That sounds like a hip coffee shop with a liberal vibe, where you can talk about pretty much anything on the Democratic platform, avoiding Trump, pro-life, and border walls I'm guessing. — Hanover

While I get the sentiment of this comment, I imagine you know how off base it is. You can discuss any of those things as long as you don't attack the fundamental dignity/equality of actual people. There are members of the group that voted for Trump (both times) and support border walls. There are also anti-women/choice folk in the mix. Sure, we are communally more protective of certain groups and more explicitly inclusive of certain groups, but we are not just some Democratic support group by another name. Modern religion and the Democrats are not synonymous. It may be that Democrats have some of the same values as certain liberal religious communities, but that is no different than Democrats having some of the same values as certain conservative religious communities. As it turns out, the same people can be both members of a religion with particular values and members of a political party with particular values. Those communities can even be in conversation with one another by way of their mutual members.

Modern religion is both older than the current state of political affairs in the US and is more geographically diverse than citizens of the US. I'm not sure why being an American in conversation with an Australian invites reducing the conversation to just American concerns/ideologies/etc. Religions, being religious, etc. writ large do not require a particular political allegiance. Yes, some religions fit better with particular sorts of political ideas than others, but that coincidence does not indicate something essential about religion or politics collectively.

We can reduce any composite to some component and then describe/define the composite by the component's relationship to other stuff. Sure, it is fun and all, but since the group meets on more than just Saturdays (and the Saturday meetings are not even the primary way that most of the members engage with the group), calling it a Saturday meetup group is rather unhelpful when trying to place the group into a conceptual bucket.

The difference between the proto-Jews engaged in 400 BCE practice and the Satmars is vast - it seems strange to call them both a religion (or Jews). To my knowledge, however, one doesn't have to be a Satmar to be religious or a member of a religion. I'm not exactly sure what help the Satmar provide here except to say that the Satmar look sufficiently religious to you that anything that doesn't obviously strike you as Satmar like isn't religion. I guess if that is your starting point (contra actual use of the term "religion") I don't have much to say. Yes - virtually no one looks like the Satmar.

The argument isn't about whether my religion is as authentically religious as theirs (after all, I am not arguing for any notion of authenticity), but whether the concept of religion allows someone to assess whether a particular usage of the word is "wrong."

. . .

In the academic study of religions, discussions of monothetic and polythetic approaches have primarily been in service of developing a definition of the term.[13] How can alternate definitions of religion be assessed? If one were to offer a lexical definition (that is, a description of what the term means in common usage, as with a dictionary definition), then the definition one offers could be shown to be wrong. In common usage, for example, Buddhism typically is considered a religion and capitalism typically is not. On this point, some believe erroneously that one can correct a definition by pointing to some fact about the referents of the term. One sees this assumption, for example, in those who argue that the western discovery of Buddhism shows that theistic definitions of religion are wrong (e.g., Southwold 1978: 367). One can correct a real or lexical definition in this way, but not a stipulative definition, that is, a description of the meaning that one assigns to the term. When one offers a stipulative definition, that definition cannot be wrong. Stipulative definitions are assessed not by whether they are true or false but rather by their usefulness, and that assessment will be purpose-relative (cf. Berger 1967: 175). De Muckadell (2014) rejects stipulative definitions of religion for this reason, arguing that one cannot critique them and that they force scholars simply to “accept whatever definition is offered”. She gives the example of a problematic stipulative definition of religion as “ice-skating while singing” which, she argues, can only be rejected by using a real definition of religion that shows the ice-skating definition to be false. However, even without knowing the real essence of religion, one can critique a stipulative definition, either for being less adequate or appropriate for a particular purpose (such as studying forms of life across cultures) or, as with the ice-skating example, for being so far from a lexical definition that it is adequate or appropriate for almost no purpose.
— SEP on the Concept of Religion

The particular argument of whether one sect of Judaism or another is the true expression of Judaism is entirely aside from why I mentioned what I did. I simply pointed to an actual practice of people engaged in what was pretty undeniably a religious act. To look at that occasion and say "that was not religion" seems (at least to me) to require an awful lot of intellectual gymnastics and outright bad faith. Whether the Satmars are actually Jews given their anti-zionist stance isn't the least bit instructive on whether something that for all intents and purposes looks like a religious ceremony ceases to be one merely because it is explicitly existential/absurdist.

The psychoanalysis is not really about why some people engaged in religious practice see themselves as being religious or their group a religion, but why it is so important to you that they either aren't a religion or, if they are, it is only begrudgingly the case. It is not so different than why it is important for scientists (and science generally) to be inside or outside of the "religion" bubble. What does the term "religion" do that makes definitive inclusion/exclusion so important to people?

Use of the term doesn't change what people are actually doing. It may influence what they do going forward, but "naming" doesn't do magic and suddenly render something with some characteristic that it didn't have before (or remove some characteristic that it did have). I know the law sort of perverts the notion of language as non-magical (things can be lawful or not with significant future consequence riding on that determination), but what social structures are implicated by deciding that something is religion?

As you well know, I will beat a long since dead horse. You let me know the point if you still want to discuss it and I will do my best to not miss it. So far as I could tell, we were trying to figure out an anchored polythetic definition, maybe get your own list of anchor ideas, and then see where that gets us. But I've been wrong before.

. . .

This strategy gives rise to a third kind of polythetic approach, one that stipulates that one property (or one set of properties) is required. Call this an “anchored” polythetic definition. Consistently treating concepts as tools, Wittgenstein suggests this “anchored” idea when he writes that when we look at the history of a concept,

what we see is something constantly fluctuating … [but we might nevertheless] set over against this fluctuation something more fixed, just as one paints a stationary picture of the constantly altering face of the landscape. (1974: 77)

Given a stipulated “anchor”, a concept will then possess a necessary property, and this property reintroduces essentialism. Such a definition nevertheless still reflects a polythetic approach because the presence of the required property is not sufficient to make something a religion. To illustrate this strategy, one might stipulate that the only forms of life one will consider a religion will include

(A)
a belief in superempirical beings or powers

(thereby excluding nationalism and capitalism, for example), but the presence of this property does not suffice to count this form of life as a religion. Consider the properties set introduced above that also includes

(B)
ethical norms,
(C)
worship rituals,
(D)
participation believed to bestow benefits on participants, and
(E)
those who participate in this form of life see themselves as a distinct community.

If the threshold number is still three, then to be a religion, a form of life would have to have three of these properties, one of which must be (A). An anchored definition of religion like this would have the benefits of the other polythetic definitions. For example, it would not produce a clear line between religion and nonreligion but would instead articulate gradations between different forms of life (or between versions of one form of life at different times) that are less or more prototypically religious. However, given its anchor, it would produce a more focused range of cases.[15] In this way, the use of an anchor might both reflect the contemporary cosmological view of the concept religion and also address the criticism that polythetic approaches make a concept too vague.

. . . — SEP on Concept of Religion

It strikes me as curious that the SEP decided to publish an article on the "concept" of religion. Unsurprisingly, that article is mostly about the nature of conceptualisation, analysed through a systematic account of definition. It's effectively an article about definition, using religion as it's example. As such it attempts to systematise Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance, a fraught task which misses the point; some (most) terms are useful despite not being definable in such an explicit fashion.

So two things of note: the first, that it is no surprise that the article fails to explicitly define religion; the second, that religion centres on practice rather than on creed. — Banno

. . . As if the writer of the article, or the other folk who posted here, or I, did not think "what we need are the essential characteristics..."

The point is to determine what they are.
— Banno

Here's a topic!

I think this a too narrow notion of science. Science is, for many if not most scientists, a spiritual practice, a way of transcending their self by achieving an understanding of the world. The rituals of bottle washing and statistical analysis are part of a far bigger picture, they have a place within a great enterprise that has as it's goal the comprehension of reality itself. How is that not much the same as your circles in circles?

