Sophie T wrote:My husband did, however, while our children were growing up, insist that he had the right to raise our children as Christians without any interference from me whatsoever. In fact, it was made clear that any thoughts, ideas, etc., that I had about God, philosophy, or life in general were not only unwelcome and uninteresting but were also not to be spoken aloud in the hearing of our children. The sad thing is that my own period of questioning lasted so long that I did not have the confidence or the self-esteem needed to argue about this. Rather, during the years that I was questioning my own faith, I just assumed that there must be something really dark and awful about me if I was unable to “see” what everyone but me seemed to “see” quite clearly. However, now that it’s done and over with, and there’s not much I can do about it, I realize that I can either forgive and let go or not forgive and not let go. For a variety of reasons, I think that, for me, forgiveness and letting go works best—even if it is an ongoing process that I have to consciously work at on a daily basis.

Well, well.

Nothing I can say at this point can increase your joy or lessen your pain. You're on record that it's your business and your business only. Plainly, you believe in "marriage". When you're in a situation like that, there aren't really any great choices for you, except you define them as such. Nobody else is entitled to judge you, but why tell anyone else about this stuff? You don't really think it's that awful, do you?

Sophie T wrote:

katja z wrote:
I do think that there are probably genuine problems of understanding on both sides, not simply a wilful refusal to communicate.

I think there's probably a little of both.

Uh-huh. Party time in Equivocation City. There's nothing to "understand", unless you think "understanding" is not proven by the capacity to engineer something. Prove you understand anything else. Bend a spoon, or something. Or just "make nice". But don't call that "understanding". Call it "being polite".

Cito di Pense wrote:

Well, well.

Nothing I can say at this point can increase your joy or lessen your pain. You're on record that it's your business and your business only. Plainly, you believe in "marriage". When you're in a situation like that, there aren't really any great choices for you, except you define them as such. Nobody else is entitled to judge you, but why tell anyone else about this stuff? You don't really think it's that awful, do you?

As to why I told anyone else this stuff . . . . oh I don't know. I guess I just felt like it.

archibald wrote:

Sophie T wrote:"I began this study by asking whether belief in the existence of leprechauns is rational.......................The answer is not easy, and what I have to say is merely tentative. I think it must be conceded that the leprechaunist has no very good answer to the request that he explain his reasons for believing in the existence of leprechauns; at any rate he has no answer that need convince the skeptic. But must he have or must there be an answer to this question if his belief in leprechauns is reasonable, rationally justifiable: must there be, for any proposition p that I rationally believe (and that is, let us say, contingent and corrigible), a good answer to the "epistemological question": "How do you know that p; what are you reasons for supposing that p is true?" Presumably not. If I am right, the analogical position is the best answer I have to the relevant epistemological question; but even if it is unsatisfactory my belief [in an-L] is by no means irrational.

. . . But let us suppose, as seems to me to be true, that there are no viable alternative to the analogical position. Then we must conclude, I believe, that a man may rationally hold a contingent, corrigible belief in leprechauns, and by extension elves, goblins fairies etc, even if there is no answer to the relevant epistimological question."

<fixed>

Analytical objections welcomed from theists present.

Well . . . if you like--I could put on a theist hat and attempt to formulate some objections and/or a response, but I don't know if you'd find that very satisfying.

Sophie T wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:

Well, well.

Nothing I can say at this point can increase your joy or lessen your pain. You're on record that it's your business and your business only. Plainly, you believe in "marriage". When you're in a situation like that, there aren't really any great choices for you, except you define them as such. Nobody else is entitled to judge you, but why tell anyone else about this stuff? You don't really think it's that awful, do you?

And as to why I told anyone else this stuff . . . . oh I don't know. I guess I just felt like it.

Oh, that's fine with me. I tend to feel like telling god botherers they have their heads up their arses. But I'd do it in a nice way, too, if I had anything to lose. Still, the message would be plain. You pays your money and takes your choice. It might be awful to feel like you have to suck up to both the god-botherers and the atheists, but there are a lot of folks like that here, who want to have their cake.

Sophie T wrote:

archibald wrote:
Analytical objections welcomed from theists present.

Well . . . if you like--I could put on a theist hat and attempt to formulate some objections and/or a response, but I don't know if you'd find that very satisfying.

