Epistemology and ontology are the same thing in two words. — Constance

Another way to encapsulate where I seem to diverge from what I assume to be the limitations of your more well grounded, logically, and thus, conventionally, current belief/settlement. And to tie our discussion back in to the OP.

For me, all of philosophy from aesthetics to metaphysics, is a process of knowing, which is a process of making and believing.

Except ontology qua what ontology purports to pursue, Being. That, if pursued to its end, is not knowing, but being. How does this require any logical assessment? Ontology pursues the nature, ultimately, of being [itself]. How better to pursue being than by turning away from making and believing (including but not limited to all philosophy) and just being?

And here's where the essence of religion resurrects. Being, necessarily not being any "pursuit" let alone a philosophical one, is virtually impossible for an organism whose brain has been generationally and individually conditioned to flooding of autonomously surfacing images, in complex structures and in accordance with evolved laws, which trigger the body, like code, to feel, and act. The catch being, the Body, mesmerized by the form; the Narrative form--Subject and predicate constructing meaning successively and in recursive(?) loops, building swirls of meaning--stops aware-ing it's true nature: nature; and, starts aware-ing "a self" in the swirls of meaning.
Eating to satisfy hunger becomes, sushi, crab cakes, and Icecream; then, I love Icecream; then, I am loved; simplified and rushed, but, I think you see the picture.

Soon enough, I need to be rich, to hell with my neighbor, she's encroaching on my driveway 12 inches. Etc. We have utterly become the they, because everything is the they. Heidegger can try to come up with tricks, sophisticated western versions of Wu-wei or Zazen, but ultimately none of these are actually just being.

Religion at its essence but rarely properly executed, provides only a Crack, a glimpse notwithstanding the impossibility, into being. Because regardless of institutions and their motives, at essence religion demands the sacrifice of ego. That is, abandon Mind.

sorry, I know you are receiving multiple notifications. Last one, just thought I'd say, because I know you may have alluded to this, most recently, when you may have properly protested, that that "glimpse" we've been volleying back and forth, each in our own "language," is a "big deal" (cant remember your word) when I had said it was unnoticeable.

Maybe there's something to Kant's "sublime" before it is described; that is, before it is "sublime."

You look at a mountain, you feel something instantly because you have aware-ing-ed seein without the intrusion of Mind. That feeling is a big deal. And maybe, and this is depressing, that's exactly what aware-ing being without Mind always feels like. Maybe our superimposed order, functional as it has been for thd prosperity of the species, has, by displacing present aware-ing being, dulled the experience of the sublime which is often the feeling triggered by sensation, but has been displaced by meaning.

And just as any superficial copy is a dull version of the original. . .

Vedanta says Brahman (ultimate reality) is Existence-Consciousness-Bliss.

Hmm. But is it in the constructions? Or is it in the Organism providing both the infrastructure and feedback? — ENOAH

To speak the word "construction' or "organism" is a construction. This is why post modern philosophy really is the final philosophy: inquiry reaches into its own structure and finds itself looking back, as with questions about the nature of logic, say. Every time inquiry goes as deep as it can go it encounters the language that produces the thought that is inquiry itself. Kant is a called a transcendental idealist for this reason, and positivists got tired of a hundred years of Kant and declared nonsense to metaphysics. Structures of thought itself are not analyzable once thought is reduced to logicality simpliciter and so the existentialist finds herself just staring unproductively at nothing in search for being. I think of the Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức who set himself afire. Yet his mind was not absent of the thoughts of protest and judgment up to final moment, that is, he knew what he was doing and why. Most interesting test for the nature of agency, the "who" one is.

