 bad ways to try to understand or talk about religion. Now religion is really very easy to understand. You know, here's, you know, something like what happened, right? Somebody saw lightning straight through the sky and then they said, ooh, a god must have made that. That must be Zeus. And that's just what religion is. Well the mistake that this approach makes is that the, you know, the critic presumes that the, that what somebody is trying to do with religion is to explain the natural world or the natural order or the causal order. And that's not what religion is trying to do. You know, in other words, this is to presume that what people are doing with religion is to do really bad science, right? Well, yeah, if you're using religion to explain the natural world, sure, you're doing really bad science. But religion isn't supposed to tell you the causal relationships between material objects. It's supposed to tell you your relationship to the divine. These folks use the natural world to explain the divine, not the divine to explain the natural world. Now of course there are going to be some cases, right, where there's going to be some appeal to a divinity to explain what's going on, but that's accidental. That's not a necessary part or an essential part of religion. And actually what we're probably going to find in a lot of cases, it's probably a mistake, according to the religion, to try to explain the natural world using religious terms. So yeah, that's one really bad way to start talking about religion. And you'll hear this sometimes, you'll hear people talk about sometimes. Well, here's another really bad way. Well, you know, here's what religion is like. Yeah, it's just a bunch of small-minded, weak-minded people who really can't think for themselves. So they ask somebody in a robe and ask them, what should we do? How should I, you know, think about this? And, you know, they just can't think for themselves. So they have to turn to some authority to answer the question. I mean, really, wake up, sheeple! Now, I have no doubt that there are people within religion that follow the claims made by some religious authority or leader or another, without investigating these claims themselves. Sure, absolutely. But not all people in religions do this. And by the way, this sort of behavior isn't limited to religion. You have unreflective or people who unreflectively accept claims made by psychologists, historians, physical scientists, politicians, economists, political science theorists, not even just, you know, politicians but political science theorists. You have it across all sorts of disciplines. Unless you've actually gone through the process of investigating the field yourself, and, you know, so doing the hard work, doing the reading and the critical analysis and the synthesis, you unreflectively accept a lot of claims all on your own. You know, the mistake with this approach is to try to appeal to some kind of psychological or character flaw when it comes to explaining this behavior, explaining religious belief. Now if you're going to do something like this, you know, appeal to some kind of psychological flaw, here's my question for you. Where did you get your credentials to psychology? What clinical examination, what clinical experiment, you know, namely one-on-one interaction with that person, have you conducted in order to reach the diagnosis that there's some deep flaw in that individual? If you can't get a give a substantive answer to either one of these questions, you are not revealing rational thought, you're revealing a bias. Now I'm not just trying to pick on you, people do this a lot. It's become commonplace in a lot of our public discourse. I don't want to shame you into, you know, guilt and hiding away. I want you and others to change their behavior. So this is another really flawed approach, flawed approach to trying to understand religion is to say that, oh, that's just something really messed up with the person. We're not going to do this in this course. We're not going to take any of these flawed approaches. You know, there's probably a lot more ways to, you know, to in some flawed way discuss religion. We're not going to take those. We're going to do something else. So through this course we are going to ask the question, what does it mean to be a religion? Right? Or what is a religion? Or maybe another way of saying this is we're going to try to define religion. We will not succeed. It is difficult at best to define religion. It's not merely a social institution. It's not merely a set of practices or beliefs. It's not merely part of what happens in a culture. There's at least these things, but it's not merely these things and trying to define it as just one of these things or a combination usually results in cases, confusing cases. So we'll likely not succeed in defining religion through this course, but we're going to take a really hard look. We're going to look at clear cut cases of religion, ancient and modern, and the last part of the course, we are going to look at borderline cases, cases that may or may not be religion, cases where there are these groups who say they are religion, but they're not, or maybe they're not, or we look at cases where we look at a group say they are not a religion, but maybe they aren't. So we're not going to be able to define religion, but we're going to gain a much better understanding of what a religion is by the investigation. We're going to take a really hard look and see what we come up with. So we're not going to be able to define religion, but we are going to look at three really important aspects of religions. That's faith, belief, and action. So starting with faith. Now faith, defining faith, might be just about as difficult as it is to define religion. You know, there's lots of attempts at doing this. The problem is compounded when we consider that not every religion means the same thing by faith. And you know, not everybody means the same thing when they use the word faith. So defining faith is itself going to be rather difficult. Now we're going to start with something that was given to us in the Oxford Dictionary of Religion. It's the disposition towards the commitment and towards acceptance of religious claims. Okay, but then now in this case what faith is is a disposition. And there's lots of different kinds of dispositions, emotional dispositions, trust, what, cultural, like a cultural affectation. There's all kinds of ways that we can have dispositions. You know, convictions is probably another word. So one of the things that we're going to do is to try to figure not only exactly what that particular religion means by faith, but try to identify what this disposition is. What is the disposition that leads people to accepting these claims? Next we have belief. Now I kind of want to caution you, right, because we're real tempted to say something like you know, faith in God is just the belief that God