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Religious fictionalism: believers without 'the belief'?

PureX

Veteran Member
That is not even remotely what I understand religious fictionalism to be. Fictionalism is all about not being vulnerable to doubt, let alone "grave" doubt. It does not necessarily involve perception or expectation of improvements, either.
I know, and I think you completely missed the point of the thread. You've wrongly associated "fictionalism" with dogmatic absolutism.

(Or else I've misunderstood "fictionalism".)
 

joe1776

Well-Known Member
If only a higher portion of the people claiming to be "Christian" would actually do as the Christ said:

"Love your neighbor as yourself."

"In all things, do to others as you would have them do to you, for this sums up the law and the prophets."


If only they would (or more of them would) indeed believe what Jesus said -- believe in Him, really -- and therefore actually do what He said.

...That would totally transform the world for the better.
Unfortunately, we humans have TWO moral sides, good and bad. The advice you quote doesn't help us in dealing with the bully-criminals of the world.

However, our intuitive conscience guides us in this. It justifies killing in self-defense or in the protection of the weak. However, killing innocent people feels wrong.
 

halbhh

The wonder and awe of "all things".
Unfortunately, we humans have TWO moral sides, good and bad. The advice you quote doesn't help us in dealing with the bully-criminals of the world.

However, our intuitive conscience guides us in this. It justifies killing in self-defense or in the protection of the weak. However, killing innocent people feels wrong.

Well, as perhaps you know, we do find limits, soon!, on how far we can go on feeling, to get things right.

At times, feeling definitely makes serious errors. Example: the puppy peed on the floor again, and you are angry, and you feel like kicking it. That's a good time to ignore the feelings or guidance from feeling, and instead do another thing, by principle from wisdom.

Example: you pause and check your intuition (or conscience). There's an example of intentionally applying a principle. But one learns in time even intuition has limits, similar.

Here's a metaphor I like: feeling and thought are like 2 arms. We can do more by using 2 arms, in cooperation.

So, I want to learn from the great wisdom teachers, just for my own gain, for my own better life. For gain.

Having read a lot of them, I can tell you Jesus is one a smart person will want to gravitate towards. If they want the best.

I'd not rely much on 2nd hand views. Go to the accounts of his words and read for yourself -- that's my way. I don't like to get my understanding 2nd hand.
 
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sealchan

Well-Known Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).

I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.

Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.

The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:

Believers without belief - TLS


According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...

Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...

The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.

One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.

I suppose that my own views fit in with the term Religious Fictionalism.

Literality is a disease of good spiritual understanding.

We all unavoidably live within a worldview that is subjective and fictional as well as objective and verifiable. We must strive continually to separate our personal truths from that which we can expect others to accept.
 

sealchan

Well-Known Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).

I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.

Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.

The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:

Believers without belief - TLS


According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...

Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...

The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.

One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.

Every time one picks up a novel or watches a major motion picture, one is implicitly allowing one's self to be immersed in a fictional world and to take that world as real for a time. We freely grant these works of fiction creditability. The same happens at sporting events where many z people grant the game way more value and importance than any practical concern can, in most cases, justify.
 

sealchan

Well-Known Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).

I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.

Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.

The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:

Believers without belief - TLS


According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...

Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...

The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.

One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.

One or two things I might object to here...

Religious fictionalism can be understood not as a belief system but rather is an attitude toward religion which is largely unthought or simply assumed. I think that in oral traditions nothing was taken for granted that didn't happen right in front of a person. Stories were good or true but no one thought to falsify by referring to any documentation or rule-based criteria.

Professor Peter Harrison talks about how religion used to be a matter of character and was largely independent of specific personally held beliefs in a series of lectures I have been watching...


The other point is similar in that myth does not require an epistemology or philosophical approach. Myth is story, ritual and art which can impact a personal in a direct, meaningful or not, way that does not have to engage a consciously formulated ideology. I would say if one has formulated an ideology out of a myth then one has likely lost hold of the value and meaning of that myth.
 

stvdv

Veteran Member: I Share (not Debate) my POV
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?
Yesterday I saw a little girl cuddling a doll. I realized all are steps towards the goal. It's good to be born in a church ... not to die; except the ego
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

I don't find value in imitating the religious. What would be the purpose of attending church or observing religious rituals if you don't believe? For community? I get that elsewhere. For a moral system? I prefer the one I've settled on over any religious system. I can't imagine that practice fulfilling any need or adding to my life.

