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Can religion be practice rather than belief? + Do animals have souls?

#1
C C Offline
Can religion be base on ritual practice without belief?
https://aeon.co/essays/can-religion-be-b...out-belief

EXCERPT: [...] For critics of the cognitive science of religion, this approach repeats the mistakes of the old grand theorists, just dressed up in trendy theoretical garb. The charge is that researchers are guilty of reifying the concept of religion as a universal, an ethnocentric approach that fails to appreciate the cultural diversity of the real world. Perhaps ironically, it is scholars in the Study of Religions discipline that now express the most skepticism about the usefulness of the term ‘religion’. They argue that it is inextricably Western and therefore loaded with assumptions related to the Abrahamic religious institutions that dominate in the West.

[...] To demonstrate the limitations with the dominant Western concepts of religion, we must examine religion in a non-Western context; for example, in Japan, where I have lived for the past four years, conducting research on collective rituals and bonding. The vast majority of the Japanese population profess to have no strong religious beliefs, and there are few who regularly attend religious services. Regardless, many people happily partake in events and festivals arranged by multiple religious traditions. Indeed for many Japanese, the decision to marry in a Shinto or a Christian ceremony is not made according to religious beliefs but instead by the bride’s preference for wearing a traditional kimono or a white wedding gown (my own wedding experience in Japan involved both). So is Japan just a non-religious society, like many surveys and some scholars claim? Or do we instead need to broaden our assumptions about what, in fact, constitutes religion?

[...] So how are we to reconcile the seemingly paradoxical situation of a society that is at once avowedly non-religious and yet simultaneously appears to support an abundance of religious institutions, celebrating thousands of matsuri every year? How do we make sense of people who self-identify as non-religious and yet are also recorded as Buddhist and Shinto adherents? First off, the statistics are less contradictory than they appear [...]

[...] Yet it would still be a mistake to interpret these findings as demonstrating that Japan is a country where strong personal religious beliefs are central to religious practices. In contrast to the United States, where 48.8 per cent reported that God is very important to their life, only 6.1 per cent chose this option in Japan. Strong beliefs, I argue, are not an essential feature of religion in Japan. Rather, they are better understood as a feature of the particular monotheistic religions that happen to be dominant in the West. In many societies, supernatural beliefs are not regarded as requiring endorsement but are instead treated as self-evident truths or, as in the case of Japan, are given much less attention than practice. The endorsement of strong beliefs is not a necessary part of religion....



Do only humans have souls, or do animals possess them too?
https://aeon.co/ideas/do-only-humans-hav...e-them-too

EXCERPT: [...] Sentience – the capacity of an organism to feel – is fundamental to being alive. If human beings have souls, they must be more about sentience than consciousness. We are motivated far more by passion than by intellect – what we feel deeply is what drives us, for good and ill. In his book "Pleasure: A Creative Approach to Life" (1970), the late psychoanalyst Alexander Lowen meditated on these connections, proposing that ‘The soul of a man is in his body. Through his body a person is part of life and part of nature … If we are identified with our bodies, we have souls, for through our bodies we are identified with all creation.’ As long as we are alive – and therefore feeling – we are connected to one another and to the natural world. We are, in a word, ensouled.

Extraordinary examples of ensoulment among non-human animals abound. [...] Thanks to the internet, there’s a steady stream of examples of animals demonstrating compassion....
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#2
Yazata Offline
Ancient religions, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and most of the rest can probably be best described as 'orthopraxies', not 'orthodoxies'. 'Orthopraxy' means 'right practice', while 'orthodoxy' means 'right belief'.

It's a particular interpretation of the Christian idea of salvation through faith that has led to the idea that salvation is to be found in believing in the right things.

But in places like India, we find people worshipping different gods, embracing different philosophies and widely different theologies (some monotheist, some polytheist and some non-theist) yet all qualifying as Hindus since they all behave similarly, in accordance with the Hindu dharma.

In ancient Greece nobody much cared what individual Greeks privately believed, so long as they honored their city's patron god or goddess on the appropriate festival days. These festivals were as much about patriotism and civic solidarity as about religious faith in the Christian sense. The ancient Romans behaved much the same way, which explains how intelligent and religiously sophisticated people could deify the emperor (he was a larger-than-life demigod who personified the state), an idea that was anathema to Jews and Christians.