There is a fundamental agreement with your thoughts that emerges from this, which is an inescapable transcendentalism. The quasi mystic, like myself, stands in a twilight world, like something out of pseudo Dionysius the Areopogite's Cloud of Unknowing, and I think this is exactly where one should be or Eugene Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation in which Fink tries to pin the activity. To observe the generative actuality in the generative moment, seen AS generative in real time: the live consciousness prduced, brought into existence as a flow of experiential-reality which is received in the actual occurrent "acceptedness" of the present, but IN the theoretical mentality that beholds the being-there at all. Hear the way he puts it, referring to the phenomenologist:

......by producing the transcendental onlooker, who as such does not go along with the belief in the world, with the theses on being [Seinsthesen] held by the world-experiencing human I. Rather,
he takes a look at that belief in the world in such a way as to inquire back behind the "world-character" of world-believing life, behind humanness, and thereupon to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human. 9Thus
through the reduction the proper theme of philosophy is revealed: the transcendental constitution of the world

Really, he is expressing simply what happens when inquiry takes one to this threshold of discovering our foundational indeterminacy which is discovered in the concrete moment of experience production, as when I put forth thoughts to conceive this sentence. I stop, and bring the whole of productive thought to a halt, and turn thought into an indeterminacy by removing the certainty of the affirmation that goes unchallenged in the thinking. But then, this indeterminacy, conceived as indeterminacy is a new thought construction itself, and we achieve what for me is a rather dramtatic impasse as the regression never stops, for thoughts about thoughts are always subject to the same review, the same gainsaying. One will never "leave" this place by, if you will, dropping out of language, for it is in the language structure that is was brought to light. But again, this does nothing to render less significant the interface itself! You see, agency-in-language or language-in-agency in the enlightened awareness does not witdraw from language; it withdraws from a hermeneutical perspective, from, as Fink puts it, the "world-experiencing human I." Houses and trees and General Motors recede into the background, for one now takes up the "impossible" givenness of the world. Impossible? See Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Long story, a bit long, and windy. There is a long extension by Caputo in his Prayers and Tears of Derrida that is complicated, but worth the read.

The case I am trying to make here is, and I know I repeat this, that "language" never leaves perception for us, interpretations come and go, and I put the term "language" now in double inverted commas because, and this is a major point I try to push, language itself is under examination, and it has been revealed that this leads to an infinite regression, but this cannot make language external to enlightenment for enlightenment in this quasi mystical sense is part of the structure of understanding. One cannot be, to recall Mill's old maxim, be both the pig and the philosopher. Enlightenment produced in the experiences of an infantile mind have a very limited sense of agency. For me, there is only one way to find remedy, an obvious way: language itself is transcendental, but not in the historical Hegelian or even Heideggerian sense. This is hard explain, but simply put, language as an interpretative medium is not a "medium" at all, but structed enlightenment itself. Nothing stands outside "noumena" and double inverted commas are everywhere in this context as language reaches into the impossible presence of its own generative possibility.

Except ontology qua what ontology purports to pursue, Being. That, if pursued to its end, is not knowing, but being. How does this require any logical assessment? Ontology pursues the nature, ultimately, of being [itself]. How better to pursue being than by turning away from making and believing (including but not limited to all philosophy) and just being? — ENOAH

Kant opens this door. But plain analysis does, too. That one epistemic failure: How does anything out there get into knowledge claims? This has to be pondered, you know, cup there, brain here....errrr, explain. Once physicalism is undone, THEN the world steps forward. An account of my knowledge of the world needs to close the distance between known and knower. This is a brain-physicality problem, so what does physicality say about this relation? It says there are two separate localities, just as when we talk about physical things, like fence posts and cactuses, one here, one there. But this "thereness" of the fence post is physically distinct from the cactus such that there can be no epistemic crossing, no intimation through the "medium" of physical space of its being-a-cactus, and this is not, at first, a language problem at all. It is purely a problem of the mechanics of physicality, if you will, the causality of relations (what the naturalist Quine calls the bottom line of justification of knowledge claims).

All I can say is that once this becomes a vivid problem, the kind that shows itself as truly important (for we are accustomed to ignoring or never even imagining such questions prior to their being taken up. That is, we are in such a "mode of acceptance" prior to basic questions, that basic questions seem outrageous and absurd) one sees that physicalism and its "localism" has no place at all in foundational thinking. And now, the world is upside down: physical distance is a mode of what is given rather than the givenness being a mode of what is physical. That is, when I say things like The cup is on the table, and make the move to basic questions, the distance between me and the cup is now interpreted as a foundational transcendence, meaning, the cup remains what it is in plain nonanalytical talk, and its being on the table, its being "over there," fits nicely into many contexts of discussion and reference, but move discussion to this other order of thought, philosophy/phenomenology, and the plain spoken "thereness" vanishes, and the intimacy of knowing is primordial. I am not a brain, most clearly. I am thought, feeling, anticipation, memory, and on and on, or rather, to be clear, I witness these as the most intimate and unassailable "objects" of my knowing, and a brain is an object like a tree or a cactus, before me, acknowledged. Does the brain produce consciousness? Of course not. Consciousness encounters a brain in the phenomenological horizon of events. Thinking that the brain does exclusively generate consciousness makes knowledge impossible (per the above). But does this mean that a brain is not causally related to thought, feelings, and the rest? Of course not. It is evidently the case that there is this causal relation, but epistemically causal relations do not define the relation between me and the the known object. Casual influence makes sense, but certainly not causal generativity. If this were the case, to repeat, knowledge would be impossible.

