Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!bcm!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: henning@acsu.buffalo.edu (Karl cut Henning) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: How to get to Heaven Message-ID: Date: 5 Mar 91 02:38:03 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: SUNY Buffalo Lines: 54 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu MARLATT STUART WARREN writes: >karl henning writes: >>Ed Ramsey writes: >>Belief systems are about philosophies and ideas. Christianity is >>about a person and our relationship *to* that person. >That, sir, is an idea. >And if you observe that idea methodically, you have something like >a philosophy. >Certainly, we might construe that the subject of marriage may be a focus >for philosophy, but if I were to say that my relationship with my wife >was simply a philosophy I follow, I think she might object. Is philosophy "simply something one follows"? Apart from the odd bias of this phrasing, I don't think there's anything to which the average person would object, in describing marriage as a topic of philosophy .... >Christianity _is_ relationship. Communication. This statement _is_ a simile, not a statement of equivalence. The notion of xianity being "communication", is at least as curious (to me) as describing the television as a "communications device"; neither is as clearly demonstrable a medium of mutual intercourse, as (say) a telephone call. >... certainly far, far more than just a set of rules >and ideas to be methodically implemented. Different people, through the ages, and from different cultures, entertain different ideas about god, and man's relation (or non-) to him/her/it/them. But religion /is/ simply philosophy, albeit clouded (<-- biased word betraying author's opinion) oftentimes by anthropomorphic conceptions of a deity. Personally, I can have no tenable objection to a fellow person's choosing to "personalize" as it were his philosophy with a projected deity. Rationally, I understand too, that while a philosopher has no ground to lose by characterizing religion as a sub-branch of philosophy, an important part of the psychological need to impart philosophical weight upon a projected deity, is lack of trust in "mere abstraction" (part of it, too, is the mythopoaeic tradition of attributing natural phenomena to a Big Person, or Little People). kph -- "The shrewder mobs of America, who dislike having two minds upon a subject, both determine and act upon it drunk; by which means a world of cold and tedious speculation is dispensed with." -- Washington Irving