The scientists innermost reality may be washing bottles, the outermost may be understanding our place within the cosmos. Their innermost selfhood their concentration on the lifecycle of some parasitic worm, their outermost, why things are as they are.
— Banno

. . .

So a family resemblance can be put in disjunctive normal form, but is extensible or retractible, changing the criteria with use.
— Banno

Earlier we (...I...) got to the point of listing ritual, transcendence and hope as central to the notion of religion. — Banno

You can list lots of things and then ask what qualifies, but the easy answer is that science is not a religion because that isn’t how we use the word or understand the concept. Science (or at least the natural sciences) is the systematic study of the natural world - religion is not. The aim of those doing religion and those doing science are not the same. One can study religion, but that is not doing religion. One can study science, but that is not doing science.

Sure, the scope of what people doing science broaches on some of the same topics as religion, but science strikes as being instrumental rather than meaning making. Merely doing ritual (keeping a lab notebook, reading the journals, cleaning your beakers) and being aware of the potential for limitless time and space (transcendence) doesn’t get you to religion. Hoping for something doesn’t get you there either.

Science, to the extent that it creates meaning in a communal/institutional way comes awfully close. There is indoctrination, dogma, shared values, broadly understood goals, etc. None of that, however, is science or doing science in the abstract.

i would think the physical description misplaced and somewhat mocking. — Hanover

The mocking was towards those that think modern religious folk actually care about beardy head. Like 2,000 years ago they may have had a point, but I'm pretty sure everyone is in agreement since about 1,000 CE or so that god is non-corporeal. Regardless, whatever view the anti-religious have about what god of necessity looks like for theists, it is wrong.

What belief is part of your religion? — Hanover

Good old orthodoxy vs. orthopraxy in a modern form. Take the thirteen principles of faith and flush them (it was heretical in its own time). In general, you don't have to believe anything to preach from my pulpit - you just need to not be too much of an asshole and not cross certain lines in the sand, e.g. women are inferior or racism is cool. The issue is not so much what you say, but a) is it interesting (or perhaps is it said by the right sort of person) and b) within the scope of the context of the preaching? So if you want to come in and preach about how you should believe in Vishnu, you'd probably not be invited back, but people might listen intently to the parts that are presented well. In any event, no one polls the audience at the end to ask what any individual audience members believes or what the community has decided is dogma.

My religion is unabashedly about the community and the community's language. Within that language, there is room for discussion about virtually anything. The leadership/people deciding who gets pulpit time are greatly inclined towards particular sorts of language and topics, but if you can make the case that what you have to say is valuable (or at least likely to be valuable) to the community, you can probably get a chance to say it. You may, however, have to speak during non-prime time and do all of your own arranging/advertising/etc. if insufficient people are interested in helping you.

For what it is worth, I recently attended a wedding of an early Christian scholar/academic that was officiated by a scholar/academic of ancient Judaism. The wedding itself had many traditional Jewish elements, but the interesting part was that god/god talk was reduced to (or introduced as) the context in which we talk about meaning making/value. Like actual practiced/lived religion includes people (religious laity) that are fully aware of the what god is about and knowingly engage with it on that level. For all of the hand waving from armchairs certain sorts of people do, in actual practice religion is moving on from "belief" in "god" as a requirement/expectation/central focus.

It would, on my view, be an act of petulance to insist that the wedding was non-religious because no one there was concerned about beardy-head. Not just can the concept of religion include religious communities that traditionally did not include god worship/belief, but it can also include religions that have changed from including it to not including it. Essentializing concepts is as silly as essentalizing discrete words.

The million dollar question: If veganism is "good", why did carnivory evolve? Does mother nature make (silly) mistakes? Does God make boo boos? Something doesn't add up now does it? — Agent Smith

This is probably unhelpful, but your question leads to a variety of interpretations. Animals ate other animals. One day, many moons later, plants came into the picture and animals evolved to eat plants. In an evolutionary sense, non-animal eating animals came AFTER animal eating animals (and omnivores are in-between). So if evolution is progress, the vegetarian/vegan animals are ahead of the carnivores.

Also, you may have noticed that vegans are a subset of people - this means that people can evolve into being vegan, but could not evolve into being omnivores. Again, the shift from being what we are (omnivores) to something else is evolution - so what we are becoming is better than what we are.

In any event, the argument from evolution doesn't work in favor of meat eating the way you might think unless you are saying that what organisms evolve to do is an indication of moral acceptability. In that case, everything everything does is morally acceptable (after all, everything that is alive evolved to be precisely what it is), so the existence of carnivores is of no moment in the discussion of whether it is better to be a carnivore rather than an omnivore that chooses to limit its behavior/diet.

And yes, god (mother nature, etc.) makes lots of boo boos. It goes with the territory.

You don't get it. I don't care if people agree with me. I'm not engaging with you for popularity points in the philosophy forum or to make internet friends. If I'm engaging you it's because I enjoy challenging/learning the boundaries of your thinking and if you can answer my queries then you've helped me gain a better understanding so thank you. — Moses

Granted this conversation is between us, but it isn't exclusively (or primarily) about us. When I speak of ethics trying to put lipstick on a pig, I'm not directing the comment at you personally. You are neither responsible for the field of ethics nor people's obsession with trying to make it more than what it is. My reference to getting people to more readily agree with "you" was truly an abstracted "you." Often ethics is used in answer to the question, "Why should I do what I don't want to do?" If your only answer is, "Because I want you to," a host of people seem to think that means the person will simply do what they want rather than that thing you think they should do. Ethics is a form of compulsion by way of logic/reason/divine will/etc. You "must/should/ought" presumes both agency and something capable of imposing obligations/duties/etc.

The only reason I am even discussing ethics in this thread is because you brought it up as something essential about religion. It more or less started here...

The problem is when you try to remove God from religions and still maintain that the rituals or morals are still good; it's like removing the foundation from a house and expecting it to still stand. . . . Sure you could try to salvage some of the ideas like human life having value or being nice to the poor but these ideas need to be justified on totally different foundations. — Moses

Went here...

EDIT: The Pentateuch is largely a life guide; if religion has been degraded to mere aesthetics then it has been degraded. — Moses

Moved to this...

I approach things more as an ethicist. In any case I don't understand why we're talking about justification for religion here. — Moses

And was restated here...

The purpose of the OT is to instruct/inform regardless of whether you agree with it. The OT is a guide. I don't understand on what basis a reconstructionist jew comes to advocate a moral/ethical positions. People always need to live and make decisions on what basis ought we make them. Religions need to answer this. There needs to be something here. Especially in the realm of ethics. — Moses

If I misread you, I misread you. We all make mistakes.

My response is straightforward (so far as I can tell), that in realms of meaning making, people make meaning sui sponte/ex nihilio - it is not imposed on them by god, reason, or otherwise. Whether you speak of religion, ethics, or otherwise, the subject of the conversation has to be about the meaning makers. The "truth" of value claims does not exist outside of the preferences of people and it is therefore tautological/useless to point out that when people make value judgments, they are inherently unconcerned with the "truth" of the world outside of human preferences. We speak of ethics/religion in persuasive language precisely because getting others to share our values is what makes the things we value valuable to other people. To the extent actions are informed by values, there is no more to it than that. Appealing to antiquity/authority/god/logic/the universe/etc. is simply a method by which we persuade others (or ourselves), but that method is misdirection - you/I/we create meaning, not the things we appeal to.

In some ways it all goes back to the Greeks, are things god beloved because the gods love them or do the gods love them because they are god beloved? There is always the infinite regress if value has to be justified by something other than the act of valuing. Existential religions (which is what I was referring to above) get that. They do not make bones about it. They (and their members/adherents) are OK with being the meaning makers and do not have to carry on the farce of claiming that something/someone else creates meaning. How humanistic/atheistic/etc. X makes meaning with a dynamic tradition is the exact same way that anyone else does. The way that a religion can exist in that context is identical to how it can exist (or did exist) in any other context.