None of this is new or a revolutionary realization in religious studies. Scholars were remarking on it in the 19th century.
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#3
Syne Offline
The difference between ritual and belief is also reflected in other ways...and even within the same religion. British acting tends to be classical (concerned primarily with appearance), while American acting tends to be method (an attempt to induce actual emotion). Catholicism has a lot of ritual and pageantry, while Pentecostalism is much more emotionally demonstrative.



Compassion is not equivalent to a soul, nor even human sapience. All life, including plant life, is a continuum of sentience. Being on the same continuum does not make any part equivalent to any other.
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#4
elte Offline
C C Wrote: "Extraordinary examples of ensoulment among non-human animals abound. [...] Thanks to the internet, there’s a steady stream of examples of animals demonstrating compassion...."

I often wondered how a line can be drawn concerning what has a soul and what doesn't, according to a common Christian tradition.  That only humans were, by evolution or outright creation, smart enough to have souls has been a common teaching.  This has involved belief that the life of the soul had supernatural roots in God.  Since the days of that particular religious thought, knowledge of the intelligence level other animal species like octopuses has accrued and become more popular.  Other questionably smart animals includes other cephalopods, certain birds, apes, cetaceans (especially dolphins), and maybe just mammals in general (definitely including dogs and cats).   Rather than avoiding drawing a line at what intelligence level can support a soul and just saying every living thing has one, the modern tendency is to say no earthly living beings have souls.  That last option is also what I settled upon and is the way I handle the dilemma.
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#5
Zinjanthropos Offline
Just trying to help out soul believers here. Just need their confirmation as to whether a soul has no physical/physiological need of anything organic to exist, IOW's let's eliminate science from all talk of souls. 

For example: Does a soul require a multi-cellular organism or does every living cell contain a minute or complete element of a soul? Meaning a soul does or doesn't require x amount of one celled organisms before becoming apparent. An amoeba for instance may not have enough soul material and a blue whale may have too much. Is there a Goldilocks range of cells that enables a soul to take up residence? Surely our cell total increases as we grow so I assume there's got to be a range. Then again, there are other creatures who have roughly the same totals we have.
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#6
Syne Offline
(Oct 23, 2016 04:29 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Just trying to help out soul believers here. Just need their confirmation as to whether a soul has no physical/physiological need of anything organic to exist, IOW's let's eliminate science from all talk of souls. 

For example: Does a soul require a multi-cellular organism or does every living cell contain a minute or complete element of a soul? Meaning a soul does or doesn't require x amount of one celled organisms before becoming apparent. An amoeba for instance may not have enough soul material and a blue whale may have too much. Is there a Goldilocks range of cells that enables a soul to take up residence? Surely our cell total increases as we grow so I assume there's got to be a range. Then again, there are other creatures who have roughly the same totals we have.

I don't think anyone would say cells have parts of soul that collectively contribute to some critical mass we refer to as a soul. That would seem to be the opposite of eliminating science from the discussion, since it still relies on scientific reductionism, and would be a physical/physiological need.

Lower sentience/sapience life is without moral agency. This is where you draw the line in the sentience continuum, between what is considered to have a soul and what is not (between human and animal). A human/soul has some agency in determining its own disposition (in both senses of the word).
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#7
C C Offline
In terms of excerpts, I probably should have included the opening part which set what the author meant by "soul":

"In common parlance, the word ‘soul’ pops up everywhere. We may speak of a vast, soulless corporation or describe an athlete as the ‘heart and soul’ of his team. Soul music gets us swaying. We want our lover, body and soul. In each case, ‘soul’ connotes deep feeling and core values. ‘Feelings form the basis for what humans have described for millennia as the … soul or spirit,’ the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio eloquently expounds in his groundbreaking book Descartes’ Error."

Whereas in a Platonic tradition context (which Catholicism reputedly derived its mangled, hybrid conception of soul from that seems to conflictingly claim both material properties [potential presence in space / time, both here and in a supernatural] and immaterial properties [abstract principles without location, size, etc])... A "soul" would just be the transcendent provenance of its empirically realized brain/body counterpart in the sensible world. I.e., the formulaic archetype which made its appearing possible in this or any spectrum of other phenomenal, natural realities.