Metaphysical physicalism, or "scientism" as it is pejoratively called, simply fails at the basic level so completely (there is no working paradigm in science that can even approach epistemology) that in order to responsibly draw up a theory, one MUST step into the pure phenomenology of the perceptual event in order even begin.

And so, in response to your "turning away from making and believing" in discussing being, this would entail the physicalist position, the treating of subjective states as independent of the observed. But a phenomenon is inclusive of this because this is the way the world presents itself" the taking up of a lamp AS a lamp, is there IN the lamp event, as are the attitudes, emotions, interest, and concepts. They all "attend" the lamp in the constitution of the lamp in its "thereness". Physicalism and a physicalist being, by comparison, is just an abstraction, a reification of a single feature of the perceptual event, its locality in space. Even if one is not being physicalist about this, the presence of the world's being in the perception of an object is complex. Being is a simple term, another world for presence, if you like, but, and this is what I call the jumping to the chase, the simplicity acknowledged in, well, the quasi mystical apprehension of being-as-such, is OUR being as such. Meaning, we really do exist, and when I say a stone exists, too, I am projecting my being on to the stone at the basic level of apprehending. Simplicity here never does overcome and annihilate complexity, for the complexity, too, is part of our transcendental nature.
Now, I have put the whole matter in deeply troubled waters, no? You and I REALLY ARE in a world and our problems and their entanglements are real. What is NOT real is that which belongs to the interpretative error made as a matter of the habits of the race, as Kierkegaard put it. What is happening before our eyes everyday is happening, no question, but what it IS is a question.

That was a bit excessive.

To speak the word "construction' or "organism" is a construction. — Constance

Agreed. But that never stopped anyone (generally).

Every time inquiry goes as deep as it can go it encounters the language that produces the thought that is inquiry itself — Constance

Well put

Structures of thought itself are not analyzable once thought is reduced to logicality simpliciter and so the existentialist finds herself just staring unproductively at nothing in search for being. — Constance

So well said!

Or admits to having no access via [that uniquely human form of] existence, and so, gets on with the business of existence, knowing (unlike postivists) that it's just business.

he knew what he was doing and why. Most interesting test for the nature of agency, the "who" one is. — Constance

Do you think he maintained focus on knowing, right through to the end; or, did he silence the knowing, the pride that would follow, and the fear which the former arises to overcome. Did he make the ultimate sactifice; one stripped of all construction, loosened from the (safety) net of becoming; a sacrifice of being?

If the former, "one" remains "I" even in its noblest sacrifice.

If the latter, one truly is the body being and ceasing to be.

Cloud of Unknowing, — Constance

A fascinating Western construction for its time.

to reduce that life to the transcendental constituting experience of the world that was concealed by the apperception of the human — Constance

WTF? I'm intrigued. Thanks!

I stop, and bring the whole of productive thought to a halt, and turn thought into an indeterminacy by removing the certainty of the affirmation that goes unchallenged in the thinking. — Constance

You know, that might be a "crack" a glitch in the mechanics where aware-ing might find "it's [organic] self." I've never tried.
But you must agree. Instantly "thoughts" flood the aware-ing, even in its "effort" (which habitually employs thought).

But then, this indeterminacy, conceived as indeterminacy is a new thought construction itself, a — Constance

ah, yes, you do agree.

rather dramtatic impasse as the regression never stops, — Constance

The trick is in the "focus" your organic aware-ing makes. Yes, infinite reduction, you cannot stop. But "you" can aware the silent breathing instant. Get a glimpse of that and see what "you" is.

