Explanatorily Intelligible

It would be interesting to answer the question of whether or not The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is a religious story by testing against ‘religion is an explanatorily intelligible account of the Cosmos’. Does the Lord of the Rings give an account in which the causal and intentional explanations for the happenings in Middle Earth fall together? One of the problems in testing a scientific theory and …

If we want to grasp the nature of the discussions in the Indian traditions, there is much we need to do beforehand: (a) identify the entity they were talking about; (b) identify the specific questions they were answering; (c) identify the generic questions that defined both the outlines of the acceptable answers and the formulation of the specific questions; etc. (The ‘cetera’ indicates that I do …

The first question: could we have EIA of units smaller than the Cosmos? An explanatorily intelligible account of any object, whatever that object is, is one where causal (say) and intentional explanations fall together. The causal account provides, let us say, an explanation that makes it clear what the causal antecedents of some object (or event, or phenomenon) are. (For the sake of this …

Of course, the concept of explanatorily intelligible account is not easy to grasp: if it were, the ‘heathens’ would not be blind to the existence of religion. However, that does not mean we cannot grasp it either. I am glad you are beginning to see why the story about ‘Jesus as a Yogi’ (Sankrant’s famous interpretation) is wrong; and why discussions on Sulekha drive me sometimes to despair and the …

(I) In a Greek story, Persephone spends part of the year in the underworld and part of the year on earth, and winter is caused by her mother Demeter’s sorrow at parting, and spring by her mother’s joy at reuniting. When taken at face value, this story makes the change of seasons be because of someone’s emotions, and hence intelligible. Two points with respect to this. (a) I do not think that the …

I Let me begin by clarifying what the notion of intelligibility says. The first thing to keep in mind is that Religion makes (i.e. transforms, renders, or any such synonym) the Cosmos (used interchangeably with ’the world’, ’the Universe’, etc) into an entity that is intelligible. In the process, and by virtue of it, the explanatory account makes itself intelligible as well. That is, Religion is …

Why did Christianity become a ‘universal’ religion? How did Christians replace the ‘chosen’ people? What was the logic behind the transformation of the Jewish god into God of the humankind? In the literature on the subject that I have read, the first two questions get a historical (semi-psychological) answer. Traces of this answer can also be found between the lines in ‘The Heathen…’. There is a …

Let us begin with the idea that religion is some kind of a system (or structure or whatever you feel like using) that maintains itself. That is to say, it is able to reproduce itself, and sustain itself. I call this the ‘simple reproduction’ of religion. This dynamic enables not only the reproduction of the community of believers but also the experiential intelligibility that the Cosmos has for …

When a religion claims that it is the word of God and that the word is unconditionally true; and that, further, the word is about the Cosmos: everything that was, is and shall be. So, when I say that religion is such an entity, namely, it claims that it is the word of God and that it claims to be unconditionally true and that it is about the Cosmos, I am accepting the self description of religion. …

Lets become clear about the nature of my claims about worldviews. The word carries multiple meanings. It has partly to do with the multiple meanings of the component words: world’ and ‘view’. In daily language-use, ‘world’ is used to pick out (a) a spatial and temporal slice of the cosmos (b) and/or the entire Cosmos itself. The first, the slices, are many: from the ‘social world’ to the …

One has faith in God and, therefore, trusts that His message is also The Truth. That is to say, one should not predicate the attitude of having ‘faith in’ to the EI account directly. There is a very important additional reason for being clear about our terminologies. Consider the distinction between having no idea that the Cosmos is an EI entity and having an account that makes the Cosmos into …

Each time I tell someone, whether in a one-to-one discussion or in a conference, “there is no religion in India”, I get the following answer: “Of course, that depends on how you define ‘religion’”. I answer as follows: “In that case, here is my definition: ‘Religion=what does not exist in India’. Will that do? If it is really a question of the definition of a word, why does one need to write such …