Group items tagged

guess the reason you think that is that for you, despite what certain secularists might say, religion involves making factual claims about the nature of reality.Yeah - I just think that's indisputable, apart from the fact that you can get many people who claim to be religious, but when you push, they are then loath to make any claims about what they actually believe. So there are many believers who are attached to the culture; they're attached to the buildings; they're attached to the art, they want to meet with that particular group - and yet they spend almost no time at all thinking about what, if anything, is true, in the doctrine. That, I would argue is just not really religion. Every religion contains propositional claims about certain events that happen in history, certain events that will happen in the future.

One reply to that might be to say that that's simply a stipulative definition.Well, there's no other honest reading of the books. Religion may be too broad a category, but if you take what religion means in the West - Judaism, Christianity or Islam - we're talking about some books. The only reason anyone can wake up in the morning thinking that Jesus even existed is because we have the New Testament, right? So you look at the New Testament. It makes a variety of claims that are by definition at odds with what we know to be scientifically plausible. And if you're going to make the move of saying "well, none of these are really claims, this is just a story, this is just literature," then you're reading the New Testament the way we read the Iliad and the Odyssey, and then you have no religion of Christianity; you have, at best, mythology. You have art - which is what I think you should have; this is how we should read these books. And certainly some parts of the Bible should qualify as great literature.