal reasoning apparently hold. As do the categories of utility and of the individual.
I think the premise would be more interesting if pressed further.
I have been trying, with some contorting, to keep this detour germane to the OP! But I agree that it could be pressed further.
I firmly believe that all faith paths, including atheism, are equally good, useful, and meaning for the individuals who hold them.
At first glance, that sounds very reasonable, but I think it carries the implication that any God or mystic focus must itself also be meaningful. How would that be assessed?
I have been trying, with some contorting, to keep this detour germane to the OP!
Sure. But if not pressed further and left as it stands, there’s no way your perspective could possibly be germane to the thread in the first place. If the philosophy is ‘whatever works for you’, then there’s no way it could be relevant to others. It’s like you’re granting permission for something you have no perspective on or authority over anyway.
I firmly believe that all faith paths, including atheism, are equally good, useful, and meaning for the individuals who hold them.
At first glance, that sounds very reasonable, but I think it carries the implication that any God or mystic focus must itself also be meaningful. How would that be assessed?
By whom would it need to be assessed?
Also, surely if anyone has belief in a God or a mystic focus then it must be meaningful to them or they wouldn't have it.
I have been trying, with some contorting, to keep this detour germane to the OP!
Sure. But if not pressed further and left as it stands, there’s no way your perspective could possibly be germane to the thread in the first place. If the philosophy is ‘whatever works for you’, then there’s no way it could be relevant to others. It’s like you’re granting permission for something you have no perspective on or authority over anyway.
Fair enough. I attempted to show it was germane by pointing out that anyone who adopts a ‘whatever works for you’ philosophy wouldn't have a problem with their child adopting a different belief to the one they hold, whereas someone who has a more exclusive philosophy would want to ensure (as much as possible) that their child adopted the same belief.
I disagree that I have no perspective on the matter because atheism is a belief and this discussion is about belief. And I don't see myself as 'granting permission ' either. I don't have authority and nor does anyone else. 'Whatever works for you' when it comes to matters of belief is an admission that we cannot comprehend objective truth and therefore we shouldn't argue or discriminate with anyone's subjective truth.
Assessment of such things has to be experiential, not third person. I have no idea what twangs your bow.
Exactly. No one else can ever share my subjective experience of a cup of coffee, let alone how I perceive the universe.
This goes to the theory of mind, the inference that others have a mind like me. It's a useful working tool, but quite often humans seem to lapse into solipsism, and think that other people are not different. Maybe this explains religious intolerance partly, well, I believe in the Matrix, you are mad/stupid if you don't. Or, you should be like me.
Comments
My son found all religions a turn-off. PlayStation was more fun on a Sunday morn.
Not at all. Pluralism isn't a view at all -- it is a meta-view. Without having a view in the first place, you really can't have an appreciation of multiple views. First, you need a place to stand -- then you can move the world. It makes no sense to appreciate all views but have none yourself. Beliefs are experiential. Avoiding all such experience just means that you are equally ignorant of all beliefs, not that you are knowledgeable of them all.
Not sure you understand. I am an atheist. My view is there is no God. That's what experience has taught me. However, that's just my view based on my experience and I don't expect anyone else to agree with me and nor do I have any wish to argue anyone into agreeing with me. I am a pluralist in the sense that it doesn't matter a damn what people believe in, so long as that belief is arrived at freely. The whole point of a belief in something is that it serves the needs of whoever believes in it.
... expresses liberty as the paramount (only?) value. And is that not a (rather arbitrary) commitment in itself?
That isn't what I wrote. I said that you cannot evaluate an experience-based perspective meaningfully without having had a similar experience to compare it with. Given your equating experience with locomotives, you may still not agree. Nonetheless, I would prefer it if you were dismissing my actual point.
No, the comparison is how can you claim to be a woman if you've never experienced being any gender or sex?
I don't understand your argument. Are you saying a child cannot make a decision about anything without having had prior experience of something similar to it?
But I disagree with you implied notion that the child has to be capable of properly evaluating something in order to arrive at a decision. That's like saying a child can't decide it dislikes Ginger Nuts unless it has had a prior positive experience of a McVitie's Digestive.
And even if that is true, the child has had experience of being an agnostic even if it hasn't rationalised what it believes as agnosticism. And I assure you that having maintained for many years that I was an agnostic, agnosticism is a faith position.
Continuing with the biscuit analogy, why not just give a child a plate of biscuits, insist it tries all of them, and then let it decide which variety is prefers.
Experience has taught me that it's the value most important to me.
It's also complicated by the non-rational aspects of religion. I remember nearly swooning at my first Catholic mass, at the age of 16, as the combination of music, visual imagery, spoken poetry, was heady stuff. But 40 years later I felt similar about Sufi singing and dancing. I guess I am a hopeless romantic.
