Look Who it Was Random video

Religion Still Matters (even if you hate it) - Part II-II

630 views · Published 1 January 2008 · 4:33 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Footnotes2Plato · 2008 · People & Blogs

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Religion cannot be reduced to psychology, because psychology cannot be reduced to biology, because biology cannot be reduced to chemistry, because chemistry cannot be reduced to physics, because physics cannot be reduced to mathematics (though it can be very nearly predicted by it, if only that were good enough to really catch "it" in the act). 

Even if we are atheists, even if we are just plain human beings who (think we) could care less about religion, we are still faced with the irreducibly meaningful immediacy of our own experience. If upon realizing this immediate experience, we are not compelled to see all our subsequent  thoughts in its light, then we have not understood it. Whatever this experience is (and I think the origin and intent of religion is to induce such an experience, even if most  of the modern traditions are dried up dogmas with very few who have experienced what all the symbols represent), knowing it clears away the clouds of memory and expectation, of history and theory, and leaves only the archetypal, the eternal.

Faith should have nothing to do with belief at all. If it does, it is just like any other kind of knowledge. If someone 'believes' in God, it's because their parents or their churches told them to, just like if someone believes in Darwinian evolution, it's because the scientists told them to. In each case, most of the believers of these doctrines handed down by 'experts' have no actual knowledge of any of it being true. They believe it is true because some very influential people in their community (church officials run many local communities just as the scientific community is supposed to run the global community) told them so. Now I know a lot of you are objecting that you know perfectly well how evolution works. You don't have to take the evolutionary biologist's word, you are rational enough to understand it all by yourself. But it hardly matters, because even the scientist who ran the experiments can only offer a theory, ie, a belief, about the cause of the empirical result. The true cause cannot be known, as the ever-evolving structure of scientific paradigms shows us. Theories are always based on confined sets of information, limited perspective on the whole. This is why it is (I think) impossible to have a science (in the traditional reductionistic/mechanistic sense)  of psychology, because at the psychological level, a human being can only doubt and believe certain facts or knowledge.  Only when religion enters the picture does the psyche  gain the possibility of true knowledge, of gnosis, of direct seeing, but religious knowledge is not a knowledge of beings, of particular things. Such a knowledge of the Many is belief (the web of contexts prevent the clear view required for any absolute knowledge of the Many). The only unified and coherent knowledge, knowledge of the One, is the knowledge that comes through faith.  To have 'faith' requires an inner transformation, something that cannot be learned from the outside. It is not something absent added later, it is not something we believe in or wish for. Faith is what it takes to realize the experience of Oneness as your telos. It is not a purpose distant in space or time; it is ever-present.

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