In this way, and exactly as @Banno knew at the outset, the "concept of religion" is what we make of it and there is nothing essential keeping it in its place in the firmament. Pearl clutching over language and/or conceptual purity through times/communities/etc. is adorable, but things only seemed fixed as long as we could maintain the pretense that they were. The very article that he posted was about this tension:

... This entry therefore provides a brief history of the how the semantic range of religion has grown and shifted over the years, and then considers two philosophical issues that arise for the contested concept, issues that are likely to arise for other abstract concepts used to sort cultural types (such as “literature”, “democracy”, or “culture” itself). First, the disparate variety of practices now said to fall within this category raises a question of whether one can understand this social taxon in terms of necessary and sufficient properties or whether instead one should instead treat it as a family resemblance concept. Here, the question is whether the concept religion can be said to have an essence. Second, the recognition that the concept has shifted its meanings, that it arose at a particular time and place but was unknown elsewhere, and that it has so often been used to denigrate certain cultures, raises the question whether the concept corresponds to any kind of entity in the world at all or whether, instead, it is simply a rhetorical device that should be retired. This entry therefore considers the rise of critical and skeptical analyses of the concept, including those that argue that the term refers to nothing. ..
— SEP on Concept of Religion

I can throw lots more words at this, but I doubt it will clarify much.

One can wear many hats and walk between various language communities. When speaking as a “philosopher” I will say things a certain way, when speaking as a participant in meaning making, I will speak another way, when describing other people’s beliefs, I will speak a third way, when speaking for other people using their voice, I will speak in another, and on it goes.

Problematically, belief doesn’t mean the same thing in all of these varied contexts. To say that Jews believe that god abandoned them is both entirely too generally and yet not wrong. Whether god exists, whether god abandoned the Jews, etc. is an aside from the statement of belief. To the extent that the belief motivates action (or at least has explanatory power for some set of behaviors), it is largely irrelevant whether that belief satisfies your epistemic/truth conditions. For my part, I find that god language can be terribly useful in certain conversations. Even when god is dead, talking about/responding to god moves the ball.

I didn’t refer to myself a nihilist/absurdist lightly. Though it will gain me few friends around here, I believe rather little. I admittedly do lots of “acting as if” or “speaking as if,” but if tomorrow you told me I was a brain in a vat, I wouldn’t find some core “belief in” destroyed. We have the now and our experience of it - that is all. History, the other side of the world, etc. are all just ideas that are more or less useful in accounting for things we do experience. Suffice it to say, “All speech is political speech” is a pretty fair summary of my approach towards language. What accounts for “real” or “historical” is different than what accounts for “myth” or “fiction” only in-so-far as we assign one group of ideas to one genre and the other group to a different genre. Sure, you might say that history books can be “wrong” whereas fiction cannot, but that is only because you privilege one narrative over another. We have what is extent and our interpretation of it, what “was” or “could have been” is forever gone and is but a figment of our collective imaginations (or memories, if you like).

I’m not sure if any of that responds to what you want to talk about. As to whether nihilism provides grounds (strong or otherwise) for religion, imagine me gesturing to the vast amount of religious existential thought in the 20th and 21st centuries. People are getting on without god and recognizing that radical freedom is not liberty to do what you want, just the ability to do what you can. We created god (even if god created us) and we get to decide what that means. Volitional constraint combined with self-imposed/enforced obligation as negotiated in community is, on my view, where we find the substance of god creation. Sure, in prior centuries god was foisted upon us and we were beaten into believing that god was “out there” to be found/revealed/etc., but that was confused.

Call it god, call it justice, call it whatever you want, but the universe does not weep if I die now, tomorrow, or never. Gussying up emotivism with appeals to reason, logic, and other intellectual contrivances to get people to more readily agree with you is lovely and all, but it doesn’t change the game. We decide what we ought to do. We use force - physical, social, emotional, etc. - to make the world what we want or change it into what we believe it ought to be. Sit with that. Let it linger. After awhile when you’ve calmed your mind of all the thoughts about objectivity and the magic that happens when you get to say “slavery is wrong” rather than “I believe slavery is wrong” you may momentarily embrace the peace that comes with knowing that things as they are are just how they are. In that moment, take ownership of the thought that comes after - that you want the world to be different. And then consider this - that that desire alone is sufficient warrant to make it so.

Here is the turn - that your warrant is not the same as my warrant and that what you want won’t compel me to want it, too. It is only through the process of social negotiation that we can arrange our desires in mutually beneficial ways. No magic. No god. No logical force of the universe compelling action A over action B. Simple. Honest. How it has always been and always will be. Sad that slavery isn’t wrong, but even worse that people have slaves. Sad that lots of horrible stuff isn’t judged poorly as a feature of the universe. Even worse that people do horrible things. Slavery IS wrong on my account, but not because someone told me. My values are enough.

What is somewhat funny about that video is how they are a touch more pious/apologetic than I am, but don’t majorly deviate from any of my themes. Even the orthodox say that Jews in their generation must re-intepret the Bible in their time and keep it is a living document (covenant, if you will), but somehow people are convinced that there is this timeless slavish devotion to a singular reading of the Old Testament.

In any event, I love their enthusiasm, but at least through when I stopped watching (over an hour), they didn’t address the major objection to any alleged use of the Bible as a personal document - no one could read it or had a copy of it aside from a very limited group. It was a political document drafted for a particular purpose and immediately abstracted away from its putative subject - the people Israel. We can absolutely reconstruct the document as a guide to personal philosophy and an appeal to reason, but that is the baggage of a tradition that existed long after the document came to be. The beauty of the tradition should not be understated (whether I agree with it or not), but apologetics is apologetics. It is interesting how Saks stresses that there is no word for “obey” in the Bible in support of his theme of freedom but zooms over the “commandments” part and says then says that “command and control” is not a part of the Biblical narrative. Oddness abounds. 36ish minutes.

Well, there's far more going on than one might put into a single post, but notice that "every axiological claim is bullshit" does not follow directly from emotivism. "Boo for slavery" is not bullshit. — Banno

I wouldn’t call it bullshit, but I suspect that “truth” as Frankfurt meant it makes a bad bedfellow with normative claims. It is in that context which I made the comment.

People are social - with this comes heaps of empathy, sympathy, and cooperative behavior. Taking someone’s preferences into account independent of your theories of truth/epistemology is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect people to do. Not just that, I’d expect consideration of those preferences to be a fundamental basis upon which people act. Anyone who would discount preference as legitimate justification is just lying to themselves and spending too much time sniffing their own farts.

Sure, we can argue about how we resolve competing preferences or whether or current moral intuitions permit multiplicity of “right” answers, but this isn’t the thread for that. Looking to the universe to provide “truth” that you can attach your normative claims to independent of people is a fool’s errand. Abandoning truth as the only (or even primary) consideration in normative judgments isn’t to say that there are no normative judgments, but it is to be honest about the origin of those judgments. Yes, slavery is wrong, but not because of the next version of the grand unified theory. We can say absolutely nothing regarding observations of quarks or blackholes that gets us to “Don’t torture babies.” If you want to try to smuggle some value theory in on the back of “truth” as Frankfurt’s allegation of bullshit used the term, I’m game.

Or maybe accusations of bullshit against religion are as inaccurate as accusations of bullshit against art and ethics. Just maybe “not caring about the truth” can mean different things in different contexts and that universal condemnation of such is unwarranted. You may have read this before, but I found it amusing in this moment.

