On 02/06/2015 07:04, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tuesday 02 June 2015 15:01, Rustom Mody wrote:
eg Would it make sense to you if you were told that there are widespread
religions like Buddhism that are agnostic or Jainism that are strictly
atheistic?
No of course it wouldn't make sense. But nothing to do with religion,
spirituality and superstition makes sense, the whole point of them is that
they speak to the emotions, not logic. (You note that I am carefully not
commenting on whether this is a good thing or not.)
Draw up two sets of overlapping axes, and label the vertical axes
"Agnosticism / Gnosticism" and the horizontal axes "Supernatural / Natural".
Belief systems can be found in all four quadrants. Agnostic religions are
easy, they're just in the Supernatural+Agnostic quadrant. If you define
religion to be merely any belief system, then even an atheist religion is
understandable: it could be anything on the Natural half of the graph.
Personally, I consider that redefining religion to refer to belief systems
which do not include supernatural divine gods is an abuse of language
(except informally, as in "football is my religion" or "the religious war
between Vi and Emacs users"). it's like the food processor that is
advertised as being a "three speed food-processor" because there are three
settings on the control: High, Low and OFF.
If anybody wishes to discuss this can they please take it off list, as
it surely has no place here when we're meant to be discussing the Python
programming langauge.
--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask
what you can do for our language.
Mark Lawrence
--
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