"The education of the human race has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from earthly to heavenly things" - St. Augustine of Hippo (City of God, Ch.14)

And now, it is returning to earthly things. In my estimation, man's religious phase will have been the period between the time when man first developed the intellectual capacity to ask why, and the time when he got his answers. In between, God did it. The world used to be more steeped in religiosity, but is becoming less so as scientific knowledge progresses.
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
I don't find value in imitating the religious. What would be the purpose of attending church or observing religious rituals if you don't believe? For community? I get that elsewhere. For a moral system? I prefer the one I've settled on over any religious system. I can't imagine that practice fulfilling any need or adding to my life.

As I understand it, it is to a degree comparable to belonging to a political party or being a member of a geographically convenient club. But there is also the matter of lending prestige and taking advantage of established language and reference points.

There is value in having some idea of what other people are doing and being listened by them in return.

And I don't know that it is necessarily imitation as opposed to the real thing. Haven't you ever wondered how come 90% of people hold such exotic beliefs? Maybe they do not.


And now, it is returning to earthly things. In my estimation, man's religious phase will have been the period between the time when man first developed the intellectual capacity to ask why, and the time when he got his answers. In between, God did it. The world used to be more steeped in religiosity, but is becoming less so as scientific knowledge progresses.

Come to think of it, perhaps the increased awareness of skepticism and atheism, which some mistake for something "new" (hence that dreaded fictional chimera of "New Atheism") is connected to the spread of the Internet social media not only because they improved the ability of niche groups to keep mutual contact, but also because the accessibility itself has weakened the need for religious groups.
 

JesusKnowsYou

Active Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).

I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.

Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.

The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:

Believers without belief - TLS


According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...

Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...

The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.

One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.
I don't like it.

It's like Democrats claiming to love the Constitution, but then trying to impeach a U.S. President for nothing more than not liking him.

Basically, it's just a hot mess.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
'religious fictionalism' dominates the ancient religions like Christianity and Islam, and in the long term it is detrimental to the advancement of humanity. One of the worst manifestations of this problem is the fundamentalist Christian view towards science, which is supported by literal scripture. 'Religious fictionalism' is accepted as conditioned when young and often pragmatically in adults for the sense of belonging and community of the belief system.
What? The whole reason creationists reject science so vehemently is because they are NOT fictionalists but literalists, i.e. the polar opposite. They believe it is ALL literally true, however preposterous.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
I don't like it.

It's like Democrats claiming to love the Constitution, but then trying to impeach a U.S. President for nothing more than not liking him.

Basically, it's just a hot mess.
But so is the nature of our human experience. It is not neat and tidy, black and white.
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
I don't like it.

It's like Democrats claiming to love the Constitution, but then trying to impeach a U.S. President for nothing more than not liking him.

Basically, it's just a hot mess.
In as much as both the situation and the downsides are fictional, sure, it is a very similar situation.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
What is your opinion of 'religious fictionalism', the stance which holds that religious doctrines / beliefs are fictional discourse but it is still worth living a religious life, practising religion, going to church / mosque / temple, participating in all the rituals, living by the ethics and using the 'language / symbols' of faith?

Religious fictionalism can come in "strong" and "weak" forms (its a scale of degrees): on the 'strong' end, an RF might believe God doesn't exist and neither do souls or anything else supernatural (i.e. Jesus did not rise from the dead, isn't actually the incarnate Son of God or perform miracles; Muhammad did not really have a vision of the archangel Gabriel who dictated Qur'anic revelations to him; the Hindu gods don't actually exist, nor do avatars or Atman etc.), while on the weak end the RF might believe in God in a kind of deistic fashion but not in any of the miraculous claims made for his religion (like the ones just mentioned, such as the resurrection!).

I am reminded of JRR Tolkien's words on the inherent 'truth' of mythology: "After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Indeed, one of the defining characteristics of human culture - since the days of the paleolithic cave-art - has been our facility for creating meaning, social identity and moral systems through the articulation of mythical stories and complex symbols.