Philosophers have a vocational bent for trying to divine the essences of things that most people never suspected had an essence, and bullshit is a case in point. Could there really be some property that all instances of bullshit possess and all non-instances lack? The question might sound ludicrous, but it is, at least in form, no different from one that philosophers ask about truth. Among the most divisive issues in philosophy today is whether there is anything important to be said about the essential nature of truth. Bullshit, by contrast, might seem to be a mere bagatelle. Yet there are parallels between the two which lead to the same perplexities.

Where do you start if you are an academic philosopher in search of the quiddity of bullshit? “So far as I am aware,” Frankfurt dryly observes, “very little work has been done on this subject.” — “Say Anything by Jim Holt”

Essential nature of religion - essential nature of bullshit…. A match of divine intent or mere coincidence?

Again, this is a theoretically a thread about the concept of religion rather than the particulars of Jewish hairsplitting, so I don’t want to go too far into denominational/doctrinal splits in modern (or near-modern) Judaism. I do, however, think there is something useful in understanding how the “orthodox” Jews that present as something akin to “authentic” Judaism are engaged in an ahistorical retelling of mythic history for purposes of contemporary legitimization in a similar fashion to the way in which the Torah was allegedly assembled in order to provide contemporary legitimization of the redactors/editors. Accepting the origin story of a group with an agenda is dangerous - if not for the simple reason that accepting it achieves the goal of the story.

The reason that I quoted Kaplan is not to get into Reconstructionist Judaism, but to point out that major modern thinkers within religion understand that their own religions are a function of communities and the needs of those communities as they evolve through time. Just because the word “evolve” is referenced, doesn’t drag all of the teleological non-sense often associated with evolutionists. Evolution is value neutral - what reproduces is what reproduces. Not to get too wrapped up in Dawkins, but his contribution of the notion of “memes” as the mechanism by which social practice is transmitted and subject to the same evolutionary analysis as “genes” is very useful. What survives in religious communities is merely what survives - that survival has no inherent relationship to purity/fidelity/etc. to the past or the features of prior communities. What is transmitted from one generation to the next is a function of the needs of the generation doing the transmission, not the needs of long since dead forbearers.

It is, perhaps, helpful to speak of taxonomy and the danger of not learning the lessons from biology and or applying them to the social sciences (as applied to religion in this instance). Naming a “species” serves certain purposes and does not magically make the reproducing organism of a fundamentally different sort than the resulting organism/s. Instead, the naming serves as a dividing line in the sand between the grains before and the grains after with full awareness of the actuality of the continuum being analyzed. Unlike grains of sand, however, what begins as something like a rodent may one day reproduce in to an elephant such that there is a meaningful distinction between how the rodent related to the world as compared to the elephant. Despite the obvious dissimilarity between the two, the elephant is the heir to the rodent and one cannot speak of the essence of the rodent as anything aside from a definitional imposition. So yes, some modern religions appear to hue more closely to their forebearers than others, but that does not make the doppelgänger any more the descendent of the earlier religion than the one that looks radically different.

I grant to you in advance that there are lots of good reasons to distinguish between Jews who did not “follow” Jesus and those that did, but in a very real way, the early “Christians” that were Jewish would have come to define modern Judaism but for their ceding their claim to Judaism and effort to be universalist. I don’t necessarily want to debate early Christianity and its particulars, but I do think the example serves as a useful example of how religious communities can reach dividing points and what it means to be the inheritor of a religious tradition (aka meme).

I'm also not sure where you got that I'm an outsider. — Moses

I’m not sure why you think I thought you are an “outsider.” My reference to ingroups, outgroups, etc. was not about you in particular, but on how different contexts can result in different identities. One major struggle of the modern liberal who wishes to define him/her/it/zi/etc.self against the world is how the world will say, “It is nice that you think that, but this is what you are…” As it turns out, self-identity is insufficient grounds to convince others that you are (or are not) a member of a group/tradition/etc.

Regardless, the notion of “who is an X” and the like (independent of the subject and object) is generally not monolithic. Speaking of the philosophy of Judaism or Jewish history is equally perilous - there are many philosophies and many histories. The reduction of the many to the one is not a reflection of something inherent about the multiplicity, but the values/agenda of the reducer. Who gets to speak for Judaism (what counts for Jewish Philosophy/theology) informs and is informed by what is taken (a fortiori) as authority on what Jewish Philosophy/theology is. Put simply, we come to a subject with ideas about the subject that define the subject in advance of our perception of the subject.

Maybe @Banno can help me flesh out a method by which we can employee an ostensive heuristic to delineate what accounts for a slab.



Without being glib, I think that it is dangerous to speak of majoritarian practice in a religious community as coming to define what that religion is. Before WWII, the majority of the Jews in the world lived in Europe and the vast majority of them were slaughtered. The Judaism that survived the holocaust is not the Judaism of the dead, but the Judaism of the survivors. This is what evolution looks like - what survives is what survives, not what we think is right or ought to be.

Regarding trusting in evolution, it was MLK who said that the arc of moral history is long, but it bends towards justice. The Christian can easily leave it to god and time to fix it all. (cf Christian and Jewish eschatology) The modern Jew (and some of the historic ones too) see it as their personal obligation to bring justice to the world even if they cannot personally achieve it (while it is not for you to finish the job of perfecting the world, you are not free to desist from trying). The metaphysical structure of Judaism between the sacred and the secular - the sanctified and the profane - and the obligation of the Jew to bring holiness into the world is fundamentally at odds with any passive notion of progress by virtue of the passage of time. Indeed, it is the charge of humanity (and humanity alone) to repair the world and restore what was broken. God abandoned the world and is not going to fix it.

For what it is worth, the reason that Judaism fits so well with existentialism is because of the ideas of personal and communal meaning making in a world otherwise devoid of meaning. While people here don’t typically discuss religious philosophy (and not much philosophy of religion either), it is worthwhile to see how one can get from properly slitting the throats of cattle in a pretty room by men with the proper number and quality of testicles to where we are today. Just as philosophy will engage in another round of re-interpreting the Greeks or Germans to justify some seemingly novel philosophical idea (you know, doing philosophy), so too will members of a religion engage with their mythic texts to legitimize seemingly novel ideas (doing religion). It isn’t just about the Greeks being right and us needing to properly interpret them (philology), but about their being a tradition which provides a useful context for having the conversation and an appeal to antiquity which provides some grounding to avoid accusations of being too far outside the playground to be taken seriously - after all, if it is really that important or profound, wouldn’t people have said something about it before?

The vicious, radical nature of contemporary thinking which claims no inheritance from the past and no obligation to treat kindly that which came before is anomalous. It might be the new normal, but people’s seeming desire for connectedness to past and future suggests that we will continue to seek wisdom from what has come before and to justify our contemporary claims by making them fit with our traditions.

I leave this post here because this is already too much. I apologize for the disjointedness.

We're arguing semantics here. We could talk about Judaism in practice or Judaism in terms of its central ideas and practices. — Moses

But it isn't semantics. The core/central ideas and practices are not found in the Bible (books of Moses or otherwise). You can't hold up a book, say "This is your religion!", and expect people of that religion to agree with you by force of character. The book had its last entry what, 2200 years ago when the people were a temple cult slitting the throats of animals? Seriously, the people (and religion) have long since moved on (undeniably helped by the destruction of the second temple and the transition into the diaspora). My point, again, is not about the facts/beliefs of Judaism, but about how you (or outsiders generally) like to impose essential characteristics onto ideas/people/etc.

I find there to be some irony in an ethicist calling out religious beliefs as being bullshit. Just so that we are on a somewhat equal playingfield, I am an ethical nihilist/absurdist. There is no normative statement that can be made that is other than "Hooray!" or "Boo!!" (i.e. emotivism). In that context, every axiological claim is of necessity "bullshit" (be it religious, ethical, or aesthetic in nature). While I am happy to discuss the underpinnings of value, I think you've quite the hurdle to jump to somehow attach the conversation of values to "truth."