exists. Well no, faith is not the same thing as belief, right? Faith is the disposition towards the belief, right, or the disposition to accept the belief. Okay, and you know we even do this in our own culture, right, when we're talking about faith. Everybody in the country, probably, hopefully, everybody in the country, believes that the current president exists. The current president in the United States exists, but not everybody has faith in that current president. You know, our language order reflects this difference between faith and belief. Now we're talking about beliefs and religion. We're going to talk about the doctrines about the religion. What does the religion say is true? What are the assertions, the claims about the divinity or ultimate reality, about humanity and human beings, about the natural world? I mean there are going to be some claims about the natural world, even though they're not trying to do science. So when we're looking at the beliefs about the religion, we're going to look at these assertions, these claims, to what people believe, not necessarily believe in, right, that you believe in the divinity. That's something like faith in the divinity, but that's not beliefs about the divinity. So we're going to pay special attention to the beliefs that these different religions have. Now something else to think about, faith is this disposition towards religious claims. Now what if we say that faith isn't just about religious claims? There are dispositions that we have towards other beliefs. You're going to find that you have dispositions towards a lot of beliefs that don't necessarily have to do with religion. And there's really no real reason to say that faith is limited to religion. I mean if it's supposed to be just talk about faith as a kind of trust, okay, well you trust a lot and you trust a lot of people about a lot of claims that have nothing to do with religion. So here's an interesting question. If we remove the religion part, or even if we don't, right, suppose we don't remove the religion part, what's the difference between faith as a disposition towards the religious beliefs and any other kind of disposition, so mere trust, and believing something else that doesn't have to do with religion? What's supposed to be the important difference? So what we might ask ourselves, the more we push on this question, so suppose we don't limit faith to just religious claims, it's about, you know, when we start pushing on these questions, we're not asking ourselves, certainly not, you know, not everybody has religion. Okay, absolutely it's true. But is it the case that everybody has faith? Now as before, you know, faith is not merely belief. Faith is not merely action either, right, it's the disposition that one has to perform any action. Now when you look at these religions, you know, for any length of time, you can find that there's such a thing as, you know, performing an action prescribed by the religion out of faith and performing it out of some other reason. I mean, we do this already, right, somebody who tells the truth. Well, they're not necessarily honest. So you like say, you tell the truth to your friends, say you find out that your friend's romantic partner is cheating on that friend, right? You know, it is possible out of a motivation to concern and care for the friend to tell the friend about that. Okay, but suppose you're just kind of a malicious person. You could tell the friend about the cheating in hopes of hurting the friend. There are different motivations different dispositions towards action. Now, so one of the things we're going to look at is, you know, how is this faith supposed to be related to action? And what are the actions prescribed by religion? What are the rituals? What are the behaviors? What are, you know, ranging from moral beliefs to, you know, what we might call broadly speaking moral beliefs to something very specific, such as the kind of clothes one's supposed to wear or the prayers that one's supposed to offer, things like this. So during the course of this semester, we're going to look at the actions that are prescribed by religion and why. And in that investigation, we'll figure out, or the point of figure out is to understand. So there we have it. We are going to look at faith, belief, and action. And all the while, we will be asking what does it mean to be a religion, although we probably won't succeed. What you might find is more difficult than we think. It's also important to remember that for this course, for the semester, I should say, this course is descriptive, not prescriptive. A descriptive course looks at the subject and merely tells you about it, to inform you about the subject so that you gain a better understanding. It's not a critique. It's merely a telling you what, not what should be. Okay, so for example, you could take a what a social course about different cultures on the planet, right? You can look at American cultures, English cultures, German, Nicaraguan. You can look at South African cultures, cultures in Eastern Europe, right? You can look at all these different cultures and just to tell you about them, okay? But in telling you about them, that doesn't necessitate that you should be German, you should be English, you should be Nicaraguan, right? And nothing like that. When you take a course that tells you about the cultures, that's descriptive, not prescriptive. Is the difference between telling you what behaviors people actually perform and what behaviors they should perform? Telling you what they perform is descriptive. Telling you what they should perform is prescriptive. So this course is descriptive. We're going to try to understand these religions. After that, and we're not going to critique. If we have, if there is any need for critique, it will be kept at a minimum. This course is not here and I am not here to tell you which religion you should believe. That's not the point. We are not going to engage in discussions in the class on which religion should be adopted. It's not going to happen. We will engage in discussions and what does it mean to accept a religion? What are the consequences in belief and action? What does it mean to have faith in one religion or other? Now while we're not going to critique any particular religion, we might ask the question, are you actually have faith in what your religion prescribes? You might find that you don't, that you have faith in something else. I'm not telling you you need to start switching churches or switching religions or anything like that. That will not be my purpose, but you might find that you need to reevaluate what you actually do. Moreover, as we gain better understanding of these different religions, hopefully, or at least one of my aims in all of this, is that you will better understand and therefore have more sympathy for others in different religions. I'm not saying adopt different religions. I'm saying being tolerant of them.