Religious fictionalism is, apparently, by no means a negligible phenomenon. Research among self-identified Catholics in the Netherlands, published in 2007, found that only 27% of the Dutch Catholics could be regarded as a theist, 55% as an ietsist, deist or agnostic and 17% as atheist. Thus, the vast majority of Dutch Catholics were apparently "religious fictionalists" on some level.

The philosopher Philip Ball declares himself to be a 'Christian' religious fictionalist. He believes God to be a 'fiction', along with the resurrection of Christ, but attends church, prays (for his own mental wellbeing), reads the New Testament for moral edification and aspires to lead a Christlike life. Here he is writing about his framework:

Believers without belief - TLS


According to conventional wisdom, religions are systems of belief. Religious people are “believers”. Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead; Muslims believe that Mohammed was the final prophet; Jews believe that the creator of the universe has a special affection for the children of Israel. These beliefs of the religious are often taken to be unsupported by, or even inconsistent with, available evidence. Indeed, many understand “faith” as a matter of believing without any evidence at all.

However, this belief-orientated – or “doxastic” – conception of religion is not universally accepted...As the philosopher Daniel Howard-Snyder has argued in detail, the contexts in which Jesus talks of “faith” make it quite clear that he was concerned with the resilience of the religious commitment of the people around him rather than with their abstract theories of reality; in other words, with “belief” in the sixteenth-century rather than the twenty-first-century sense...

But suppose you think the arguments for the existence of God fail entirely. Or suppose you think we have very good reason to think that God does not exist...Could you still have some grounds for taking religion seriously? One might think not. Yet there is a philosophical position that combines out and out atheism with a positive commitment to religious practice; this is the view known as “religious fictionalism”.

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshleman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”. The religious community is bound together across space and time by its stories, rituals, regular meetings and celebration of rites of passage. At a time when globalization has fractured communities and weakened our shared forms of life, there is arguably a real need for institutions that bring people together around a shared moral purpose. The rise of nationalism around much of Europe may, in part, speak to a deep human need for shared structures of meaning...

Moral character is cultivated and sustained, at least in part, through emotional engagement with fictional scenarios. For the fictionalist, immersion in the religious ritual is akin to losing yourself in a book or a film, the only difference being that the effect is accentuated through our active and corporate participation in the act of worship...

The New Testament scholar Marcus Borg – another late, great voice in liberal theology – developed in some detail a Hickian conception of Christianity. Although sceptical of the literal truth of the virgin birth and the resurrection, Borg believed that the Christian myth expressed what he called “the character and passion of God”. By conceiving of God as born into poverty, eating with outcasts, suffering a humiliating death at the hands of the unconquerable colonial power and yet paradoxically triumphing through that very suffering, we are led into a deeper and truer experience of the Real.

One might be forgiven for thinking that fictionalism was a new-fangled approach to religion, but in fact there are fictionalist elements in Christian theology going right back to the Early Church Fathers. Origen (c.184–253) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–395) were proponents of apophatic, or “negative”, theology, according to which the real nature of God is unknowable. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late fifth/early sixth centuries) wrote that God is “beyond every assertation” and “beyond every denial”. And the hugely influential late fourteenth-century text The Cloud of Unknowing guided Christians to a knowledge of God that left behind the superficial descriptions found in ordinary worship. If God’s nature cannot be captured in human language, it follows that talk of God as having personal characteristics – such as “wisdom” or “omnipotence” – although perhaps essential for regular practice, is strictly speaking a fiction.
Thanks very much for this, Vouthon. It articulates very well something about my own shaky degree of belief, such as it is. I can certainly recognise myself as being somewhere "on the spectrum" of fictionalism. I have suspected for a long time that quite a lot of church-going Christians - and even a number of Church of England clergymen - are in this position, so it is reassuring to see this corroborated by the Dutch research.

I wonder in fact whether the demands we tend nowadays to make of religious believers, viz. that they should have a fully worked out, intellectually coherent and firmly held conviction about all the doctrines of their faith, are an aberration, arising from an Enlightenment-driven approach to religion in the wake of the Reformation. It was @Polymath257 who, in another thread, drew my attention to the distinction between mythos and logos and the way logos has been emphasised, to the detriment of mythos, since that time. Mediaeval people may have approached religion rather differently.