Do words just not have any meaning anymore? — Moses

This is, to some extent, where @Banno's thread began and many people take up - whether words (or concepts) have essential features, i.e. that there is some way to employ a word incorrectly by virtue of the word's sine qua non. For my part, I am firmly in the camp that meaning is individually constructed within the context of that individual's aptitudes/experiences/proclivities/etc. What I mean when I type and what I mean when you read it are never the same thing, even if we act as if they are. Meaning can only ever be established through interpretation of signs, i.e. the process by which the meaning maker converts a signifier to the signified within a particular context. I am completely comfortable with the heuristic approach to language (or, if you prefer, meaning by approximation). Are the signs employed effective?

With that said, group identity is fascinating and complex. There are ways that ingroups define themselves, ways that outgroups define ingroups, ways that individuals define themselves, ways that people define others, etc. What constitutes a particular person has a multiplicity of answers. Asking "who is a Jew?" is inherently ambiguous and requires a great deal of parsing to answer. Suffice it to say, I have my own view on what constitutes membership in a group and self-declaration doesn't cut it.

I think you'll find that the centrality of the Bible(s) is a modern imposition and largely ahistorical. Why you think that the Bible is a life guide, I'm not sure, but it sounds like you bought what someone else was selling. Give the "Pentateuch" a read and see if you can find where it tells you what to do.

The major issue I have with your questions is not so much whether you get the facts rights (for whatever they are), but about the order in which you proceed. Religions are what people do - when we ask what a religion consists of we look to its practice (we can parse out what practice is later, but suffice it to say espoused dogma is not independent of practice). We don't look at the Bible to know what Judaism is - you wouldn't recognize a single modern practice of "religious" Jews. Being Jewish is not about interpreting some text correctly (hermeneutics), but about being a part of a people, i.e. community.

Someone smart said this: "Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.”

The problem is that this is a discussion about religion, not Judaism, so talking about Judaism as if it somehow stands in for other religions is to miss the point. What is being asked is not what Christianity, Islam, or Judaism is without God, but whether one can have a religion without god. The broad consensus among religious scholars, so far as I know, seems to be that you can. The actual practice of many people also seems to be that they can be in a religion without believing in god/s.

Outside of making demands of religions that religions do not make of themselves, I'm not sure what the point is of insisting that it must be X to qualify as a religion. What is the end goal? To make it clear that social institutions exist outside of god? No shit. God doesn't exist, so even religious institutions exist outside of god. Take for granted in advance that the story book character you are so wedded to could NEVER HAVE BEEN the justification for religion - the justification was always provided by human communal practice. Being honest about it doesn't make the idea of religions go poof, it just lets people have a serious conversation about when communal practice becomes religion rather than staying the same or becoming something else.

If you remove the idea of God from Christianity or Judaism or Islam then it's basically lies and bullshit. — Moses

It is tough to take comments like this seriously when there are active Jewish and Christianity communities that do just that and still find the religion worthwhile. Religion becomes aesthetics just like everything else. If it is your cup of tea, great, if not, move along. It isn’t very hard.

Your view of corporations is very on point. IBM doesn’t exist, yet it is meaning making. Strange that.

You'll find that most people aren't interested in discussing modern religions, but only the ones principally concerned with Jesus with the occasional use of Islam or Judaism as tokens/foils. I am sympathetic to the idea that secular humanism is largely just secular Christianity (in-so-far as it is principally the product of Christian culture), but I would very much agree that theism is not a requirement of religion. Focusing on communal practice/behavior is helpful when evaluating what a particular group is, but so often the conversation devolves into discussions about individuals as if religions exist on the individual level.

Humanists would have a much better go of it if people realized that they could reject beardy head without abandoning communal practices such as meaning making and belonging. Alienation as pathology to be cured by exercise and the like has come to be the only legitimate way to address the sorts of existential issues previously addressed by religion. God doesn't animate religions and never has (after all, god doesn't exist), so it is terribly odd to make God a requirement for religions. This is why, I think, that academics in the field are loathe to simply define Christianity as religion and include other "groups" in-so-far as they sufficiently resemble Christianity. Religion as a way to understand large social/communal practice (including ethics, mythology, social relations, etc.) is more useful, perhaps, than what people people here let on.

As an example, there is a state-of-affairs of objects orbiting the planet Jupiter. — Harry Hindu

This is a good example of the leap I am discussing between states-of-affairs and facts. What is is - the state of affairs. What 'is'? Those are facts (or perhaps the subject of metaphysics). How we speak/conceive of the states-of-affairs does not change what 'is', but we still have concepts about what is and those sorts of concepts are things like process ontology, substance ontology, etc.

Although there is a bit of irony in the critique that I am using a label for a concept (mereological nihilism) in a thread about "religion", I rather don't care what you call your ontology. My critique is about whether the relationship of "stuff" creates new stuff or if the relationship of stuff has no impact on what exists.

You write

Facts, as such, are not socially constructed. — Harry Hindu

But does Jupiter exist? Is it a state of affairs? Is the naming of a particular assemblage of stuff related to the state of affairs or merely to our intersubjective discussion? What I am trying to point out is that ontology (or our particular ontology) does not suddenly get us from language to the states-of-affairs and calling things "facts" is a linguistic turn.

Pretend for a moment that Jupiter is a fact. Does Jupiter have parts? Are Jupiter's parts facts? As those parts change, does Jupiter cease to exist? Does Jupiter endure regardless of the constituency of its parts? These questions of identity are not about language games (though to some they strike as such). They might take place within the context of a language game (after all, where else would they be asked?), but they are intended to be about the states-of-affairs in precisely the same way that you think "fact" is about the states-of-affairs. I am asking you to provide what in the states-of-affairs, if anything, constitutes a fact.

The generalized claim is that a social group is just as much a candidate for being a fact as a planet, a person, or a particle. The fuzziness of when something is a fact that is constituted by an assemblage of stuff does not preclude you from calling Jupiter "Jupiter" or saying that it is a "planet" and it should not preclude us from calling Christianity "Christianity" or saying that it is a "religion".

I don't see why we would need to use the term, "metaphysical" here. It's just a fact that I would be a citizen of X because being a citizen of X is a human conceptual invention - not something discovered in nature that has existed prior to humans, like planets vs dwarf planets, or life vs non-life when talking about the origins of life.

It also seems to me that more than one person would need to agree upon the definition of "citizen" and "X" for us to then agree that I am indeed a citizen of X, or else being a "citizen of X" is meaningless. Words are only useful for communicating shared experiences and understandings, or else what is the purpose of using a word that only you understand the way you are using it? What is the purpose of using words, or any external symbol for that matter, if there are no other humans alive? — Harry Hindu

Picture a time one billion years from now when humans are long since gone. Was George Washington the first President of the United States of America? Is it a fact that survives humans? Or perhaps human memory? The question here is whether social groups can create facts independent of the underlying "facts" (you'd likely agree that George Washington had arms and legs regardless of whether people with language ever existed). In this context, can you, as a matter of fact, be a member of a religion without your consent/agreement? As in, do your personal beliefs have any relationship to the fact of the matter of you being a member of X?

Put differently, is being Christian a state-of-affairs?

It's interesting that the struggle to explicate the concept leads to so many places. — Banno

Not that I agree that you have to be religious to understand religion, but I do think that explication devoid of purpose makes it harder to get at what I think you believe underpins “defintions”: how you use the word. Knowledge that vs. knowledge how, perhaps. The people in the article were using religion to an end and they found the use useful (as, perhaps, did other members of their language community).

Use the word a bit. Play the game. See when you are called in and called out. In this way you will come to know the concept of religion. Kicking some ossified remnants of prior generation’s use is amusing in some respects, but do you really expect it to be enlightening?

I just think that is question begging. The article is about what a concept can be including a non-essentialist concept. So we can agree that religion is not usefully conceived as an essential concept that can be explicitly set forth, but I’m not sure that means that we can’t make an explicit statement about the concept of religion.