Despite an array of conceptual incongruities accompanying the comparison, the "simulated reality" mania of today (with one foot each in science and technology) still seems the quickest analogy for imperfectly illustrating the "noumenal" variety of soul of that centuries-long philosophical tradition. A character in an intricately detailed computer game or simulated reality could sensibly detect / measure features of its body and its observable and instrument-exposed causes. But not have access to its "soul" -- the hidden software or specific sub-programming being processed by the equally hidden electronic substrate, that was the ultimate template and source of the character. (As well as everything else in the character's manifested and investigate-able environment having such "behind the scenes" regulating templates / forms.)

Whereas in the traditional Christian context of "soul" -- or rather in one modern movement to free it / update it from older Christianity's classic misrepresentations(?), I guess... Some of the liberal factions of Christianity seem to be siding somewhat with scattered views (like those of Jehovah's Witnesses) that the words in Biblical manuscripts which were translated as "soul" do not refer to something immortal or necessarily supernatural. The following quotes serving as elaboration for that genre. Nancey Murphy is among those (scholars, scientists, philosphers, skeptics) who have appeared in the past on Robert Kuhn's show "Closer To The Truth".


QUESTION: As you’ve pointed out, science has made it extremely hard to posit something like the soul that exists independent of the body, or a mind that exists independent of physical processes in the brain. Some would say the dualistic view was never a biblical view to begin with, though it has long been part of Christian tradition. Do you agree?

NANCEY MURPHY: I follow New Testament scholar James Dunn in holding that the biblical authors were not interested in cataloguing the metaphysical parts of a human being -- body, soul, spirit, mind. Their interest was in relationships. The words that later Christians have translated with Greek philosophical terms and then understood as referring to parts of the self originally were used to designate aspects of human life. For example, spirit refers not to an immaterial something but to our capacity to be in relationship with God, to be moved by God’s Spirit.

It is widely agreed that the Hebrew Bible presents a holistic account of human nature, somewhat akin to contemporary physicalism. The New Testament authors certainly knew various theories of human nature, including dualism, but it was not their purpose to teach about this issue.
--Nature’s God: An Interview with Nancey Murphy ... The Christian Century (December 27, 2005, pp. 20-26.)

- - - - - - -

From CLOSER TO THE TRUTH, episode - "Can We Believe in Both Science and Religion?" (transcript):


NANCEY MURPHY: But in the, in the liberal half of Christianity, those who have a higher degree in theology are almost all phsyicalists.

MICHAEL SCHERMER: Really?

ROBERT KUHN: Physicalist meaning that there is no…

NANCEY MURPHY: We’re just bodies.

ROBERT KUHN: There is no non-physical element required to make us human beings.

NANCEY MURPHY: We’re just bodies. That’s right.

MICHAEL SCHERMER: Now when you’re resurrected, how old will you be?

NANCEY MURPHY: 30.

MICHAEL SCHERMER: Really? You have an answer.

NANCEY MURPHY: Augustine thought about that, that’s when you reach the height of your powers but before you start to disintegrate.

[...]

NANCEY MURPHY: [...] I am committed to saying that both are mental capacities and also are spiritual capacities, I don't talk about spirit as an entity or substance, but spiritual capacities emerge from our complex neural equipment, in a social/cultural context.

ROBERT KUHN: Back to Michael’s question about resurrection, which you do believe in. How does that occur?

NANCEY MURPHY: That is the part of Christian theology that we could say the least about. Our only reason to believe it is going to happen is first, a moral argument that there seems to need to be some life after death if there is going to be justice in the universe. That has led to the invention both of the concept of resurrection of the body and also the concept of an immortal soul that lives on after death. But the only reason Christians have for believing that resurrection is going to happen is the model of Jesus been raised from the dead, and the only clue we've got about what that’s supposed to be like is a set of strangely conflicting stories about what the resurrected person of Jesus was like.

MICHAEL SCHERMER: What if he was, you know, in sort of a comatose state for three days due to an epileptic seizure or some such thing?

NANCEY MURPHY: That would be comparable to the resuscitation of a corpse, and the resurrection body is not material in the same way, it’s not material of the same kind of material that we know.

ROBERT KUHN: But you certainly believe that people who have died, as Christians at this point are dead, they’re unconscious, they’re non-conscious, they don't exist until they may or may not be resurrected in the future.

