Would it make sense to have a shorter word for procrastination? I guess not. The sole purpose of procrastination is to postpone whatever a person is doing at the moment. The longer the delay, the more successful the procrastination is. Anyways, the word procrastination made me procrastinate yet again, and hence is preventing me to come to main topic, religion. The above explanation is related to the context as I am writing about a discussion I just had with my colleagues on religion, while procrastinating (as always, duh! ).
OK, so the discussion was about religion.
I had a feeling -- and only a feeling, no thinking and no guessing, all from the bottom of the urging place -- that religion is about beliefs; miracles and praying is just a custom for the people who may have a hard time identifying or focusing on their beliefs. The English definition of the term religion, on the contrary, suggests that it is about the belief or worship of one or more super-natural being as the controlling power. So I guess, this western definition is pretty screwed up. No wonder, there are armies of Atheist denouncing their religion in the hemisphere (of the Earth) that does not have erotic paintings on a temple's walls.
I thought it is more about explaining the inexplicable using some set of axioms or conjecture. Did I just obfuscated the previous sentence with somewhat convoluted terms to demonstrate my smartness? May be, I did. Or may be, I do not have simple words to elaborate on this issues. So I guess, Bush, Arjun Singh, Tom Cruise, and the likes, the sermon is over for you guys. Go back to your prayers.
I always tried to draw parallels between religion and science (and of course, I am not the only or the pioneer fool in this blasphemous territory). To me, for every scientific phenomena, there is a level of detail that I believe (or trust) and there are some that I could/would derive from those basic beliefs, or a set of axioms and conjectures for the mathematical minds. I do not care how that collection of beliefs came into existence; I think, I just trust those books or science to provide a justification. As do others, I often console myself for this part of negligence by claiming that there, in fact, do exist logical proofs for all of these, without actually verifying these claims (I know we have so little time to waste by looking into everything). For example, everybody knows that there is this cool "theory of relativity" (well, not everybody but I am assuming if somebody actually reads this article then there is a fair chance that he or she or it may have heard of it). But how many of "us" actually know about it? How many believe it? and, how many have actually verified its correctness? By now, we have lost everyone. Of course, the person who, in reality, was counted in all the three above-mentioned how-many's is not wasting any time reading this post. So the conclusion is: even in science, we believe in certain concepts as true.
I know, Mr. I-will-argue-about-everything and Ms. I-dont-give-a-crap-about-religion would zealously raise their hand from the back bench to say, "but most of these concepts are verifiable."
"Well, they are verifiable for a reason that they are rather simple."
"Do you exist?" "Explain that, you crazy Albert."
There are set of axioms in science. My notion is that religion also has a similar starting collection. The problem is that there is a big confusion about the inclusion of prevalent traditions/cultures as part of religion. Most people only see the traditions as religion, and when they could not explain these "weird" traditions with their notion of logic, they reject it as a valid hypothesis. So is it really a problem with the hypothesis that a (any) religion being sensible or is the set of basic beliefs that these "scientists" postulate fallible?
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Question:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/04/28/prayer.death.ap/index.html
This is a recent news story about parents who didn't take their daughter to see a doctor when she became ill. Instead, they saw the illness as a test of faith from god and just prayed, and the daughter ended up dying.
Is behavior like this "right" or "moral"?
I'll try to anticipate your response, and guess that you'll say this is practice, gone wrong, and separate from the theory of religion.
In which case, my next question would be, if this is practice of religion, but you consider it to be bad or wrong, then on what grounds can you say that it is wrong? The parents could claim that their beliefs are axioms and the fact that their daughter died just means they didn't pray hard enough.
excellent point!!
I do not think I want to call this behavior right or moral, as both, righteousness and morality are defined by the culture and the specific circumstances that demand their meaning. For the same reason, I am also unsure if I want to call it wrong or immoral either.
I am, however, tempted to characterize this act as "ignorant".
At the risk of being over-repetitive, I concur that religion is about explaining the unexplained, perhaps to help an individual accept his/her limitations. To elaborate further, I believe religion suggests that first an individual should try his/her best -- with the help of science, logic, reasoning, or what have you -- to resolve a situation or solve a problem. Once all your options are exhausted, a religion provides a belief or a faith (some call it God) for self consolation.
As you anticipated, I want to take the refuge of theory versus practice argument here. In addition to referring to malpractices, I also want to say that there are aberrant adaptations (by individuals) of the reasonable sets of axioms available with every religion (I believe such a set exist for every religion). These adjustments, unfortunately, quite often distort the original moral/motive of these beliefs to ridiculous forms. For example, perhaps, in biblical era, a cure for diabetes was not present so an influential philosopher (a noble one) might have suggested that the patient and his family members should have faith in God and use prayers to console themselves, and let the patient enjoy his remaining life. This advice must have been suitable for that time frame. Since then, science and technology has made a lot of progress, so I guess the assumptions have changed a little, however the fundamental idea has not changed. There might be preventive measures, if not cure, for diabetes available now, but what about Alzheimer's? What is a patient or its family members supposed to do? -- live the remaining moments of life in frustration and angst, or accept an uncontrollable cause and make the best of it.
hm, so that raises a few other issues.
First, it seems like you're saying that science takes precendence over religion, in the sense that, if science and religion offer contradicting explanations for some phenomenon, then it would be "ignorant" to take the religious view over the scientific view. Would you agree with this statement, and if so, what does that say about the nature of science versus the nature of religion? It seems to me to be saying that science is in some way more objective and more useful in understanding the universe than religion.
A related issue is what you mean by an aberrant adaption of a religious axiom or belief. How do you judge what is aberrant? It seems like here you're also saying science and logic should take precendence over religion, and be used as a measure of which religious beliefs are acceptable and which are aberrant.
One final issue - it seems like, at least based on this issue, that you see religion as more of a coping mechanism, a therapeutic device for humans to deal with what they don't understand. Under that philosophy, it seems like religion is not concerned at all with the "true" nature of things.
For instance, in a hypothetical situation where no cure for diabetes exists and moreover, no god exists, it seems like you could still make the same argument that it is better for the person to believe in god and accept the situation rather than accept the truth of no god and be frustrated by it. Would you agree with this?
This seems both unnecessary and dangerous. Unnecessary because it assumes that lack of belief in god or some sort of religion will lead to frustration and despair, which I would not say is true. More importantly, dangerous because it would lead to complacency - if everyone in the past had all believed that diabetes and other illnesses were simply the will of a supernatural being and that no scientific cure was possible, then no cures would ever have been developed.
About the word procrastination - http://www.slate.com/id/2191238/
For a completely different reason, I looked at the wikipedia entry for "Jainism". It says the following:
"Jains view God as the unchanging traits of the pure soul of each living being, described as Infinite Knowledge, Perception, Consciousness, and Happiness. Jains do not believe in an omnipotent supreme being, creator or manager (kartā), but rather in an eternal universe governed by natural laws."
I was expecting a similar beliefs about God in other religions also, and thus my notion of God does not agree with a belief in a super-natural being (ref. Oxford American dictionary).
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