Not much point, once your cover's blown. We all know the drill. The whole thing about having ex-theists regurgitate the undigestible portions of their woo needs to happen in Technicolor to be entertaining to anyone else.

Cito di Pense wrote:


Oh, that's fine with me. I tend to feel like telling god botherers they have their heads up their arses. But I'd do it in a nice way, too, if I had anything to lose.

If one has nothing to lose, does that mean that one has already lost it all? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Cito di Pense wrote:

Sophie T wrote:

katja z wrote:
I do think that there are probably genuine problems of understanding on both sides, not simply a wilful refusal to communicate.

I think there's probably a little of both.

Uh-huh. Party time in Equivocation City. There's nothing to "understand", unless you think "understanding" is not proven by the capacity to engineer something. Prove you understand anything else. Bend a spoon, or something. Or just "make nice". But don't call that "understanding". Call it "being polite".

I take your point, but, well, we're obviously operating with somewhat different definitions of "understanding". I meant an insight into a theist's mindset - the logic of it, if you will, although it does seem decidedly illogical to me. On second thoughts, such an insight might even help bend a (mental) spoon, or at least find a crack and use said spoon like a crowbar. There are some interesting stories in the Welcome New Members section right on this forum. Oh, well, it's 1:28 a.m. over here and I'm probably rambling. Never mind, I'm sure someone will tell me if I am

Cito di Pense wrote:

Sophie T wrote:

archibald wrote:
Analytical objections welcomed from theists present.

Well . . . if you like--I could put on a theist hat and attempt to formulate some objections and/or a response, but I don't know if you'd find that very satisfying.

Not much point, once your cover's blown. We all know the drill. The whole thing about having ex-theists regurgitate the undigestible portions of their woo needs to happen in Technicolor to be entertaining to anyone else.

Oh, you misunderstand. I wasn't interested in what might be entertaining to you. I was thinking of what might be entertaining to me. It's just that I find that satirizing certain brands of Christianity to be entertaining, much the way some people may find satirizing certain brands of atheism to be entertaining. Not that anyone here is doing that, but hopefully, I do make my point.

I am currently reading The Analytic Theist, by Alvin Plantinga. And to my surprise, this evening, I ran across some things that Plantinga wrote about what it means to believe that God exists and also what Kant meant when he said that God existed. As I read this, it occurred to me that perhaps, when grahbudd refers to God, he is not in fact referring to a real person or entity but rather to an idea or to what Plantinga refers to as a creative construct. Of course, I could be wrong about this, and if I am, then I hope grahbudd will correct me. However, reading this section of Alvin Plantinga's The Analytic Theist was very interesting to me and I think it may relate very much to what is being discussed in this thread. Here's an excerpt:

To believe that God exists, therefore, is first of all, to hold a belief of a certain sort – an existential belief. To assert that God exists is to make an assertion of a certain sort – an existential assertion. It is to answer at the most basic level the ontological question “What is there?” This may seem excessively obvious. I would not so much as mention it were it not for the fact that some philosophers and theologians seem to disagree. Oddly enough, they seem to use the phrase “belief in God” and even “belief that God exists” in such a way that to believe in God is not to hold any such existential beliefs at all. Much of what Rudolph Bultmann says, for example, seems to suggest that to believe in God is not at all to believe that there exists a being of a certain sort. Instead, it is to adopt a certain attitude or policy; or to make a kind of resolve: the resolve, perhaps, to embrace one’s finitude, giving up the futile attempt to build hedges and walls against guilt, failure, and death . . .

. . . Some contemporary theologians, under the baneful influence of Kant, apparently hold that the name ‘God,’ as used by Christians and others, denotes an idea, or a concept, or a mental construct of some kind. The American theologian Gordon Kaufman, for example, claims that the word ‘God’ “raises special problems of meaning because it is a noun which by definition refers to a reality transcendent of and thus not locatable within experience. In a striking echo of one of Kant’s famous distinctions, Kaufman distinguishes what he calls “the real referent” of the term ‘God’ from what he calls “the available referent.”

The real referent for ‘God’ is never accessible to us or in any way open to our observation or experience. It must remain always an unknown X, a mere limiting idea with no content.