Or maybe I am reading too much into “explicitly” and not enough into “set out”. Either way, we agree the concept of religion is non-essentialist and it is a fool’s errand to try to make it one. What I haven’t figured out yet is whether that strikes you as a negative thing about the concept or just an observation to be shared with others.

Not to go too far afield, but I am reminded a bit of Mr. Holland’s Opus (if you’ve ever seen it). Is music necessarily sound/heard? You get to cry a bit as he (and perhaps you) discover the answer.

Big all encompassing ideas are tough. It is their sheer size and people’s desire to use them that makes them fit in places you wouldn’t otherwise think they belong.

We cannot make explicit the bounds of when a proper invocation of religion is made, however we can generally demarcate the territory. You and I may not agree on what religion is, but I think we will likely agree on many things that are not religious and many things that are. I do, however, find the mention of magic in the article to be helpful - not everything fantastical/miraculous is in the bucket.

What I want to shy away from is the idea that the concept is of necessity the same in all contexts - that what makes religion fit for use in one case is what makes it fit for use in another. We try it and see if helps the conversation along - no need to quibble about use if we find it falls flat. And that perhaps is the unspoken difference - the people in the article are making use of the word and other people seem to be more interested in saying why the “concept” is stupid.

Who do we arrest, him or her? She just got herself a wet ass pussy that needs tending to, that's all. Sex positive. That's what this is. Stop being a fuddy duddy. — Hanover

Fortunately this is an ethics post and not a law enforcement one. So do we arrest a kid that has had his sexual expectations set by culture in the abject silence of his parents because his girlfriend consented to be choked during sex since she was afraid that he'd break up with her if she didn't? Probably not a strong argument to get that past the legislature, but I leave it to more convincing people than me.

The fault is social and so the question is social. The article itself is addressed not to the kids doing things that make them unhappy, but to the society that is raising them. It is about what we should teach people about sex, what sexual behavior we should encourage, and whether we should be advocating for unrestrained freedom between consenting partners or something more restrictive. It is certainly within a context of elders to youngers, but it is the youngers that are complaining, not the elders judging. No one really cares what you do in the bedroom, but that attitude may be contributing more to misery than sexual/relationship health. When, if ever, does society become responsible for creating an environment in which children are taught to be better than their parents?

Individuals act independently of society, to be sure, but show me what social mechanisms have been employed to address the issue. Show me the systems that have been collectively employed/directed that are meant to help provide standards.

If you had you would have noticed that I made a distinction between socially constructed facts and natural facts. — Harry Hindu

And this is responsive to why you aren't a mereological nihilist how? Facts are socially constructed whether about social relations or relations of atoms. The states of affairs, however, are what "is" independent of society. The question is to what extent the states of affairs are primitive (only the whole exists, e.g. atoms) or composite (wholes can have parts, e.g. people). If you believe that the states of affair are composite, I am saying that you are already acknowledging that the relationships of parts to one another cause things to exist or not. The question is why you privilege certain sorts of relations (things that are closer like people) over others (things that are further like countries) especially when you are likely to call things very far away from one another existent (like planets and solar systems).

I don't see why we would need to use the term, "metaphysical" here. — Harry Hindu

That is because you are not understanding metaphysical in the way that I am using it. It is something that is true of the states of affairs independent of how we think about them. Perhaps "ontic" would sit better with you?

The definitions of these terms can only be objectively defined by people — Harry Hindu

You don't seem to appreciate what a definition is - it is inherently emblematic of intersubjective agreement, i.e. not objective (existent independent of minds).

by people that are not religious (atheist) or don't have a political leaning (a-political) — Harry Hindu

You also don't seem to appreciate the difference between objectivity and disinterest. Further, you don't seem to appreciate that people are social, i.e. they are necessarily political and religious (by at least one definition).

but they all must share a common characteristic for them to be categorized as a religion or government. — Harry Hindu

This is exactly the problem that the "anchor" in polythetic approaches is intended to address. The problem with @Banno's post is that he plays fast and lose with words. He references a word ("religion") which is discussed in conceptual terms, highlights an approach which is intended to incorporate essentialism into a non-essentialist analysis of concepts, and then asks whether there is an essence to it. (It doesn't help that he vacillates between "concepts" and "definitions".)

Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion, instead, as having a prototype structure.

. . .

Polythetic definitions are increasingly popular today as people seek to avoid the claim that an evolving social category has an ahistorical essence.[14] However, the difference between these two approaches is not that monothetic definitions fasten on a single property whereas polythetic definitions recognize more. Monothetic definitions can be multifactorial, as we have seen, and they can recognize just as many properties that are “common” or even “typical” of religions, without being essential. The difference is also not that the monothetic identification of the essence of religion reflects an ethnocentrism that polythetic approaches avoid. The polythetic identification of a prototypical religion is equally ethnocentric. The difference between them, rather, is that a monothetic definition sorts instances with a Yes/No mechanism and is therefore digital, and a polythetic definition produces gradations and is therefore analog. It follows that a monothetic definition treats a set of instances that all possess the one defining property as equally religion, whereas a polythetic definition produces a gray area for instances that are more prototypical or less so.
— SEP

So it would be great if rather than rehashing why essentialism is dumb, we can move on to whether something can "refer" that is non-essentialist. (Where the answer is clearly yes).

This is the same as saying, "religion" is just scribbles on this page. — Harry Hindu

Then you are not necessarily a Jew if your mother was a Jew and Judaism IS based on a belief system because now you've shown that what makes one a Jew is based on one's belief system. — Harry Hindu

Pretend for a moment, if you will, that we aren't talking about religion and instead are talking about government. One day you are born - from that moment onwards, you are a citizen of one state or another. You haven't made a choice, it doesn't matter what you believe, it doesn't even matter what your momma or pappa believes, but you are citizen of X. In some respects, this is tantamount to saying there is a metaphysical fact that you are a citizen of X.

What do we make of this fact? Do we say that because if there were no humans alive aside from you that you would not be a citizen of X it means that you aren't a citizen of X? Do we acknowledge that we can create facts through social convention? Do we hold the fact that you are a citizen of X to be something that has legitimacy only if claimed by group Y rather than group Z?

Non-voluntary membership in a group based upon the criteria of others is not unique to religion. Having the world treat you fundamentally different based upon those criteria is not unique to religion. The only difference between being a citizen of X and being a member of religion A is the extent to which such status changes your relationship to the world.

If your goal is to say that there are no such things as socially constructed facts (let alone socially constructed metaphysical facts), then great. Go be a mereological nihilist and describe your world that way. Relationships aren't for you.

If, on the other hand, you are willing to acknowledge that some pieces of papers (or binary configurations) are currency and that some are not, you seem to be engaged in that thing around here people like to say... "Special pleading" is it? Uniquely critiquing religion using criteria you do not apply in other contexts means that you are inconsistent rather than the other-way round.


P.S. Notice here that I do not invoke god/gods as some arbiter of metaphysical facts because god's take on the matter is either a) equally legitimate/illegitimate to that of any other authority and b) not useful if "unknowable".

A bunch of notions that seem incapable of producing any account that would serve to define the concept of religion. — Banno

One can describe how we use language (or maybe just gesticulate), but that doesn't account for WHY we use language. Having an abstracted conversation of "what does the word "religion" refer to?" as if there is one answer (or even two) for all contexts (time, place, audience, etc.) will lead to disappointment. The article itself delves into this problem of "why 'religion'" and I think if you sit with that awhile, you might come closer to understanding what it refers to. Not because there is some essential meaning in the word, but because you might come to understand how it was effectively employed before and how you (or someone else) might effectively apply it in the future.