Caputo in his Prayers and Tears of Derrida that is complicated, but worth the read. — Constance

Thank you! Is it nevertheless "true" to Wittgenstein? Does it assess Derrida? Favorably?

language" never leaves perception for us — Constance

And I have never ceased to agree.

Then why harp on about being and the essence of religion? At worst, it is a useful ritual. If we can get a glimpse of only being, a nanosecond, to add that to our knowing, albeit, by definition, that experience as knowledge, is no longer that experience, yet, our knowing will be enriched and grounded. Both phenomenology (Kant's and Husserl's) and existentialism (SK's, N's, Heidegger's and Sartre's) are "more" functional with that added tool. At the very least.

This has to be pondered, you know, cup there, brain here....errrr, explain — Constance

This comes up consistently. Does this answer, if any necessary premises are accepted, address it? Use rock because cup has the added complexity of being a cultural construct.

In nature without language eyes see rock and brain process it bt sending signals to trigger an appropriate feeling, drive, action, if any. The "conversion" of the rock into the object, "the rock" doesn't take place. So that your question, "how rock there brain here" does not even come up.

In world of human mind, eyes see rock, a conversion into language autonomously takes place, drives feelings actions, are displaced/determined by those constructions. Now eyes "see" "rock

physicality say about this relation? It says there are two separate localities — Constance

Is this necessarily so? Am I misunderstanding "physicality"? Mind makes difference, Mind makes the space between. Physically, it might be simply as I described above. Sensor and object are One in Sensation

And so, in response to your "turning away from making and believing" in discussing being, this would entail the physicalist position, the treating of subjective states as independent of the observed — Constance

Yes. You may be absolutely and inevitably right here. Where you have taken us. It may be that--even if my [admittedly fully constructed] depiction happens to be accurate, and Sensor-object-response are all One in being; we--we specifically human beings are irreversibly alienated from that Reality. That, I agree with you, and any resistance on my part is psychological, or, wishful thinking.

You and I REALLY ARE in a world and our problems and their entanglements are real. What is NOT real is that which belongs to the interpretative error made as a matter of the habits of the race, as Kierkegaard put it. — Constance

No maybe about it, from where I'm standing; there are many ways to express it but yes:

1. We humans are real; as real and present as a stone or an elephant.

2. But we are ineluctably in a world of representation; and, "owing to that" we do not aware-ing that present being; but, instead, turn our aware-ing to the Narratives of becoming.

As for our (that is yours, Constance, and mine) dialectic seeming never to arrive at a complete close [BTW, fine by me, and, I sense, by you] here is another beam of light on the point of difference.

I see in the Western philosophers I have read (comparatively, Eugene Fink! for me, not a lot) places where they have erred and others where they have not gone far enough. I'm sure others do. And I do, fully aware of my ignorance. But it happens. I can't help it. As I believe, Mind is an autonomous "thing." The difference between us contextually might be my ignorance. Either it leads me down a provably wrong path, or it permits me to wander away from authorial intention, or both.

So I see Husserl as erring when he correctly hypothesized that the transcendental experience belonged to what we've loosely agreed to call the "language." But then seemingly elevated that experience in what I find to be this shadowy hierarchy of reality inescapable since Kant, but showing up everywhere starting with Plato. Heidegger then repeats this error with his Dasein talk.

For me it is simpler. The elevated reality where humans are concerned, belongs to being [that organic being]. All else is talk.

Husserl's transcendental contradictorily involves the Ego. It is, by definition, not elevated.

I now both anticipate and welcome your reply as to why it is in fact an elevated experience notwithstanding the Subject's place front and center.

Addendum: the ego/I is only self evident (or apodictic) within the "rules of play" giving "life" to the ego, to begin with. It is (I am) not absolutely apodictic.

Addendum: but I recognize Husserl's Transcendental experience might be as far as we go re the essence of religion; and that just being, as I've been promoting, may actually be impossible for us. And, that this is akin to what you're saying. But I'm not certain.

I haven't had time to read all the responses above incase I lost the train of my own responses.......

I believe religion is a result of human imagination and the power of our brains.

Firstly to put language and words to such abstracts concepts and make them captivating to others to share that idea is so powerful. And taken for granted for 1000s of yrs.