NANCEY MURPHY: Right, there is no part of us that continues to exist after death.

ROBERT KUHN: And that God would have to resurrect the body and recreate your thought patterns.

NANCEY MURPHY: Basically, yes, re-create us in a different form, a whole different world, because otherwise we would be equally subject to corruption and decay as we are in this life.
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#8
elte Offline
I see Nancey as having a view because the alternative is so bad. Her view seems particularly that there is justice in the universe. It seems there is none however. I was thinking about mosquitos today as they were tearing into me. They are my evidence of no justice.
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#9
Zinjanthropos Offline
I was hoping someone could give us the science proving a soul's existence just to see how credible it is. I've been waiting my whole life to see scientific evidence for unsubstantiated claims.  Don't you get tired of hearing about things beyond our comprehension every time there's no scientific proof? Wouldn't such a claim require scientific evidence that there are things beyond our understanding?
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#10
C C Offline
(Oct 24, 2016 03:34 AM)elte Wrote: I see Nancey as having a view because the alternative is so bad. Her view seems particularly that there is justice in the universe. It seems there is none however. I was thinking about mosquitos today as they were tearing into me. They are my evidence of no justice.


I'm not sure what the apology [defense] of these particular liberal or Neo-Christians would be. But the Christian mythos usually tries to remedy that via the first humans getting themselves kicked-out of an idealized version of the world (Eden). Banished to a contingent cosmos with its later (post-Biblical) revealed natural history of causes and explanations (Lucifer's domain?). With the God family (duo, trinity, or whatever) only intervening mildly in the realm of human exile to direct the fate of the Hebrews and eventually instantiate a "savior" for them and the Gentiles.

Either the original reality or a reboot of it appears again after all or most of the fireworks described in the Book of Revelation:

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone." --Revelation 21:1 ... (New Living Translation)

"For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; And the former things will not be remembered or come to mind." --Isaiah 65:17

"But in keeping with God's promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells." --2 Peter 3:13

"The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be dissolved in the fire, and the earth and its works will not be found." --2 Peter 3:10

"... that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." --Romans 8:21



But of course, the Christian literalists who deny the Bible being metaphorical would stick with their creationism pseudoscience view of history still being applicable to even the unruly world of human exile. With "Eden" having genuinely been a small expanse (garden) located in the Middle East.

(Oct 24, 2016 04:15 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: I was hoping someone could give us the science proving a soul's existence just to see how credible it is. I've been waiting my whole life to see scientific evidence for unsubstantiated claims.


If a soul is supposed to be immaterial (is a principle that lacks size, location, mass, etc), then by definition it would be futile to try to detect and measure it. More futile than a restricted computer-game character trying to discover the archetypal-like software data that was the source of its changing figure on the screen (or such transpiring within its own sensory experiences, granting that future technology could grant it such qualitative consciousness).

Descartes introduced a psyche or soul that was seated in the pineal gland of a phenomenal body. Thus actually making it a hybrid with both material and immaterial properties (despite the claim otherwise). But the Church's apologetic branch of scholastic philosophy was probably just as perversely treating it as some "substance" with a location in space / time long before that. Such a brand of "soul" could probably crash and burn via its confused identity alone, and science failing to find it was just icing on the cake. It was ironically akin to a strawman in the sense of either believer or skeptic wasting their time pursuing and addressing such a detour, misrepresentation or ill-conceived concoction.

Quote:Don't you get tired of hearing about things beyond our comprehension every time there's no scientific proof?


I'm more interested in the internal consistency of concepts, or making them more coherent if they need to be. Comic book fans know that Superman is fiction, but they still complain about the ridiculousness of him deriving powers from the light of a yellow sun, and so-forth. They want better explanations of how he circumvents the laws of physics rather than eliminating the intellectual recreation or entertainment of him.

Quote:Wouldn't such a claim require scientific evidence that there are things beyond our understanding?


Transcendent affairs ("beyond our understanding") would by definition be outside the concerns of scientific activity; or be what made its variety of evidence possible (the latter uncovered by a combo of perceptual and reasoning methods). Science is neither metaphysics nor "a prior in rank" level where the working assumptions and presets for how various disciplines and fields will operate are established. Scientism does make the claim of being epistemologically "prior in rank" to everything else, but not the humbler enterprise of science itself.
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