Despite this murkiness, all three of these versions are “substantive” definitions of religion because they determine membership in the category in terms of the presence of a belief in a distinctive kind of reality. In the twentieth century, however, one sees the emergence of an importantly different approach: a definition that drops the substantive element and instead defines the concept religion in terms of a distinctive role that a form of life can play in one’s life—that is, a “functional” definition.

. . .

What is counted as religion by one definition is often not counted by others. How might this disarray be understood? Does the concept have a structure? This section distinguishes between two kinds of answer to these questions. Most of the attempts to analyze the term have been “monothetic” in that they operate with the classical view that every instance that is accurately described by a concept will share a defining property that puts them in that category. The last several decades, however, have seen the emergence of “polythetic” approaches that abandon the classical view and treat religion, instead, as having a prototype structure.
. . .

A central theme of his essays is that the concept religion (and subcategories such as world religions, Abrahamic faiths, or nonliterate traditions) are not scientific terms but often reflect the unrecognized biases of those who use these concepts to sort their world into those who are or are not “like us”

. . .

In some cases, the point of rejecting thing-hood is to deny that religion names a category, all the instances of which focus on belief in the same kind of object—that is, the slogan is a rejection of substantive definitions of the concept (e.g., Possamai 2018: ch. 5). In this case, the objection bolsters a functional definition and does not deny that religion corresponds to a functionally distinct kind of form of life.
. . .

Like the concept of witches or the concept of biological races (e.g., Nye 2020), religion is a fiction (Fitzgerald 2015) or a fabrication (McCutcheon 2018), a concept invented and deployed not to respond to some reality in the world but rather to sort and control people.

. . .

These post-structuralist and nominalist arguments that deny that religion is “out there” have a realist alternative. According to this alternative, there is a world independent of human conceptualization, and something can be real and it can even affect one’s life, whether or not any human beings have identified it. This is true of things whose existence does not depend on collective agreement, like biochemical signaling cascades or radioactive beta particles, and it is equally true of things whose existence does depend on collective agreement, like kinship structures, linguistic rules, and religious commitments. A realist about social structures holds that a person can be in a bilateral kinship system, can speak a Uralic language, and can be a member of a religion—even if they lack these concepts.

This realist claim that social structures have existed without being conceptualized raises the question: if human beings had different ways of practicing religion since prehistoric times, why and when did people “finally” create the taxon?

. . .
— "SEP

The article is, in the end, an effort to understand the ways in which we come to describe a particular, though grantedly vague, relation.

And though I was entirely self-aware of the futility of trying to define religion for everyone else when I made the post on the meaning of religion, you can see the hallmarks of religious existentialism and ideas (not to mention language) referenced in the article.

. . .

One also sees a functional approach in Paul Tillich (1957), who defines religion as whatever dominant concern serves to organize a person’s values (whether or not that concern involve belief in any unusual realities). Tillich’s definition turns on the axiological function of providing orientation for a person’s life. ..

For example, the Thai villager who wears an apotropaic amulet and avoids the forest because of a belief that malevolent spirits live there, or the ancient Roman citizen who takes a bird to be sacrificed in a temple before she goes on a journey are for Durkheim examples of magic rather than religion, and for Tillich quotidian rather than ultimate concerns. . . .
— SEP

Also, there is a really good article referenced at the end (yes, it starts off a bit beneath the likely reader).

Religion is not a thing

. . .

Race is not a thing

A striking example of this is Laura Tabili’s (2003) argument that ‘race is a relationship, not a thing’ — itself playing on the famous phrase by the historian EP Thompson (1963) that [socioeconomic] ‘class is a relationship, not a thing’.

As Tabili shows, even though the concept/category of ‘race’ is considered to be rooted in physical differences, this category is itself historically (and thus socially) constructed. Thus, it is not the case of race (as a thing) causing racism, but rather the social construction of racism creates race. . . .


. . . .

Capital is not a thing

Going somewhat further back with this: in the nineteenth century the philosopher and historian Karl Marx wrote the influential book Capital, which of course set out much of his highly influential theory of political economy. Even though Marx had a lot to say about the idea of ‘capital’ (and with it of course the capitalist mode of production), he does throw in a brief comment:

‘capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons’ (Marx 1887, ch.33, p.533)

. . ..

Thus capital, class, and race are all not things despite being considered to be things. I could continue with other examples — the idea of gender talks about things (gendered bodies, clothes, dispositions) which are also social relations (see, of course, Butler 2002). The category is not the thing in itself, it is the means by which the ‘thing’ is made ‘thingy’ (that is, it is how the category comes to be seen as a thing). . . .


That is, for McCutcheon, and many other contemporary scholars in the field, religion is not a thing in itself, but is a discourse that has political uses within certain social and cultural contexts. People do not call things religion because religion is a thing in itself (that has some special core at its heart that makes it religion).

Instead, the discourse of ‘religion’ is a human construct that does certain types of work by the human actors that put it to use. No more or less, it is a powerful term, but what the term describes (the ‘thing’) is not necessarily what we assume ‘it’ to be from the label ‘religion’.

. . . — Malory Nye

What work do you intend the word to do when you use it? What work did the word do when another person used it? What work do you suppose they intended to do when they used it? Was the use efficacious?

Each of the examples in the SEP article were about the context in which "religion" was used, the intended audience, and the work contemplated. As any of these variable changed, the "meaning" of the word changed. Without context/relationship, we just have meaningless symbols.

Somehow you tagged me without my getting a notification.

There is lots of great stuff in that article. It is difficult to land on just one part.

Why?

That is my take away. I wouldn't necessarily call language a heuristic and I don't intend to enter the broader discussion of what language is, but the article does such a nice job of tracing the edges of language within context. What is also nice is the end where words are generally shown to be wanting - that concepts seem to transcend words and that the focus on a particular word may be to miss the point.

I would not dwell on whether "religion" refers to anything (or even what it "means"), but the ostensive approach could be helpful in understanding what strikes as a "meta-religion" article. What other conversations about "religion" were excluded from the article? What voices are missing? Are the examples selected indicative of the bounds of what can be said about religion? Are there related conversations that should be included in the discussion?

. . .It is easy to imagine that if the way that a people worship their gods permeates their work, art, and politics, and they do not know of alternative ways, then it would not be likely that they would have created a concept for it. There is little need for a generic concept that abstracts a particular aspect of one’s culture as one option out of many until one is in a sustained pluralistic situation. . . . — SEP

Language and religion are relational and predicated on community. It is only in pluralistic situations where communities encounter one another that we have to concern ourselves with naming/categorizing the distinctions.

This, I think, is the rub for many conversations:

. . . A methodological individualist, Smith denies that groups have any reality not explained by the individuals who constitute them. What one finds in history, then, is religious people, and so the adjective is useful, but there are no religious entities above and beyond those people, and so the noun reifies an abstraction. . . . — SEP

Is religion a thing? When looked at on the individual level (i.e. the non-communal), the space between is forgotten. Reification, emergence, atomism, correspondence. . . the list goes on. The metaphysics is hard to avoid when we ask whether religion "refers."

(X v ~X) & ~( X & ~X)

Also, we get stuck in the dividing. Language, religion, and life are squishy.

. . . We might say that a bounded polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy, and an open polythetic approach produces concepts that are fuzzy and evolving. Timothy Williamson calls this “the dynamic quality of family resemblance concepts” (1994: 86). One could symbolize the shift of properties over time this way:

Religion 1: A B C D E
Religion 2: B C D E F
Religion 3: C D E F G
Religion 4: D E F G H
Religion 5: E F G H I
Religion 6: F G H I J
…

Wittgenstein famously illustrated this open polythetic approach with the concept game, and he also applied it to the concepts of language and number (Wittgenstein 1953, §67). If we substitute our concept as Wittgenstein’s example, however, his treatment fits religion just as well:

Why do we call something a “religion”? Well, perhaps because it has a direct relationship with several things that have hitherto been called religion; and this can be said to give an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. (Wittgenstein 1953, §67)

Given an open polythetic approach, a concept evolves in the light of the precedents that speakers recognize, although, over time, what people come to label with the concept can become very different from the original use. . .
— "SEP

Here I was wanting to end apartheid because it is an unmitigated evil. — StreetlightX

No, here you were wanting to end Jewish apartheid because you fetishize Jews.

loooooool — StreetlightX

Mocking what you don’t understand isn’t a good look. Wanting to end apartheid because you read it in a fortune cookie makes you poorly reasoned, but not a bigot. Wanting to end apartheid perpetrated by the Jews, not caring about why they might be doing it and whether it is acceptable in connection with other ethical imperatives, and managing to give not a moment’s thought about whether the people living under apartheid will stop living under apartheid when the Jews stop makes you anti-Semetic.