I am also very struck by @sayak83's comment about the theories of science being in a sense "fictions". This seems to me rather an arresting comparison, suggesting as it does that the black and white division we tend to make between fact and fiction is actually a bit naive and crude.
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
When you stop and think about it, there is indeed quite a lot being expected from believers (in the strict sense).

Some 1500 years ago there were heresies (and that is not a dirty word, mind you) in Christianity about the specific relatioship between God and Jesus, as well as about the nature and workings of the Original Sin, to mention two that come to mind.

List of heresies in the Catholic Church - Wikipedia

It can become rather esoteric and, well, lacking in practical significance.

How likely are people in any given community to be consistently believers in the exact form of dogma presented by any of their local Churches? What are they supposed to do if, say, they do not believe that the communion hosts are literally the body of Christ?

At some point one realizes that it is just too much noise for too little justification. There is so much detail, much of it is not even known by most adherents, and would not be worth raising to even a minor issue if they did know. People generally won't choose to confront their own parishers and priests if they happen to believe that hosts are just a form of bread. Should they? Are even the priests themselves expected to care or to necessarily have such beliefs?

There is such a thing as taking those points of belief too seriously for anyone's good.

Come to think of it, isn't this ponderation what is generally expected of religious moderates, and understood to be a good thing?
 
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shunyadragon

shunyadragon
Premium Member

Needs clarification

Are you saying that fundamentalism somehow benefits from fictionalism or is supported by it?

Fundamentalism is grounded in an ancient worldview and mythology believed as fact in ancient scripture.

No one benefits from religious fictionalism, Fundamentalism is an extreme example, but all ancient religions are supported by religious fictionalism believing ancient mythology is in some way factual.

[quote Quite so. And it leads to a lot of confusion too. But what do you see as a better situation?[/QUOTE]

I used to think that education was the solution, but I have been disillusioned as time passed, because many who cling to religious fictionalism are among the best educated, and they are the sheepherders.

Beyond this I hope for a paradigm shift(?) of sorts from a universal spiritual perspective like the Baha'i Faith and increased influence of science and humanism to bring change, but at present I am at a loss.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
Needs clarification



Fundamentalism is grounded in an ancient worldview and mythology believed as fact in ancient scripture.

No one benefits from religious fictionalism, Fundamentalism is an extreme example, but all ancient religions are supported by religious fictionalism believing ancient mythology is in some way factual.

[quote Quite so. And it leads to a lot of confusion too. But what do you see as a better situation?

I used to think that education was the solution, but I have been disillusioned as time passed, because many who cling to religious fictionalism are among the best educated, and they are the sheepherders.

Beyond this I hope for a paradigm shift(?) of sorts from a universal spiritual perspective like the Baha'i Faith and increased influence of science and humanism to bring change, but at present I am at a loss.
You seem to have misunderstood the OP completely.
 

LuisDantas

Aura of atheification
Premium Member
Fundamentalism is grounded in an ancient worldview and mythology believed as fact in ancient scripture.
Yes. And fictionalism rejects fundamentalism in order to instead use the concepts and tales in a more allegorical way.

No one benefits from religious fictionalism, Fundamentalism is an extreme example, but all ancient religions are supported by religious fictionalism believing ancient mythology is in some way factual.

I am not following. You seem to think of fundamentalism as fictionalism in an extreme form, is that correct? I don't think that is accurate or possible.

If anything, fictionalism is incompatible with the view that ancienty mythology would be factual.

I used to think that education was the solution, but I have been disillusioned as time passed, because many who cling to religious fictionalism are among the best educated, and they are the sheepherders.

I think that it may be helpful to consider how much of an appreciation of the power of myth exists in fictionalism.

It is not always, or even mainly, a bad thing.

Beyond this I hope for a paradigm shift(?) of sorts from a universal spiritual perspective like the Baha'i Faith and increased influence of science and humanism to bring change, but at present I am at a loss.

I must say, I stand surprised that a Bahai would feel so ill at ease with fictionalism.
 
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