It has been interesting, even entertaining, to follow the intellectual acrobatics of Banjo and Yuyutsu as they search for a
cosmically-satisfying definition of "god" while each has a concept that has a universe dividing them. It never brings out the best aspects of the faithful in the eyes of non-believers for it so frequently raises the spectre of the artifice and contrivance that underpin religions, the renaming and redefining of attitudes and beliefs. In the case we see in their current posts re "god" the sins of hubris and conceit are wrought into the divine attributes of humility and respect.

I beg your patience Yuyutsu and seek not to condemn or humiliate but to demonstrate a glaring fault when you desperately try to insulate your god from unrighteous and unholy approach. You wrote: "You can tell those humans ideas apart from God because they attempt to describe God and assign to Him all sorts of attributes - whereas God Himself has none and cannot be described." While critical, even slightly contemptuous, of those whose presumption leads them to assume certain attributes of god, you, with an especially bestowed divine insight declare you are an authority on godly attributes to a degree that renders their opinions into blasphemy. It's as if you are proclaiming; "God has no attributes and cannot be described.........well, he did have an attribute that enabled him to communicate with some of his flock, to confer with me and my sect about attributes and description and THEN he gave them up. Only god, I and my colleague co-religionists are privy to this knowledge. So you'll all have to trust us with the only divine truth about him henceforward."

All monotheist religious protagonists face this sectarian dilemma. You hold atheists to an impossibly high standard of evidence yet you exempt yourself and your colleagues from that same standard. Special pleading for such exemption will not be countenanced. In the rare possibility of a second coming, at whose table will Jesus sit for the first supper? Who will be invited? let us hope that all Middle-eastern nuclear powers are included

Dear Banjo,

>>I hope I have correctly interpreted your definitions. Both describe religion as a process. <<

I am not sure which definitions of mine you mean. Beside the elephant metaphor, I quoted only the classical anthropological definion by Clifford Geertz. Religion as an “irresistible symbolic conditioning of “men” via the emotions” that you prefer, might be another of the 300 definitions.

I am not an anthropologist nor psychologist to comment further. I only know that some people can accept a definition of religion only if it implicitly assumes that the divine most religions refer to does not exist. Others can accept only definitions that implicitly ackonowledge the existence of the divine. My understranding of Geertz's definition was that it did neither, hence my preference for it.

Dear david f,

>> God was created by the human imagination at one point in time and will be discarded when humanity is grown up enough to discard it.<<

If you replace here "God" by "aether" or "electromagnetic field" then this sentence would make sense, although its second half would today apply with certainty only to aether.

When speaking about God, love, and many other concepts that cannot be subject to scientific observation you can only try to understand them, using mythological, metaphorical, speculatively-rational etc descriptions or ignore them. The latter is how I came to understand open minded atheists in distinction to my marx-leninist teachers - who tried to convince me that God did not exist, belief in Him was childish, superceded by science, etc - who then should be called anti-theists.

Dear George,

I am arguing with Yuyutsu not you.

Yuyutsu wrote: "What you are referring to are human ideas ABOUT God, of which there are many and which, unlike God, do born and die.

You can tell those humans ideas apart from God because they attempt to describe God and assign to Him all sorts of attributes - whereas God Himself has none and cannot be described."

In the above Yuyutsu is making a claim about the lack of attributes of God.

I am not arguing with you about whether God does or does not exist. You have not made any claims about God one way or another. I agree with your last paragraph and was not challenging your belief. You have not made any claims about God the way Yuyutsu has. He has also made claims about religion. He claims religion is a search for God. That ignores the fact there are non-theistic religions. You have made no statements about God's existence, attributes or lack of them. To claim knowledge of the unknowable is arrogant. I do not think your belief is childish. I think Yuyutsu's belief is childish.

You contrasted open-minded and closed-minded atheists. I contrast open-minded and closed-minded theists.

.

Dear George,

.

You wrote :

« I am not sure which definitions of mine you mean … »
.

Sorry, I was referring to Cliford Geertz’s definition of religion which you indicated was your favourite (among the 300 definitions you considered to be serious).
.

You then added :

« Religion as an “irresistible symbolic conditioning of “men” via the emotions” that you prefer, might be another of the 300 definitions »
.

Once again, I’m sorry for the confusion. You will recall that in my previous post I quoted Clifford Geertz’s definition “in extenso” (exactly as you had indicated it yourself) and then summarised it as follows :

« In other words, religion = the irresistible symbolic conditioning of “men” via the emotions »

[by “conditioning” I mean “inducing a particular state of mind”]
.

So this is not a definition of religion which I prefer (as you indicate). It is my summary of Geertz’s definition which you say you prefer. It is what I consider to be the essence of his definition.

Having studied it carefully and extracted its essence, It seems highly likely to me that it has been inspired by the ideas of the English mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who developed a theory of symbolism ("Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect", 1927) and whose “opus maximus” was “Process and Reality, an Essay in Cosmology” (1929) – in addition, of course, to the three-volume “Principia Mathematica” (1910–13), which he co-wrote with former student Bertrand Russell.

That said, I note that Geertz’s definition, apart from applying to religion, could have a multitude of applications as a “brainwashing” technique. The implementation of the process of five steps could not only induce particularly vulnerable people to espouse all sorts of weird and wonderful ideologies including (why not?) Islamic Extremism, perhaps it could even persuade an impressionable young person he is guilty of some terrible crime he has not committed.

It is certainly not limited to religion. There is no mention in the definition of any deity or other supernatural entity of any sort.

.

Dear david f,

Sorry, neither did I want to argue with you. I only wanted to point out that a sentence could be right or wrong when it concerns concepts that science has access to, but when applied to philosophical concepts that do not have their representation in science its validity might not be that easy to decide.

One reason for this is, I think, that in science, at least in physics, there is a clear distinction between the subject (observer, experimenter, etc) and the object seen as belonging to the world independent of the subject (in spite of Copenhagen).

I agree that to argue about the existence of God is as futile as to argue about e.g. the existence of time, since God, existence and time are all primitive (basic) concepts that I referred to above in my post to Banjo. As I wrote in http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=14464, Dawkins’ “reality is everything that exists” is a good definition of reality if we can agree on the meaning of “exists”, and a good definition of what is meant by saying that something exists if we can agree on what is understood by “reality”.

I also agree that there are people - theists as well as atheists - with philosophically rather naive understandings of what religion and/or science are all about who nevertheless like to argue with those from the opposite “world view camp” holding similarly simple understandings of these things. And there are those, again in both camps, who welcome contacts with those from the different or even opposing camp in order to enrich, broaden, their own position (hence also better formulate its verbal expression).

.

David’s last post reminds me that I have observed over the years that some of the commentators on OLO qualify atheism as a religion (mistakenly or by provocation?).

That inspires the following reflection (taking inspiration from Bertrand Russell) :

The fact that there is no evidence of a herd of elephants circling around in space blowing their trumpets, and having no reason to think that there is one, therefore, believing that there is no such thing, does not qualify as an ideology or a religion. It is simply common sense (i.e., good sense and sound judgement in practical matters - OED definition).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQzV_p8fJ9U

.