For all practical purposes, it is the available referent – a particular imaginative construct – that bears significantly on human life and thought. It is the “available God” whom we have in mind when we worship or pray; . . . It is the available God in terms of which we speak and think whenever we use the word ‘God.’ In this sense, ‘God’ denotes for all practical purposes what is essentially a mental or imaginative construct.

. . . Now these are puzzling suggestions. If it is Kaufman’s “available referent” “in terms of which we speak whenever we use the word ‘God’,” and if the available referent is a mental or imaginative construct, then presumably when we say “there is a God” or “God exists” we are affirming the existence of a certain kind of mental or imaginative construct. But surely we are not. And when Christians say that God has created the world, for example, are they really claiming that an image or imaginative construct, whatever precisely that may be, has created the world? That seems at best preposterous. In any event, the belief I mean to identify and discuss is not the belief that there exists some sort of imaginative construct or mental construction or anything of the sort. It is instead the belief, first, that there exists a person of a certain sort – a being who acts, holds beliefs, and has aims and purposes.

The Analytic Theist,
by Alvin Plantinga
Chapter 5: Reason and Belief in God (pp. 105-106)

With this in mind, then, if grahbudd is, in fact, thinking of God as an idea, as opposed to a person, then the following statements, made by grahbudd, make a little bit more sense.

For example, grahbudd wrote:

grahbudd wrote:

To complain that freedom, or even God, are incompatible with "universal naturalistic causality" is to make the (in Kant's view!) invalid move of turning freedom, God, etc, into phenomena, when they are not (they are transcendental).

I did ask grahbudd, awhile back, if he would please provide clarification of what he meant when he used the word “phenomena” and “transcendental.” Understandably, he was too busy to respond to my post. Therefore, I took it upon myself to look up the word “transcendental” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary online and found the following:

3 in Kantian philosophy a : of or relating to experience as determined by the mind's makeup

Also, if when grahbudd uses the word God, he is referring to a creative construct rather than a person or divine being, his post to Will, as follows, makes more sense:

grahbudd wrote:
So the reason I am refusing to answer "but do you think God really exists" is because I think it is a meaningless question.

And so assuming that I am correct (and again, if I am incorrect, then I do hope grahbudd will correct me) then when grahbudd speaks of God, he is actually referring to a creative construct and not an actual person. However, if this is so, why wouldn’t one just come out and say this? Why would one use the word God, fully realizing all along that those with whom one is talking are understanding the word God to mean a person or divine being, without correcting the people with whom one is talking---explaining that when one speaks of God one is referring to a creative construct of God and not an actual person or divine being. If genuine dialogue is what is desired, then this tactic just does not make any sense to me.

Also, this makes me wonder about another question: If a person believes that God exists--but he believes that God is an idea as opposed to an actual person or a divine being--can we really say that this person is a theist? After all, I believe (and I'm sure everyone in this forum believes) that the idea of God exists. However, to say that one believes that the idea of God exists is quite different from saying that God, an actual person or divine being, exists. Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics, but somehow it seems dishonest to me for a person who does not believe in the existence of God (defined as a person or divine being) to call himself a theist. Using that definition of "theism," everybody would be a theist. But then, upon further reflection, perhaps that is what grahbudd is saying anyway. We are all theists. However, if that is what grahbudd is saying, then it would also be true to say that we are all atheists, since we all believe in the idea of God not existing. If this is how we are going to "talk" with one another, however, what is the point of "talking" at all? Instead of talking, we may as well all just call it a day and go watch a movie or take a walk along the beach instead.

^^ This is how I too read the passages you quote here. But I have an impression that grahbudd is sliding between two meanings of the word. One is god as an idea, a practical assumption to make in order, roughly put, to make sense of one's experience and existence (I think this is what he is getting at when he speaks about consistency). But there's another sense - god as the source of the Ultimate Good. Now I think the whole point of assuming that there is such a thing as the Ultimate Good is that it does not only exist in people's minds, but somehow independently.

Thanks for the Plantinga quote. Interesting reading, and the reference to "the baneful influence of Kant" made me chuckle. And now on to real life ...

ETA:

Also, this makes me wonder about another question: If a person believes that God exists--but he believes that God is an idea as opposed to an actual person or a divine being--can we really say that this person is a theist?