Then I want to say that these ideas were adopted and used to grant power for the individual and chosen lineage......shamans or pharaohs...being earthly embodiment of these gods....and this type of religion lasted for many 1000s yrs. With whole prosperous civilisations based upon that model.

Yet these models had masses of downtrodden and unworthy. Life there was cheap.

So it is only logical that these masses imagined their own saviours and as they had no earthly resprestative with any power, no wonder more ephemeral saviours were imagined.

And eventually the masses won the war of attrition so the powerful quickly adopted these stories and quickly placed themselves in important positions to speak the good word of the Lord or his representative who was also surrounded in mystery.

And here we are 1000 yrs later still believing our first intelligent mushroom induced fantasies.

And here we are 1000 yrs later still believing our first intelligent mushroom induced fantasies. — Gingethinkerrr

Ok, all that might be so.

But what was that fantasy? What was pug into words and captivating? What was the result of human imagination?

Was it commandments? Was it a revelation of truth? Or, what is the essence?

Could the essence not be a result of our evolutionary make up. Just as cancer is a consequence of biological malfunction. Maybe our imagination needs to fill in the blanks in our understanding.

I don't think our biology thinks. No blanks to fill in because it's all blank.

But you likely disagree.

From a purely physical perspective. Ig must be something like you say. Religion manifests because it is fit to do so, in terms of our survival. For example, given the complexity of our brain, it counters a natural drive to die. Or even, it manifests a mysterious intuition we have materially connecting us to Nature as a Whole.

I thoughts on the whole matter of religion is varied and widespread. Could you perhaps give me a summation what has happened over the 9 pages as I am late to the party.

I think it could be best to start by looking at differing cosmological perspectives both now and historically, then extrapolating further back into prehistory.

I think Mircea Eliade did some stellar scholarship on religions and religiosity in general.

Do you believe we need language to think? As in this here written language?

In terms of Cosmological perspectives this might spark some interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6s_O0_6Ehs

I hold that religion actually has a foundation discoverable in the essential conditions of our existence. — Constance

According to Islamic doctrine, religion is built into our preprogrammed biological firmware, called "fitrah" in Islam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitra

Humanity is, however, overly flexible.

It is trivially easy to deprave and degenerate humans away from their innate biological firmware. There is a lot of power to be had in doing so.

Therefore, the need eventually arose for religious scripture to appear which contains a copy in human language of the biologically preprogrammed rules that humans should not break and that government should never overrule. That is why during his investiture ceremony the new king was always forced to kneel to religion in order to be crowned. He had to acknowledge the supremacy of God's law.

If there are no tensions or even conflict between the political overlord and religion, then it is not a true religion. The more the political overlord complains about a particular religion, the more it is doing its main job, which is to constrain the political overlord, and therefore the more truthful it is. If religion is never an impediment to the expansion of state power, then it is a false religion.

Could the essence not be a result of our evolutionary make up. — Gingethinkerrr

Don’t loose sight of the fact that evolutionary biology is a theory of the origin of species. It’s not necessarily a theory of the origin of everything about human nature, although it’s often assumed to be.

Therefore, the need eventually arose for religious scripture to appear which contains a copy in human language of the biologically preprogrammed rules that humans should not break and that government should never overrule. — Tarskian

I looked up that link provided, about ‘fitra’. It starts:

Fitra or fitrah (Arabic: فِطْرَة; ALA-LC: fiṭrah) is an Arabic word that means 'original disposition', 'natural constitution' or 'innate nature'. The concept somewhat resembles natural order in philosophy, although there are considerable differences as well. In Islam, fitra is the innate human nature that recognizes the oneness of God (tawhid). It may entail either the state of purity and innocence in which Muslims believe all humans to be born, or the ability to choose or reject God's guidance.

But why do you think that maps against biology? There’s nothing in biological theory that seems to correspond with that - it’s much more a religious idea, perhaps comparable to the ‘Buddha-nature’ of East Asian Buddhism.

But why do you think that maps against biology? — Wayfarer

Whenever a behavior is universal throughout history and throughout the world, it can only be biological. Otherwise, there would be or have been numerous societies in the past and/or throughout the world that did not have it. Every society that has ever existed, had a religion.

