How Confident Should the Religious Believer Be in the Face of Religious Pluralism?

Chapter 3 explores the prospects for resisting the sorts of arguments in which religious diversity or disagreement seem to support skepticism regarding justified (or rational) religious belief. Those religious believers who would resist can (i) argue that the principles that convict the faithful of irrationality overreach, and would establish a more widespread skepticism about rational belief; (ii) downgrade their disagreeing interlocutor(s); (iii) appeal to epistemic permissivism; or (iv) argue that the believer is no worse off, epistemically speaking, than the atheist or agnostic non-believer. After presenting what the present author regards as the best version of the argument from diversity or disagreement, the chapter argues that any believer who hopes for truth will not get much solace from any of these responses.

Transfer of consciousness. Considering its possibility or fantasy from the religious and scientific perspectives

Ancient beliefs such as astral projection, human possession, abduction and other similar are not only universal, taught by all religions, but also used as premises for core believes/expectations, such as after-life, eternal damnation, reincarnation, and many others. Transferring Consciousness to a Synthetic Body is also a feature of interest in our actual knowledge, both religious as for science. If immortality were an option, would you take it into consideration more seriously? Most people would probably dismiss the question since immortality isn’t a real deal to contract. But what if having eternal life was a possibility in today’s world? The possibility of the transfer of human consciousness to a synthetic body can soon become a reality, and it could help the world for the better. Thus, until recently, the subject was mostly proposed by religion(s) and saw as a spiritual [thus, not ‘materially real’ or ‘forthwith accomplishable’] proposal therefore not really fully engaged or trust if not a religious believer. Now, technology is evolving, and so are we. The world has come to a point where artificial intelligence is breaking the boundaries of our perception of human consciousness and intelligence. And with this so is our understanding about the ancient question ‘who are we?’ concerning consciousness and how this human feature sticks to our body or it can become an entity beyond the material flesh. Without being exhaustive with the theme's development [leaving enough room for further investigations], we would like to take it for a spin and see how and where the religious and neuroscience realms intersect with it for a global, perhaps holistic understanding. Developments in neurotechnology favor the brain to broaden its physical control further the restraints of the human body. Accordingly, it is achievable to both acquire and provide information from and to the brain and also to organize feedback processes in which a person's thoughts can influence the activity of a computer or reversely.

Disagreement-Motivated Religious Skepticism and the Commitment to Impartiality

This chapter begins by clarifying the focus of the book, which is what may be called the “higher-order argument for disagreement-motivated religious skepticism.” A key premise of this argument is that a suitably informed religious believer lacks justification for thinking that his or her process of religious belief formation is significantly more reliable than the collective reliability of the processes that otherwise epistemically qualified people use to form religious beliefs. Arguments for this premise that appeal to the rational symmetry of competing processes of religious belief formation are shown to be inadequate. It is argued that a viable argument for the key premise must posit three constraints on the factors that may justifiably ground epistemic self-trust in the face of religious disagreement: an “internal reason constraint,” an “agent impartiality constraint,” and a “reasons impartiality constraint.”

Religious Disagreement, Religious Experience, and the Evil God Hypothesis

Conciliationism is the view that says when an agent who believes P becomes aware of an epistemic peer who believes not-P, that she encounters a (partial) defeater for her belief that P. Strong versions of conciliationism pose a sceptical threat to many, if not most, religious beliefs since religion is rife with peer disagreement. Elsewhere (Removed) I argue that one way for a religious believer to avoid sceptical challenges posed by strong conciliationism is by appealing to the evidential import of religious experience. Not only can religious experience be used to establish a relevant evidential asymmetry between disagreeing parties, but reliable reports of such experiences also start to put pressure on the religious sceptic to conciliate toward her religious opponent. Recently, however, Asha Lancaster-Thomas poses a highly innovative challenge to the evidential import of religious experience. Namely, she argues that an evil God is just as likely to explain negative religious experiences as a good God is able to explain positive religious experiences. In light of this, religious believers need to explain why a good God exists instead of an evil God. I respond to Lancaster-Thomas by suggesting that, at least within the context of religious experience, (i) that the evil God hypothesis is only a challenge to certain versions of theism; and (ii) that the existence of an evil God and good God are compossible.

