Wittgenstein on Understanding Religious Beliefs

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-78
Author(s):  
Yuliya Fadeeva
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Magical Beliefs

AbstractWittgenstein’s writings on religious and magical beliefs, especially the “Lectures on Religious Belief” and “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” are taken to imply semantic incommensurability and inaccessibility by the Wittgensteinian Fideism and, in part, the expressivist interpretation. According to these interpretations, religious and non-religious discourses are self-contained, closed, and not intertranslatable. Wittgenstein is taken to deny mutual understanding between believers and non-believers with respect to religious and magical discourse. I argue against such interpretations and support readings by Kusch, Schroeder, and Tripodi that are optimistic of the possibility of mutual understanding. Nevertheless, there is a danger of scepticism for such optimistic readings when they refer to a special attitude that is needed to understand religious belief and speech. I offer a reply to this problem and suggest to see Wittgenstein’s stance on understanding religious discourse in a greater proximity to his general views about language in his later writings. Then, however, any fideist view of the religious (and magical) form of life as self-contained and isolated from the non-religious has to be repudiated.

Understanding Theism

1981 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 311-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Millar
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Religious Discourse ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
The World ◽  
Theistic Belief

Much contemporary philosophy of religion is preoccupied with highly general problems about the nature of religious belief and of religious language, rather than with how to interpret, in detail, specific religious beliefs or forms of religious discourse. Among the matters of dispute there seem to be two of overriding importance. The first concerns the relation between religious beliefs and experience and centres on the question, what sorts of experience are relevant to the acceptance or rejection of religious beliefs. The second concerns whether or not religious beliefs have an explanatory function. Discussion of both these themes in relation to theistic belief is still largely dominated by conceptions of God and of his relation to the world which have been developed by natural theologians, particularly, though not exclusively, those who have worked within traditions significantly influenced by Thomas Aquinas. Thus the idea that religious beliefs have an explanatory function is commonly associated with the view that they present answers to questions raised by those alleged traits or features of the world which have been the concern of natural theologians and which have been described by means of concepts of ‘contingency’, ‘purposiveness’, ‘order’, and ‘design’. Consequently, the sort of experience often held to be relevant to the acceptance or rejection of theistic belief is that which is relevant to the application of these problematic concepts.

Analysis, Metaphysics, and Belief

1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-39 ◽  
Author(s):  
F. Michael McLain
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Religious Language ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Recent Statement

What has Jerusalem to do with Athens? The everchanging contours of the answer to this question have taken an arresting shape with the confluence of existentialist theology and analytic philosophy. This improbable union has led to an impressive and attractive account of religious belief and its language. Under the influence of Kierkegaard, Buber, and others, existentialist theology has argued persuasively for the non-theoretical, practical character of religious belief; it has, of late, discovered inspiration and assistance for this position in the reflections of recent analytic philosophy on the difficulties involved in speculative philosophy. The resultant theological point of view is one which argues for a ‘practical’ interpretation of religion, one which holds that the meaning of religious language is to be found exclusively in its use. Religion is seen as a self-contained ‘form of life’, and its language is held to have its own peculiar ‘logic’. It follows that religious beliefs and conceptions are intelligible in their own right and do not need to be explicated or justified with the aid of an ontology or metaphysic. I propose in this essay to appraise a recent statement of this position, and, in so doing, explore the broad question of the bearing of analytic reflections on the question of Christian theology's relationship to philosophy.

Insubstantial Burdens

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Vallier ◽  
Michael Weber
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Religious Freedom Restoration Act ◽  
The Government ◽  
A Minor

This chapter articulates and defends a “partially subjectivist” way of defining burdens on religious belief under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). On this view, courts should largely defer to plaintiffs as to what is a burden on their religious belief. There is only a minor requirement that the plaintiffs have to satisfy, which is to show that the government is doing something that pressures them to act in a way contrary to their beliefs—a relatively easy hurdle to clear. In general, courts are ill-equipped to determine what people’s religious beliefs really are, and this extends to determining when those beliefs are substantially burdened. More strongly, there is a tradition that says evaluating when people’s religious beliefs are burdened is really none of the court’s business. The partially subjectivist view honors these principles.

Let us be careful with the evidence on mentalizing, cognitive biases, and religious beliefs

2016 ◽  
Vol 39 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjaana Lindeman ◽  
Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Theoretical Synthesis

AbstractNorenzayan et al.’s theoretical synthesis is highly plausible and commendable. However, the empirical evidence for the arguments on mentalizing, cognitive biases, and religious belief is currently not as strong as the writers suggest. Although certainly abundant and compelling, this evidence is indirect, contradictory, and weak and must be acknowledged as such. More direct studies are needed to support the theory.