Interesting. Before I accepted that I was an atheist I was an agnostic. Could I have arrived at atheism without having previously been an agnostic? I don't know.
Even now I'm not a conventional atheist in that I accept the possibility of non-deistic supernatural phenomena.
But I would question the idea that a child raised with pluralism can't decide what it believes in because it has had no experience of belief. It's true the child will have had no experience of theistic belief (as was my case) but it will inevitably acquire a set of beliefs in some form or other.
I would say that it is only ever possible to make an assessment of something if one has one or more things to compare it to.
I remember my Catholic girl-friend had a two year old nephew, and his parents were giving him a kind of early induction. Thus, pictures of Jesus on the cross elicited sad face, and so on. I don't know if he was equipped to compare and contrast with anything else. Of course, some secularists object to this. However, parents can fill their kids' heads with anything they like, including secularism. I suppose we reason that in adolescence, we are more equipped to discriminate, not sure about that.
Do you mean parents can fill their kids' heads with anything they like in the sense that that's what parents inevitably do? Or do you mean that parents have a right to fill their kids' heads with anything they like?
The first position is, unfortunately, true. The second position I strongly disagree with.
I'm not proposing to stop parents filling their child's head with anything they like during family time. But I would limit their ability to do so by banning faith schools and home-schooling.
NB. I would suggest that exposing a two-year old to any representation of the crucifixion qualifies as psychological abuse.
We could say that parents have the opportunity to teach their child anything they like and some abuse that opportunity. I would agree the alternative, such as heavy intrusion into private life or children being taken away from parents (which I think happened in the Kibbutz system) is often worse.
I would see a state and secular education system as a necessary addition and sometimes corrective to parental teaching.
I agree, the 'about' is key here but would argue that scope is equally important.
Indeed, though your experience was restricted to varieties of Juedo/Christian faith which is hardly pluralism.
Are there varieties of faith: e.g., Buddhism, Islam, Shinto, Hinduism, Wicca, Daoism, atheism, etcetera, that you regard as plain wrong or grossly inadequate? Or do you think they are legitimate for those who hold them, but simply not to your taste?
Legitimate probably wasn't the best word. I meant something like, equally valid. There are self-defining Christians who regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship and there are self-defining Christians who regard all faith paths as valid inasmuch as they lead to the same place and there are many self-defining Christians who are somewhere in between. Where someone is on the spectrum has relevance to how they would feel about the faith their child grows up with.
That's Islam and Judaism off the table for starters then.
They surely do not teach this today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice#Islam
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sacrifice#Judaism
AIUI Judaism doesn't practice animal sacrifice because there is no Temple, not because it's not OK. Were the Temple rebuilt, my understanding is that they could restart.
You conceded earlier that Allah in Islam is the same God as described in Christianity: they describe the same referent. (Matters are more ambiguous if neither is real; the identity or non-identity of fictional or otherwise unreal characters being not a matter of simple fact.) So Christians and Muslims and Jews cannot rationally regard each other as plain wrong even as they think the differences are down to more than just taste.
Right and wrong are a spectrum. And even if one thinks one's own religious tradition is more likely to be right in more ways that doesn't mean one can't think other religious traditions may have something to teach one.
Also, there are ways and ways of being wrong. I think Mormonism is fatally flawed from a philosophical perspective: I think all the standard atheist arguments about evidence work against the Mormon god in a way they don't work against orthodox theistic traditions. On the other hand right-wing American-style fundamentalism of the sort that supports Trump seems (from its outward appearance) spiritually bankrupt which is a different way of being wrong.
Isn't 'valid' an odd word for an atheist to use? I would imagine from your POV all are equally invalid; by contrast, for an adherent of a religion theirs is the one which is valid - since theirs is the one they believe in. Is this so controversial?
To complicate things further it's not just in one respect that religious systems can be more or less similar. Mormonism is superficially close to orthodox Christianity; deeper down it is utterly unlike and much closer to, say, Norse polytheism.
Confucianism meanwhile is so unlike Christianity that it may as far as I know be not even in competion and as compatible as Aristotelian philosophy.
My problem with this was the idea that you either "regard anything other than their particular branch of faith as tantamount to demon worship" or you "regard all faith paths as valid" or some intermediate spot. This leaves no place for me or quite a few other Christians IMHO. If I believe that my Muslim neighbor is sincerely mistaken, but at the same time do NOT regard his faith as demon worship, where does that leave me? I'm not in the middle. I will never "progress" to thinking all faith paths valid. That position is IMHO logically self-invalidating. Either one is right, or all are wrong. That's because they are mutually contradictory, so all cannot be right. Logic is the problem here, not the evilness or otherwise of my heart attitude toward non-Lutherans.