My thoughts exactly. To borrow Dennet's useful distinction, this seems a lot more like "belief in belief in god" than "belief in god". Only the latter is properly theism. As for the former, may I propose the word protheism? (One could conceivably be a protheist atheist - not believing in god but believing that belief in god is a good thing ). It's equivocation between these two quite distinct beliefs (which can be held at the same time, or not) that seems to be at the root of quite a lot of misunderstandings.

Sophie T wrote:

archibald wrote: Analytical objections welcomed from theists present.

Well . . . if you like--I could put on a theist hat and attempt to formulate some objections and/or a response, but I don't know if you'd find that very satisfying.

No, please do. :]

Interesting turn this discussion has taken! Pity I'm going away!

Of course, we're usually better off if we believe things which are true, not things which are false. But this isn't an invariable law of nature, and there are exceptions. The example I like most is this: If my job were to get you to walk safely on a 6 inch plank over an abyss 1000 feet deep, if it were at all possible, I'd get you to believe that the abyss was only 4 feet deep and that it was lined at the bottom with with thick, comfortable mattresses. If I could create this illusion and get you to believe it, I'm sure you'd be much less likely to fall off the plank.

So I don't have any particular problem with the common claim that religious people live longer, have better health etc than non-religious people. It may be true, and the connection may indeed be causal: religious belief may improve health and prolong life. But that's got nothing to do with the question of whether religion is true.

It's easy to see how people can come to believe that, in n different ways, religion is a good thing. At a really crude extreme, there's a lovely story about an upper class Victorian boy who became an atheist and refused to join in saying grace before meals. His father grimly told the rest of the family that he would deal with the matter, and summoned the lad to his study. He explained to the boy that there was, indeed, no God, but the idea of God was very useful. It consoled the women (sorry, Sophie! - I wasn't the father concerned), and it helped keep the lower orders from becoming too uppity ('The rich man in his castle / The poor man at his gate / God made them high or lowly / And ordered their estate')

Seriously, you can see how various, less obnoxious, forms of that belief might easily arise - Dennett's discussion of 'belief in belief' has already been mentioned. And here Catch-22 arises, of course. If that's what you think, you can't say so. What's more, you will probably tempted to shy away from Catch-22 and keep the whole matter nice and vague, blurry, unfocused in your own mind. (We've most of us had the experience of trying not to let some issue or other come into sharp focus, and, as far as I'm concerned, the tricks which you play on yourself in these circumstances can be really remarkably elaborate! )

Will S wrote:
Seriously, you can see how various, less obnoxious, forms of that belief might easily arise - Dennett's discussion of 'belief in belief' has already been mentioned. And here Catch-22 arises, of course. If that's what you think, you can't say so. What's more, you will probably tempted to shy away from Catch-22 and keep the whole matter nice and vague, blurry, unfocused in your own mind. (We've most of us had the experience of trying not to let some issue or other come into sharp focus, and, as far as I'm concerned, the tricks which you play on yourself in these circumstances can be really remarkably elaborate! )

Thanks Will for bringing this up. It is, indeed, an easy temptation to succumb to, and hard to notice once you do! This must be why it's often so difficult to articulate your (a genereric "your") beliefs, often on matters that are very important to you - because when you start looking at these beliefs too hard, they may come apart. It's happened to me before, but I happen to think that this is a good thing - and I recognise that people who point out just where I'm not making sense are doing me a favour.

As for your example of a possible advantage of believing in something that is not true, it's a double-edged sword. In your hypothetical case, this illusion would make me careless and I could easily fall - which would be far less likely if I knew the danger and took the proper precautions.

katja z wrote:As for your example of a possible advantage of believing in something that is not true, it's a double-edged sword. In your hypothetical case, this illusion would make me careless and I could easily fall - which would be far less likely if I knew the danger and took the proper precautions.

Yes - valid objection, which I'd overcome by telling you another lie. (You'd scarcely believe how deceitful I can be!)

I might tell you that, if you successfully negotiated the plank, I'd give you a bottle of an outstanding single malt, or of some other tipple which I knew to be to your taste. Or I might tell you that some lady, whom I knew you admired, would be watching, and particularly wanted you to put on a good show, and was going to reward you appropriately, if you did ... My overall objective would be to motivate you, but without frightening you.

