[MD] Religion as social, as intellectual and even as atheistic.

[John Carl]

That sounds exactly right, Dave.  Religion in this sense,  could be thought
of as socially agreed upon "scheme of meaning".
 or *William James*: There is no atheism, as religion is defined to include
any fundamental perspective on life.

That is certainly what I meant when I proposed the analogy of the 3rd level
being "the religious level"

Thanks,

John


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 11:37 AM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From the magazine "Philosophy Now":
>
>
>
> "Everyone reading William James’ (1842-1910) seminal 1902 book The
> Varieties of Religious Experience
>  will be impressed by the huge variety of religious ideas. Nevertheless,
>  that variety is to a considerable extent caused by James’ very broad
> conception of religion. Jamesian ‘religion’ encompasses all the
> fundamental visions of life, including political, ideological and
> philosophical stances. Such a view is popular among those who approach
> religion from a psychological or sociological perspective, as James did.
>  We clearly detect this view in James’s definition of religion as “the
> feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so
> far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they
> may consider the divine.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study
> in Human Nature, Penguin edition, p.31.)
>
> What James called ‘Emersonian optimism’ or ‘Buddhist pessimism’ also
> betrays a relation to the divine, so these positions are ‘religions’,
> according to his definition:
>
>
>
>
> 'We must therefore, from the experiential point of view, call these
> godless or quasi-godless creeds ‘religions’; and accordingly when in our
>  definition of religion we speak of the individual’s relation to ‘what
> he considers the divine,’ we must interpret the term ‘divine’ very
> broadly, as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete
> deity or not.' (p.34.)
>
>
>
>
> This brought James to a conception of religion as 'man’s total reaction
> upon life.' (p.35.)"
>
>
>
>
>
> You can read the whole article here:
> https://philosophynow.org/issues/78/The_Varieties_of_Atheist_Experience
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
>
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-- 
"finite players
play within boundaries.
Infinite players
play *with* boundaries."