Plenty of nice people are anti-Semites and have made great contributions to the world. Don’t take it so hard. Hell, lots of those nice anti-Semites don’t even think of themselves as being anti-Semites: they have lots of Jewish friends, have gone to a shiva or two, and can tell a funny incrowd Jewish joke. A lack of bad intent doesn’t make you not a racist.

Lol, yeah, you speak for Jews: they necessarily need to kidnap, destroy, torture, and extra-judicially kill. Perhaps you'd like to quote the Protocols in support of Israel next. A bit of Mein Kampf after, just to round it out? — StreetlightX

No, the Zionists have to engage in apartheid to create a JEWISH state. It sort of goes with the name. Jews, however, don’t have to be Zionists. And Jews can recognize when other Jews are advocating bad policy, even if seemingly well meaning. Seems you can’t keep your objects of scorn straight.

the Israeli apartheid ends and is replaced by a Palestinian apartheid, then the Palestinian apartheid will then have to end. But the current crisis is the Israeli apartheid, the one that is actually happening. — _db

A perfectly reasonable response, obvious though it may be. It is basically the only defense I know of regarding the end-apartheid folk that doesn’t make them sound like bigots, just naive. If, on the fair weighing of the presently available evidence, you conclude that Palestinian apartheid is mere conjecture and not a likelihood, I might disagree with you, but at least I’d respect the position if well reasoned. People of good judgment can differ, after all.

Frankly, I am highly sympathetic to the “justice delayed is justice denied” line of thought. When it comes to larger group interests, however, I am not entirely convinced that reflexive “do the right thing in front of you and worry about the rest later” is the best choice. At some point long term strategic thinking is required and public policy seems like the place to negotiate present injustice against the value of future benefits.

I don’t care about your accusations; I’m gesturing towards the history of Zionism and how everyone had it stuffed down their throats that being anti-Zionist was being anti-Semitic. Zionism is inherently problematic. I’m neither the first nor last to say that. The difference when I speak is that I am at least considering the Jews and their interests when deciding whom, if anyone, has any claim to my support. When you speak, there is not even a moment where you care about them. They aren’t even worthy of consideration and they don’t even get to speak until you give them permission. That you are so unreflected is unsurprising, but one day perhaps you’ll catch up.

oh right. Because anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. You make that up on your own or have to consult with Likud?

Again, your reading needs work. No one gives a shit if they do it to the Jews (anti-Semitism), they only care if apartheid ends (by whomever on whomever). Apartheid is bad - moral acid test.

My response is not, “But what about the Jews?!” (Again, the audience doesn’t care about the Jews), it is “But when Israeli apartheid is gone, it will be replaced by Palestinian apartheid. The solution to apartheid is not different apartheid. Until you offer a solution in which apartheid ends in Palestine/Israel entirely, you aren’t actually trying to end apartheid.”

180, who to his minimal credit, at least gestures in the direction of how maybe the Palestinians don’t actually mean that they want to create an apartheid state because someone made some promise that has never been honored. For his part that is the best he can do - suggest that it isn’t necessarily apartheid in Free Palestine. He has no real evidence for that, but at least he is willing to cherry pick.

As I said in my very first response to 180, this conversation is not about the Jews because the Jews don’t matter in the popular conversation about Free Palestine. All that matters is that the Palestinians suffer. There can be no excuse for it and no justification. Anyone who causes it is in the wrong no questions asked. The wrongness must stop because the Palestinians. The conversation is wholly self aware that it is focused on the victim and stopping the behavior of the wrongdoer.

What I am responding to is what is likely to happen in the absence of Israeli apartheid. It isn’t not apartheid. It is just not Jewish apartheid. Your level of thinking is this….

Step 1) end Israeli apartheid…
Step 2) …. We are only discussing step one!!!!
Step 3) …. No no no!!!! Just step one!!!
Step 4) Peace on earth and good will towards man.

I envy your critical reasoning skills.

except the Palestinians disavowed the Oslo accords. Read what they have said since Oslo and in direct response to it. The PLO has not adopted what Arafat promised to put up for consideration. The evidence is there for you to look at. Find an official policy statement of Hamas that recognizes Israel’s right to exist and says that they don’t intend to establish a Zionist free state in 100% of the land. Go ahead and leave the pipe dream 90s and catch-up to at least 2005.

Like, I understand that you wish you were arguing against fanatical anti-Semites opposed to the very existence of the state of Israel, but you're not, and so you should probably adjust your arguments and rhetorical strategy accordingly. Or you can continue to post this sort of nonsense, and continue to fail to meaningfully contribute to this discussion. — Seppo

Seppo, grow up. The Palestinians who 180 wants to free can speak and have spoken for themselves in this regard. Go read what they have said. Hamas and Fatah. They aren’t hard to find. They are the de facto leadership of the Palestinians along with the “Palestinian Liberation Organization.”

And in case you need some direction, rumour has it that this is something of signifigance in Palestinian circles:

Chapter One
Principles… Goals…. Methods
The Movement's Essential Principles
Article (1) Palestine is part of the Arab World, and the Palestinian people are part of the Arab Nation, and their struggle is part of its struggle.

Article (2) The Palestinian people have an independent identity. They are the sole authority that decides their own destiny, and they have complete sovereignty on all their lands.

Article (3) The Palestinian Revolution plays a leading role in liberating Palestine .

Article (4) The Palestinian struggle is part and parcel of the world-wide struggle against Zionism, colonialism and international imperialism.

Article (5) Liberating Palestine is a national obligation which necessities the materialistic and human support of the Arab Nation.

Article (6) UN projects, accords and reso, or those of any individual cowhich undermine the Palestinian people's right in their homeland are illegal and rejected.

Article (7) The Zionist Movement is racial, colonial and aggressive in ideology, goals, organisation and method.

Article (8) The Israeli existence in Palestine is a Zionist invasion with a colonial expansive base, and it is a natural ally to colonialism and international imperialism.

Article (9) Liberating Palestine and protecting its holy places is an Arab, religious and human obligation.

Article (10) Palestinian National Liberation Movement, “FATEH”, is an independent national revolutionary movement representing the revolutionary vanguard of the Palestinian people.

Article (11) The crowds which participate in the revolution and liberation are the proprietors of the Palestinian land.

Goals
Article (12) Complete liberation of Palestine , and eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence.

Article (13) Establishing an independent democratic state with complete sovereignty on all Palestinian lands, and Jerusalem is its capital city, and protecting the citizens' legal and equal rights without any racial or religious discrimination.

Article (14) Setting up a progressive society that warrants people's rights and their public freedom.

Article (15) Active participation in achieving the Arab Nation's goals in liberation and building an independent, progressive and united Arab society.

Article (16) Backing up all oppressed people in their struggle for liberation and self determination in order to build a just, international peace.
— “Totally non-apartheid people”

I posted their charter. Your move.

That the Palestinians don’t intend to create an apartheid state on whatever land they govern and/or an Islamic state.

So glad you are amused. Now evidence and sources. I’m more than happy to give it a read. I would be thrilled if there was a third choice.