OK - I accept that the more elaborate a set of lies I constructed, the greater the probability that you'd rumble them, but I think the uncomfortable fact remains, that there are circumstances in which people will positively benefit by having false beliefs.

Sophie T wrote:I am currently reading The Analytic Theist, by Alvin Plantinga. And to my surprise, this evening, I ran across some things that Plantinga wrote about what it means to believe that God exists and also what Kant meant when he said that God existed. As I read this, it occurred to me that perhaps, when grahbudd refers to God, he is not in fact referring to a real person or entity but rather to an idea or to what Plantinga refers to as a creative construct. Of course, I could be wrong about this, and if I am, then I hope grahbudd will correct me. However, reading this section of Alvin Plantinga's The Analytic Theist was very interesting to me and I think it may relate very much to what is being discussed in this thread. Here's an excerpt:

*chops out Plantinga quote*

With this in mind, then, if grahbudd is, in fact, thinking of God as an idea, as opposed to a person, then the following statements, made by grahbudd, make a little bit more sense.

For example, grahbudd wrote:

grahbudd wrote:

To complain that freedom, or even God, are incompatible with "universal naturalistic causality" is to make the (in Kant's view!) invalid move of turning freedom, God, etc, into phenomena, when they are not (they are transcendental).

I did ask grahbudd, awhile back, if he would please provide clarification of what he meant when he used the word “phenomena” and “transcendental.” Understandably, he was too busy to respond to my post. Therefore, I took it upon myself to look up the word “transcendental” in the Merriam-Webster dictionary online and found the following:

3 in Kantian philosophy a : of or relating to experience as determined by the mind's makeup

Also, if when grahbudd uses the word God, he is referring to a creative construct rather than a person or divine being, his post to Will, as follows, makes more sense:

grahbudd wrote:
So the reason I am refusing to answer "but do you think God really exists" is because I think it is a meaningless question.

And so assuming that I am correct (and again, if I am incorrect, then I do hope grahbudd will correct me) then when grahbudd speaks of God, he is actually referring to a creative construct and not an actual person. However, if this is so, why wouldn’t one just come out and say this? Why would one use the word God, fully realizing all along that those with whom one is talking are understanding the word God to mean a person or divine being, without correcting the people with whom one is talking---explaining that when one speaks of God one is referring to a creative construct of God and not an actual person or divine being. If genuine dialogue is what is desired, then this tactic just does not make any sense to me.

Also, this makes me wonder about another question: If a person believes that God exists--but he believes that God is an idea as opposed to an actual person or a divine being--can we really say that this person is a theist? After all, I believe (and I'm sure everyone in this forum believes) that the idea of God exists. However, to say that one believes that the idea of God exists is quite different from saying that God, an actual person or divine being, exists. Perhaps it's just a matter of semantics, but somehow it seems dishonest to me for a person who does not believe in the existence of God (defined as a person or divine being) to call himself a theist. Using that definition of "theism," everybody would be a theist. But then, upon further reflection, perhaps that is what grahbudd is saying anyway. We are all theists. However, if that is what grahbudd is saying, then it would also be true to say that we are all atheists, since we all believe in the idea of God not existing. If this is how we are going to "talk" with one another, however, what is the point of "talking" at all? Instead of talking, we may as well all just call it a day and go watch a movie or take a walk along the beach instead.

On transcendent and phenomena: phenomena are those things amenable to the senses. And transcendental for Kant means knowledge that comes not from phenomena, but from the way in which we see phenomena. For example, he would say that knowledge of things like causality etc doesn't come about from empirical data (there is no "red thread" connecting up events that have a causal relationship, but rather relate to the way the mind structures data. Because such things structure how we gather data, it follows that they also represent a limit to knowledge : e.g. we can't see things happening outside of time, or acausally, etc. But the word also has a more traditional meaning that is reflected in the Kantian use, which is simply to refer to entities that lie beyond the bounds of knowledge. And the traditional (!) concept of God is clearly such: God is meant to be somehow "outside" of time and space; given that these are both traditionally seen as part of the created order.

When Plantinga complains about the evil Kantian influence, he is of course thinking of those who really relegate God merely to a sort of creative idea. But to do that means that you think that you actually "know" that God "really" doesn't exist. Or "exist", perhaps. But if God really lies beyond all phenomena (or perhaps more properly, behind all phenomena), and thus all possible ways of empirically knowing, how could one come to that negative conclusion? It would be as invalid as the thinking of those who think they "know" God exists.

