Religion

Sacred determines what profane is; it is not about respect for religion. The film Innocence of Muslims has turned cities around the world upside down in the past week, and threatens to continue to do so. “We never insult other prophets”, says the tenor of several Muslims, “so why can’t we demand that Mohammed receive respect? We respect others; why do they insult us?" Others argued that the anger …

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 …

Let us assume that the Church Fathers (or the Apostles or whoever else) planned to introduce an eschatological doctrine and some mode of worship. (Let us further assume that their reasoning or their strategy was something analogous to your impressions: their intention was to induce a sense of urgency and guilt.) Our problem is not to explain their possible motives but to explain the success of …

One confuses between a definition and a hypothesis. Definitions tell us how we use a word and which objects it refers to. In the case of the term ‘religion’, a definition should merely address this referential task: which things are we referring to, when we use this word. It cannot give us any understanding of the structure or properties of religion and does not have empirical consequences (much …

We all agree that events like the Gujarat riots are tragic and terrible. But what is the role of intellectuals in avoiding similar tragedies in the future? Why can’t religion be political? Obviously, the duty of the intellectual is to try and help us understand the nature of the events and the violence involved. In India and abroad, the concepts of ‘communalism’ and ‘communal violence’ are often …

You ask whether ‘in principle’ a neurobiological theory on religion could “account” for the experience of the believers. The answer depends on what kind of an account you are asking for and what you have in mind when you say ‘in principle’. If you mean by ‘account’, whether it could predict or even explain, I do not think so. We know that, at the least, we are made up of atoms. Your question, in …

Before deciding about whether or not Vivekananda was ethnocentric, jingoistic or even plain intolerant, one has to understand what Vivekananda was saying. In doing so, the interpretative “principle of charity” requires us to render him maximally consistent. Consider the title of this thread: “All religions are true”. Spelling-out Vivekananda’s stance regarding this theme presupposes the ability …

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. …

The first thing is that my book is about the western culture and a specific religion, which brought the former forth. It is only indirectly about India because I interrogate the way India was looked at by the western culture. I proffer some hypotheses about India there by consciously remaining within the western framework. You are right in saying that I deny that ‘religions’ called ‘Hinduism’, …

Let me begin this contribution, the third piece about our culture and traditions([1] , [2] ), by sharing something you are familiar with. Very often, I have heard the NRI parents in the USA making the following remark: When I came to the US so many decades ago, I knew very little about Hinduism. My ignorance was driven home when I had children and they began to ask what Hinduism was. Because I had …

Balagangadhara points out an inconsistent reasoning of the western and westernized Scholars, as well as the last 400 years of humanities scholarship. “Let me summarise the dilemma. Some properties are necessary for some traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) to be religions. If one accepts this, the threat is that other cultures appear not to have religions at all. For some reason or another (I …

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 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 …

Ideas have impact on people. Theological dilemmas have impact on those who formulate such dilemmas and on the future generations. They undertake actions (of whatever type) to solve these dilemmas, where and when these people find such dilemmas important. In this way, one can make some sense of the claim that Christological dilemma propels Christianity forward. However, this explanation cannot (at …

Question: why religion spreads among (some) human beings? What is it about them that enables the transmission of religion? This issue allows multiple answers. In this post, I would like to focus on the simplest answer to the question. In my theory, I presuppose an answer to the question: I assume that there is something in our constitution that allows religion to spread among human beings. The …

Are there accounts about the origin of religion? Yes, there are at least two kinds. One kind tries to localise the origin of religion in human beings and the other in God. 1.1. If religion is what it also says about itself, namely, it is the word of God, what are we trying to answer when we try to answer the issue of the origin of religion? Are we trying to give a scientific answer to the …

Religion lays claim to truth, both about itself and the Cosmos. It is true the way no other account (that we know of) is. However, religion also generates (or brings into being) a configuration of learning. That is, it enables a coordination of different learning processes into a configuration. A culture is such a configuration of learning. Could religion be a neural disorder? I do not see how we …