"I do know quite a bit about religion, but not from the biased insider's point of view... I am able to compare and contrast belief systems without having to support one desperately to appease my own cognitive dissonance."
This sounds as if you see yourself standing outside religion and analyzing it objectively. You mention your own bias, but do you really consider it? What about your bias as a non-believer of God or gods? I would say you are not standing outside. In the same way I am biased towards believing in the Christian God, you are biased towards believing in no god. The belief system you run the risk of supporting desperately due to your own cognitive dissonance is that of the nonexistence of God. I made my decision on religion based on this presumption, "There are many religions in the world, all of them claiming to be true. They cannot all be true, but might there be truth in there somewhere? If there is truth to be found here, I am going to plunge in as far as it takes to safely conclude the truth or lack thereof." I would hazard to say your presumption goes like this: "There are many religions in the world, and they all seem like fairy-tales or wishful thinking or supernatural explanation for what science used to not know. Since there isn't truth here, I can compare and contrast them academically, like I would compare and contrast theories or Brothers Grimm. If there is truth to be found here, it will rise to the top of my analysis, but I do not expect it to be so."
"Not to sound harsh, but to deny that the reality of a religion is purely subjective shows a lack of perspective."
This statement proves my point. Saying that the reality of religion is purely subjective is the same as saying there is no reality to religion. If religion - God's existence - is dependent on personal opinion/culture/feelings, and thus different for everyone, then there is no true God out there that is independent of everyone's stance. But if any of the religions are true, then there is a God or gods who exist regardless of any one person's view. Thus, as you assume all religious views are subjective, by default you assume they are all untrue.
I posit that if there is a God out there, He exists objectively, and it is of importance for every human to take the time to determine whether or not this is true. "I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. That is not the point at which Faith comes in" (C. S. Lewis). But you cannot look at it objectively, with your best reasoning, until you take the stance that if it is true, it (and God) exists objectively.
I think you make a lot of good points in this. I think that his words clearly show that he has a bias against the objective reality of any religion, and thus against the beliefs of the vast majority of religions, which posit themselves to be objectively true.
ReplyDeleteI disagree with your concluding comment, however. I think it is true of objectively looking at many religions, especially monotheistic religions, but I don't think that an objective god is metaphysically necessary for there to be a god.
I can envision a world in which god is the result of people's belief in him, that that belief has power and that the power of so much collected belief brings god into existence and determines the afterlife. In this case, god's existence would be subjective and malleable, totally dependent on the collected power of belief, but god would exist and be able to interact with the world so long as he was believed in.
And that's just one example of a possible religion one could have while embracing the idea that god is subjective, taken from the top of my head. It would have pretty strong explanatory power, offering a reason why conceptions of god would change so drastically throughout history- god himself changed.
I'm not saying I believe in that; I don't. I am agnostic, and thus don't really believe in anything. I do think that one pitfall people tend to fall into when considering religion is considering it from a monotheistic, and frequently Christian perspective. Even atheists are guilty of this- they feel that if they can disprove a single omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent being through logical games then they have ruled out the existence of a god. But this perspective is limited, and I think it can be worthwhile to explore other possibilities.