Kant saw the three questions of philosophy as: what can we know? what should we do? and what can we hope for?; and these are covered in his three critiques. And the three answers are, broadly: i) we can know the phenomenal world; ii) we should act according to the categorical imperative (ie universally willable ethics), which is to act also as if there is a God; and iii) we can hope for the union of goodness and happiness in eternal life.

After all, one might accept the first two of these, and still not hope for God actually to exist. Ie, one might come to agree with Kant that our very nature means that we can only act consistently as if there is a God; and yet not believe or not hope that to be the case. This would be an unhappy proto-theist, like WillS unhappily playing the part of the theist for the sake of the ladies. Or one might accept the first two and also look forward joyfully to its truth as well; and then one would be a happy proto-theist. But Kant would also say that true goodness involves virtue and happiness; and thus to be unhappy would not involve the highest good. And therefore...
The role that hope for happiness plays in Kant's ethics is much discussed, but it is clear that he does not see its role as purely motivating. In other words, ethics is not about, for Kant, saying "if I do this, I will achieve happiness/endless bliss. But I want to be happy and have endless bliss. Therefore I should do this".

I don't think that Christian hope could be founded on the first two categories, even though they are not irrelevant to it. In the Christian tradition, the gospel(s) of course stands centrally, as a concrete connection to the phenomenal world: and as I said to WillS before, if these turned out to be wrong (for example if the gospels turned out to be 4th century fakes or something), then one would no longer be able to tie religious hope to that particular set of circumstances. At best, it would remain unsystematic in some sense. Rather, I think the basis for actual hope is reflective judgement, which is in turn tied in closely with our aesthetic experience.

Sophie T wrote:It's just that I find that satirizing certain brands of Christianity to be entertaining, much the way some people may find satirizing certain brands of atheism to be entertaining.

The word you're looking for is not "satirize" but "caricature".

Sophie T wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:
Oh, that's fine with me. I tend to feel like telling god botherers they have their heads up their arses. But I'd do it in a nice way, too, if I had anything to lose.

If one has nothing to lose, does that mean that one has already lost it all? Or am I misunderstanding you?

It means you've stopped asking, "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Following is the long and obfuscated version (the Reflective Judgement™ Edition):

grahbudd wrote:
On transcendent and phenomena: phenomena are those things amenable to the senses. And transcendental for Kant means knowledge that comes not from phenomena, but from the way in which we see phenomena. For example, he would say that knowledge of things like causality etc doesn't come about from empirical data (there is no "red thread" connecting up events that have a causal relationship, but rather relate to the way the mind structures data. Because such things structure how we gather data, it follows that they also represent a limit to knowledge : e.g. we can't see things happening outside of time, or acausally, etc. But the word also has a more traditional meaning that is reflected in the Kantian use, which is simply to refer to entities that lie beyond the bounds of knowledge. And the traditional (!) concept of God is clearly such: God is meant to be somehow "outside" of time and space; given that these are both traditionally seen as part of the created order.

When Plantinga complains about the evil Kantian influence, he is of course thinking of those who really relegate God merely to a sort of creative idea. But to do that means that you think that you actually "know" that God "really" doesn't exist. Or "exist", perhaps. But if God really lies beyond all phenomena (or perhaps more properly, behind all phenomena), and thus all possible ways of empirically knowing, how could one come to that negative conclusion? It would be as invalid as the thinking of those who think they "know" God exists.

Kant saw the three questions of philosophy as: what can we know? what should we do? and what can we hope for?; and these are covered in his three critiques. And the three answers are, broadly: i) we can know the phenomenal world; ii) we should act according to the categorical imperative (ie universally willable ethics), which is to act also as if there is a God; and iii) we can hope for the union of goodness and happiness in eternal life.