Blanshard's Ethics of Belief and Metaphysical Postulates

1991 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-156
Author(s):  
Winfred George Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Ethics Of Belief ◽  
Roman Catholics

In Brand Blanshard's major defence of reason in religion, Reason and Belief, he criticizes both Roman Catholics and Protestants for advocating contradictory theological doctrines and for believing beyond what the evidence supports. Claiming belief to be an ethical matter, with one morally responsible for one's religious beliefs, he holds that one is morally obligated in such metaphysical matters to believe only what the evidence warrants. Blanshard finds that religious beliefs typically fail to meet the standard of this ethics of belief, and thus his ethics appears inhospitable to religious belief.

scholarly journals The gene of agricultural grain-growing civilization of the modern Ukrainian territory as a marker of religious belief

2017 ◽  
pp. 126-138
Author(s):  
Oleksandr Zavaliy
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Living Conditions

The article «The gene of agricultural grain-growing civilization of the modern Ukrainian territory as a marker of religious beliefs» by О. Zavalii. The issue of the origins of the agricultural culture of the territory of modern Ukraine is considered in the article, based on the analysis of the leading foreign and domestic scientists’ research. The culture served as the source of religious beliefs based on the Natural worldview which was predetermined by the geographical living conditions.

scholarly journals Speaking to My Ancestors: An Ethnographic Study of Lived Childhood Religion in Rural Gansu

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
Joseph Chadwin
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Gansu Province ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Lived Religion ◽  
Unique Form ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Rural Village ◽  
Ethnographic Data

AbstractThis article provides an overview of the major existing scholarship pertaining to childhood religion in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). More specifically, it examines lived childhood religion in a rural village in Gānsù province. This article challenges the commonly preconceived notion that children in the PRC do not regard religious belief as important and simply mirror the religious practices of their guardians. By utilising ethnographic data, I argue that children in the PRC are capable of constructing their own unique form of lived religion that is informed by, but crucially distinct from, the religious beliefs and practices of adults. The practices and beliefs of this lived religion can be extremely important to children and the evidence from fieldwork suggests that they tend to take both their practice and belief very seriously.

Intimacy, Imagination and the Inner Dialectics of Knowledge Communities: The Synthetic Society, 1896–1908

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. C. Lubenow
Keyword(s):  
Social Capital ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
Knowledge Communities ◽  
Knowledge Community

Knowledge communities are formed at the interstices of university and metropolitan life. They help produce some of the intangible features of social capital and are also considered as engines of change. This chapter examines the knowledge community — the Synthetic Society — in more detail. It discusses the Rules of the Synthetic Society, which consider existing Agnostic tendencies and contribute toward a working philosophy of religious belief. Their objective was to expose various views and to seek in them not only mutual understanding but to identify which of those concepts they held in common.

Parents’ Expectations of Religious Congregations

2021 ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Christian Smith ◽  
Amy Adamczyk
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Faith ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Religious Development ◽  
Religious Congregations ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Youth Ministers

Church leaders, youth ministers, and volunteers are likely curious about the extent to which parents find congregations useful in transmitting religious beliefs and behaviors. This chapter explores how parents use religious congregations to transmit religious belief. The chapter discusses why parents tend to feel that they, rather than their congregations, are primarily responsible for passing on religious faith. Many parents select their congregations for fairly practical reasons, they have a lot of confidence in their own understanding of religion, and they want to be involved in all aspects of their child’s life, including religious development. This chapter also unpacks what parents see as the most valuable contributions that congregations provide for their children. These include the congregation’s role in providing religious education, making religion fun for their children, and transmitting cultural traditions.

Locke’s Underlying Background Beliefs

2021 ◽  
pp. 201-206
Author(s):  
Ruth Boeker
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Moral Accountability ◽  
Over Time

This chapter brings together the results of the previous chapters and shows what role Locke’s moral, religious, metaphysical, and epistemic background beliefs play in his thinking about persons and personal identity. Locke breaks with traditional metaphysical debates, first, by adopting a metaphysically agnostic stance with regard to the materiality or immateriality of thinking substances and, second, by arguing for a kind-dependent approach to questions of identity over time. Locke’s moral and legal conception of a person, according to which persons are subjects of accountability, is informed by his moral and religious beliefs. His thinking about moral accountability can be challenged and has been challenged by his contemporaries. Although Locke has good reasons for distinguishing our idea of a person from that of a human being and of a substance, these reasons are based on his metaphysical agnostic views and his religious belief in an afterlife.

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