Place Spirituality

The expression of attachment to the divine in certain places among different groups has been documented by anthropologists and sociologists for decades. However, the psychological processes by which this happens are not yet fully understood. This article focuses on the concept of ‘place spirituality’ as a psychological mechanism, which allows the religious believer or non-believer to achieve an organised attachment strategy, involving the interplay of place and spiritual attachment. First, place spirituality is considered as an experience that satisfies the attachment relationship criteria in that geographic places and divine entities can be perceived as ‘objects’ of attachment. Second, it is proposed that the maturational aspects of the attachment repertoire in adults make the place spirituality experience possible since adults’ cognitive abilities are much wider than those of children and can include relationships to geographical spaces and invisible divine entities. Finally, the theme of place spirituality is explored to further position the concept as a relational paradigm for understanding the relationship between place experiences and spiritual attachment.

Psychoanalytic Thinking on Religious Truth and Conviction

While Freudian psychoanalysis is famous for its negative evaluation of religion, many contemporary analytic schools reject this view, regarding religion positively. Interestingly, both critical and positive psychoanalytic approaches to religion are based on the idea that religious belief is an illusion. This chapter explores these approaches, their development, and the thinking that underlies them especially in relation to the notion of truth and the personal quest for it. It sheds light on the complexity of Freud’s thinking on truth and conviction and draws attention to a neglected dimension that is crucial to his understanding of religion. The chapter points to the fact that despite fundamental differences, the Freudian world view has more affinity with that of the religious believer than commonly thought. In turn, the world views of the psychoanalytic schools which have regarded religion positively are actually opposed to those of most believers.

The American Commercial Religion

10 DePaul Business and Commercial Law Journal 107 (2012)To all but possibly the most senior of commercial law specialists, it is difficult to imagine American commercial life without the nationwide adoption of the Uniform Commercial Code. We would surely regard as impossible the idea that the vast economic success of the latter half of the twentieth century could have been achieved without it. The Uniform Commercial Code is our godhead, our sacred foundational document, our Holy Book of modern commerce, which brought us a form of economic enlightenment from the pre-Code Days of Ignorance. Our attachment to the U.C.C. runs far deeper than a mere rational commercial preference. It resembles more that of the faith of the religious believer. This presents a problem, however. Even if we assume that our faith in the U.C.C. has been over the past several decades salutary, and there are good and plenty reasons to believe that it is, and even if the uniformity that is its product has on balance permitted massive economic progress, our near dogmatic faith-like belief in the U.C.C., our Code, has hindered the very type of global uniformity, and the attendant benefits thereto, that it continues to enable in the domestic context. The Article will demonstrate this by focusing on two areas of attempted global convergence in commerce where cross border harmonization of domestic regimes has proved particularly problematic, albeit in different ways in each case. These areas correspond to the respective scope of two of the more hallowed Articles of the Code; namely, Article 2, which deals with the sale of goods, and Article 9, which deals with means to obtain security over debt. This Article also discusses what must be done if meaningful international harmonization is to be achieved.

Perceptions of danger and co-occurring metaphors in Buddhist dhamma talks and Christian sermons

This article focuses on an analysis of the perception of danger in a sample of conservative Evangelical Christian sermons and Thai Forest Tradition dhamma talks. Through the analysis of keywords, frames, conceptual metaphors, and patterns of agency in the use of metaphor, it seeks to explore how one Christian believer and one Buddhist practitioner conceptualize their ways of being religious. We argue that this specific set of dhamma talks has a primary focus on an individual actively progressing within the practice of meditation while interacting with elements that may be beneficial or harmful to that progress. In contrast, this particular sample of sermons has a primary focus on two groups or categories of people, fallen sinners and true Christians, and their strictly defined hierarchical relationship to God. Aspects of this relationship are often defined in terms of power, fear, and danger, with shifting intersections between active behavior and being acted upon by greater forces or powers. We conclude that a cognitive linguistic approach to analyzing perceptions of danger within a specified genre of religious discourse can be useful in producing a picture of how an individual religious believer within a particular context and moment in time views reality, their position within it, and their progression through it.

Love and Religion

In the Judeo-Christian tradition that has shaped much of Western thought, we find an insistence on love as a requirement. Many points of philosophical interest arise from this injunction to love, irrespective of whether one is a religious believer. This chapter begins by asking if it makes sense to suppose that love can be commanded, and moves on to examine various “demandingness” objections to the commandment to love one’s neighbor. The chapter then considers, and rejects, the possibility of purely a secularized interpretation of the Christian ethic that dispenses with the religious framework altogether. The concluding section looks at how various religious conceptions of love connect up with certain fundamental assumptions about the nature of the cosmos we inhabit and the meaning of human life.