Read Aquinas and prepare to have your mind blown...
Then I have no idea what you were attempting to communicate.
But it's harder to see how one could incorporate Buddist philosophy into Christian theology without losing something important to one or the other, just because they are closer and deal more with the same areas.
This comment made me think this thread as a whole maybe takes these traditions as more unified and static than they actually are. All of the great world religions and philosophies are rich and multi-stranded - with not just differences in theology, but also different 'charisms' (as a Catholic might say) for religious orders and so forth. And they do change and find different expressions over time. I find it difficult to imagine a coherent or valuable synthesis of, say, Calvinist Reformed theology and Vajrayana Buddhism. But Robert E Kennedy is both a Jesuit priest and a Zen roshi, Sister Elaine Macinnes is a nun and a Zen master; and Laurence Freeman, John Main, and to some extent Rowan Williams have IMV done a creditable job finding resonances between some Asian traditions and the spirituality of the Desert Fathers.
And as the fact of all these different intra-tradition schools shows, each of them has its own innovators and evolutions. It's not as though 'pluralism' in any deep sense can consist of showing kids a bunch of shrink-wrapped solutions and then expecting them to choose amongst them once they've attained some notional marker of competent individual judgement. I think of it more as introducing them to a range of approaches that allows them to think with and through the tradition they've been raised in (for surely we are all raised within a tradition of some kind, however ill-defined it may be) and to find a coherent path for their lives; not as a selection of orthodoxies they agree or disagree with in their entirety.
Of course there are more alternatives. That's why I said etcetera. There are more alternatives than I could reasonably list in a forum.
What I am trying to get at (and clearly failing to do) is the idea that all faith paths are equally good, equally useful, equally meaningful, for the individual follower. Given we have no way of objectively measuring the truth of any one faith it seems to me that their value to the individual is the only useful measure.
If someone agrees with that position then they will have no problem with their child following a different faith path to the one they follow. If they believe their faith path is the only one, or the most favoured one, they will disagree.
I firmly believe that all faith paths, including atheism, are equally good, useful, and meaning for the individuals who hold them.
I know that!
Some Christians do argue that but they are a minority. Christians who believe all faith paths are equally valid are also a minority. Between them are many different positions. I'm not attempting to get anyone to make a ridiculous standpoint. I just want to know where they stand.
It leaves you somewhere in between. Somewhere in between is where the great majority of believers in all faiths fall.
However, I do believe all faiths are equally valid because I do not believe we have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. Therefore the only measure of any belief is its subjective usefulness to the individual.
I don't think your belief is wrong; I think it's exactly right for you. Similarly, my atheism is exactly right for me.
I think you sincerely want your subjective truth to also be objectively true and apply to everyone regardless of whatever subjective truth they hold. I think that is an error.
The therefore is interesting. We don't have the capacity to perceive or comprehend objective truth. But the rules of formal reasoning apparently hold. As do the categories of utility and of the individual.
I think the premise would be more interesting if pressed further.
I have been trying, with some contorting, to keep this detour germane to the OP! But I agree that it could be pressed further.
Sure. But if not pressed further and left as it stands, there’s no way your perspective could possibly be germane to the thread in the first place. If the philosophy is ‘whatever works for you’, then there’s no way it could be relevant to others. It’s like you’re granting permission for something you have no perspective on or authority over anyway.
By whom would it need to be assessed?
Also, surely if anyone has belief in a God or a mystic focus then it must be meaningful to them or they wouldn't have it.
Fair enough. I attempted to show it was germane by pointing out that anyone who adopts a ‘whatever works for you’ philosophy wouldn't have a problem with their child adopting a different belief to the one they hold, whereas someone who has a more exclusive philosophy would want to ensure (as much as possible) that their child adopted the same belief.
I disagree that I have no perspective on the matter because atheism is a belief and this discussion is about belief. And I don't see myself as 'granting permission ' either. I don't have authority and nor does anyone else. 'Whatever works for you' when it comes to matters of belief is an admission that we cannot comprehend objective truth and therefore we shouldn't argue or discriminate with anyone's subjective truth.
Exactly. No one else can ever share my subjective experience of a cup of coffee, let alone how I perceive the universe.
This goes to the theory of mind, the inference that others have a mind like me. It's a useful working tool, but quite often humans seem to lapse into solipsism, and think that other people are not different. Maybe this explains religious intolerance partly, well, I believe in the Matrix, you are mad/stupid if you don't. Or, you should be like me.