It always contains two things:

(1) a way of praying to the divine
(2) a set of rules not to break

If it is biological, then it is preprogrammed in one way or another into our biological firmware ("fitrah").

But then again, humanity is very flexible and adaptable. We are often able to overrule our own biological inclinations. Therefore, I believe that people are fundamentally religious but can also easily be trained not to be.

Whenever a behavior is universal throughout history and throughout the world, it can only be biological. — Tarskian

I don’t know about that. Language has a biological component, insofar as spoken language requires the unique physiology of h. Sapiens. But I don’t know if on that basis you could say that language is biological feature, or that studying it through the perspective biology would be more suitable than through, say, linguistics or anthropology.

But I don’t know if on that basis you could say that language is biological feature — Wayfarer

Yes, I believe that language is a biological feature that is part of the biologically preprogrammed firmware of humans. Otherwise, there would be humans in history or throughout the world that do not use language.

studying it through the perspective biology would be more suitable than through, say, linguistics or anthropology. — Wayfarer

That would be in my opinion unsuitable. For example, every stomach is ultimately built from atoms. That does not mean that you should address a stomach ache by means of theories in nuclear physics. But then again, this does not invalidate the observation that every stomach consists of atoms at some deeper level of observation detail.

But then again, this does not invalidate the observation that every stomach consists of atoms at some deeper level of observation detail. — Tarskian

It doesn’t need to be invalidated. It’s simply irrelevant, even if it is the case.

It doesn’t need to be invalidated. It’s simply irrelevant, even if it is the case. — Wayfarer

It is irrelevant until it isn't anymore.

Spolsky's law: All non-trivial abstractions, to some degree, are leaky.

The organic-chemistry composition of the stomach is mostly irrelevant but not completely.

The innate inclinations of humanity, its biological firmware, is actually even less irrelevant. A lot of human behavior is determined at the biological level.

Do you think Muslims would agree that ‘fitrah’ is a biological drive?

Do you think Muslims would agree that ‘fitrah’ is a biological drive? — Wayfarer

The term "fitrah" in Islam refers to all behavior that is innate. So, where else does it come from, if not from our biological firmware?

We are not a completely blank slate:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct

Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behaviour, containing innate (inborn) elements.

Humans are, however, incredibly flexible. We are able to override a lot of innate behaviors while animals cannot.

For example, people may be able to modify a stimulated fixed action pattern by consciously recognizing the point of its activation and simply stop doing it, whereas animals without a sufficiently strong volitional capacity may not be able to disengage from their fixed action patterns, once activated.

This flexibility is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Humans are beyond any doubt the species that is the most prone to corruption, depravity, and degeneracy.

The term "fitrah" in Islam refers to all behavior that is innate. So, where else does it come from, if not from our biological firmware? — Tarskian

Do Muslims believe that it’s biological firmware? Or doesn’t it matter whether they believe it?

Do Muslims believe that it’s biological firmware? Or doesn’t it matter whether they believe it? — Wayfarer

I use the term "firmware" metaphorically here. It's a bit like the software embedded in specialized devices, such as your phone's camera, but obviously implemented in a completely different technology.

We do not control or even properly understand this technology because we did not design it.

The Quran does not contain its implementation details. If it did, we would probably not understand it anyway.

So why bring Islam into it? why not just stick to biology?

So why bring Islam into it? why not just stick to biology? — Wayfarer

Because the idea that religion is biologically innate comes from there. It is standard Islamic doctrine.

If that’s so, you should be able to provide a citation.

If that’s so, you should be able to provide a citation. — Wayfarer

Quran 30:30 (Ar-Rum): So be steadfast in faith in all uprightness ˹O Prophet˺—the natural Way of Allah which He has instilled in ˹all˺ people. Let there be no change in this creation of Allah. That is the Straight Way, but most people do not know.

Fair point. But, it does add that ‘most people do not know’ it. And I’m still questioning the sense of it being identified as a ‘biological drive’. Humans are biologically the same everywhere, but culturally and intellectually they’re vastly different.

Humans are biologically the same everywhere, but culturally and intellectually they’re vastly different. — Wayfarer

Every human is even individually unique. By design so.

Designed by whom or what?