After all, one might accept the first two of these, and still not hope for God actually to exist. Ie, one might come to agree with Kant that our very nature means that we can only act consistently as if there is a God; and yet not believe or not hope that to be the case. This would be an unhappy proto-theist, like WillS unhappily playing the part of the theist for the sake of the ladies. Or one might accept the first two and also look forward joyfully to its truth as well; and then one would be a happy proto-theist. But Kant would also say that true goodness involves virtue and happiness; and thus to be unhappy would not involve the highest good. And therefore...
The role that hope for happiness plays in Kant's ethics is much discussed, but it is clear that he does not see its role as purely motivating. In other words, ethics is not about, for Kant, saying "if I do this, I will achieve happiness/endless bliss. But I want to be happy and have endless bliss. Therefore I should do this".

I don't think that Christian hope could be founded on the first two categories, even though they are not irrelevant to it. In the Christian tradition, the gospel(s) of course stands centrally, as a concrete connection to the phenomenal world: and as I said to WillS before, if these turned out to be wrong (for example if the gospels turned out to be 4th century fakes or something), then one would no longer be able to tie religious hope to that particular set of circumstances. At best, it would remain unsystematic in some sense. Rather, I think the basis for actual hope is reflective judgement, which is in turn tied in closely with our aesthetic experience.

You can get an account of aesthetics from asking "why is there something rather than nothing", but taken too far, it becomes the substitution of talking about it to actually doing it. Critical theory is an art form, somewhat parasitic on art, but still artistic, and quite lovely sometimes, in skilled hands. I'm fairly confident that Katja will point out that aesthetics is a feature of social interaction.

So the question becomes, "Why are there gospels rather than no gospels?" People live in hope of flim-flamming others, and find that success in flim-flamming others is quite blissful, because some people can't find a coherent thought with two hands and a torch, particularly a bunch of flea-bitten iron-age goat-ropers. The gospels are not a singular event in the history of prophetic literature, and they can be read critically or uncritically, in either case requiring one to have too much time on their hands, given all the other, better literature there is from which to choose. It's an aesthetic choice. Then there's the fact that one's reading of the gospels can be shocking or electric, say, in the hands of a ML King, or can turn into pale, constipated dweebery in the hands of a Plantinga.

It's a fact that people are social animals, use language, and use opposable thumbs to hold their crayons. The religious experience emerges from that rather than vice versa. One might say it "evolved", and the act of concocting a fancy narrative around that is itself a construction. Just count how many spoons are bent by people claiming to be blissful.

Will S wrote:

katja z wrote:As for your example of a possible advantage of believing in something that is not true, it's a double-edged sword. In your hypothetical case, this illusion would make me careless and I could easily fall - which would be far less likely if I knew the danger and took the proper precautions.

Yes - valid objection, which I'd overcome by telling you another lie. (You'd scarcely believe how deceitful I can be!)

I might tell you that, if you successfully negotiated the plank, I'd give you a bottle of an outstanding single malt, or of some other tipple which I knew to be to your taste. Or I might tell you that some lady, whom I knew you admired, would be watching, and particularly wanted you to put on a good show, and was going to reward you appropriately, if you did ... My overall objective would be to motivate you, but without frightening you.

OK - I accept that the more elaborate a set of lies I constructed, the greater the probability that you'd rumble them, but I think the uncomfortable fact remains, that there are circumstances in which people will positively benefit by having false beliefs.

I was wondering if another example would be ...excuse my being coarse...watching porn. :]

You don't really know for sure if the actors are faking it, which gives you room to believe they mighn't be, even though it's unlikely.

The trick is in the doublethink.

archibald wrote:
You don't really know for sure if the actors are faking it...

Faking what, exactly? Bliss? Time for the Vulcan Mind Meld. Pr0n takes those bent spoons and straightens them right out.

The post-modern definition of a simulacrum is a copy of a copy for which there is no original. I'm sure that this is used in connection with deconstructing the artifacts known as the "gospels". Xtians are not faking their belief that the gospels represent a singular event in the history of prophetic literature. But it's in contravention to the evidence.

Faking their free will, amongst other things. :]

archibald wrote:Faking their free will, I suppose.

Round and round we go. Obfuscating an uncontrollable desire to believe in miracles as "free will" is what I call "posturing", or, perhaps, "imposture". I have other, less-polite descriptions, available on request.

As you can see, we're back to noting that "bald is not a hair color".

Let's not go there. :]

As Will S has said before, and indeed as Grahbudd has commented on very recently, religion is not really so much about belief, as hope, which is to say crossing one's fingers while walking the plank.