That’s an interesting turn of phrase. No doubt you were going for “”make up one’s own mind” but put your way points out something naive about either phrasing. Did we set our mind’s foundations in the womb. No doubt the way we respond to events in our lives, especially the habits we settle on do shape our minds. But from what vantage point do we appraise our minds and determine which way we’d like to be. Our ships are at sea and always will be; we can’t put ourselves in dry dock for a rebuild.
The same is true for everyone of course but our strength as a species is our ability to share expertise. Why would anyone want to restrict themselves to their own google search fueled opinion. Where science applies it is the gold standard. I would no more restrict my understanding of the world to “my own research” than I would restrict my medical treatment to what I can learn about herbs, vitamins and crystals.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
483
So they are beyond the scope of psychology, of anthropology.
I would think biology, psychology and anthropology would all provide context for religious experience without any one of them being able to entirely account for it. I think that project would potentially enrich each discipline. There is no more reason to fear religion becoming explained away in the process than there is to fear backward attempts to subsume all the branches of science under what they think of as God’s empirical compendium, the Bible. The attempt can be made but it can’t succeed in any satisfying way.
Oh nothing like that. One would have to content themself with studying people’s experience of God, living people not legendary ones from the past. As you say, for the purposes of scientific investigation God cannot not be isolated as either a substance or subject.
“Appropriate sacrifices” might work. But figuring out what’s “appropriate” could be tricky; you’d have to keep sacrificing things until you find what works and what doesn’t.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
489
? Psychology, sociology, anthropology emerge from biology… Religious ideas are nested in those matryoshkas. And what religious ideas need a supernatural explanation?
It’s like studying alien abductions. We have no evidence of alien abductions. or even evidence that aliens exist. We only have people with vivid imaginations who claim they were abducted by aliens. And we take it from there. (Man, the first Invaders from Mars movie scared the crap out of me).
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
493
We need no evidence, which is just as well as there cannot be any, for the certainty that aliens exist. Nor for the certainty that they’ve never been here and never will be. Just an nth of thought.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
498
It has been to all materialists’ satisfaction. Religion is easily fully explained by mind, society, culture,
evolution. There is no smoking gun for anything else. No divine or esoteric or Jungian collective or theosophist or pantheistic, noospheric intelligence.
You are entitled to place your trust in such a view. You just don’t seem capable of making any kind of case for your particular bias that doesn’t amount to “it’s true for everyone who sees things as I do” or “it’s obvious to anyone who isn’t committed to or deluded by other commitments”. I’d say your pot is as black as anyone’s kettle.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
500
Sure is, I know my cognitive bias. It’s for parsimonious rationality.
No surprise then if you employ a highly restrictive filter that you find no justification for that in which other people believe who do not employ that same filter in every context of their lives. Many of those same people do employ a similar filter in empirical contexts but not in subjective/relational ones.