I mentioned in the video that Hume might be interpreted as a hermeneutic fictionalist. I discuss his views on this here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Q_h0ah_WDho.html
Why should a religious fictionalist insist on internal consistency? Consistency only gets into the way of a good story. Just imagine Star Trek with internal consistency! Who would watch that?
I wonder if the inconsistency of God might be useful part of the story insofar as it can give the fictionalist the sense of a being that is incomprehensibly greater than us. God is beyond all limitations, and when we try to grasp God within our minds, we can't even form a coherent idea of him. Perhaps this kind of ineffability is an important part of the religious experience. Characterizing God in a way that is inconsistent is more likely to get us into that frame of mind. Anyway, there are even some religious realists who don't insist on internal consistency: Descartes held that God could do absolutely anything, including realize logical contradictions. So I'm not sure that the fictionalist should be too troubled by this.
Can an agnostic be a religious fictionalist? Would an agnostic be better positioned to assert religious fictionalism in virtue of their uncertainty? I think so. If an agnostic grants the epistemic possibility of the existence of god, then perhaps they can be reasonably motivated by the possibility this is true. Agnosticism weakens the strength of the coherence objection, as an agnostic is not entirely rejecting the claim of the religious worldview. Agnosticism also seems to remove the reason giving power objection, as the agnostic can claim to be motivated by the epistemic possibility of god's existence. The agnostic is also in a better position to answer what is special about religion-namely it has the possibility of being true (although this does not explain why someone would be a fictionalist about one religion and not another.) I suspect that the deceit objection would also fail in many religious communities, but this seems more like an anthropological question.
Religious fictionalism seems like a solution no one wants for a problem no one has. Religious people don't want fake believers, and nonreligious people don't want to pretend to hold fake beliefs. Neither side would be satisfied with the outcome of choosing to play pretend. It also is likely to fail on a practical level: If we ALL were just pretending that religion is true when none of us actually believe it, eventually religion would lose the supposed benefits it holds as it fades into obscurity like any other fad with nothing to anchor it. Christianity for example is ultimately nothing more than a transactional religion; if the bargain and the bargainer aren't real, and we don't believe they're real, what exactly is the point of pretending we have a bargain in the first place? Maybe some religions could retain their fictional-metaphorical "truth" in a transition to fictionalism, but covenantal religions that promise to trade eternal life for devotion are probably doomed if all their participants decide they aren't true. Similarly, it has the practical problem that there will always be people who DO believe in the religion in the literal sense, and if the religion has harmful beliefs if taken literally (but which are otherwise harmless if viewed as fictions), we effectively condone the bad faith (even though, ironically, theirs is the genuine faith) of literalists and platform them when we probably shouldn't; that alone seems to be incentive for it to be discarded and discouraged if we collectively determine it to be untrue.
I suspect that it's probably most appealing to people who grew up with a religion, and who found a lot of comfort and meaning in it, but who later came to be convinced by philosophical arguments that the religion is false. Religious fictionalism will (they hope) let them keep those benefits, even if they find themselves irresistibly compelled by the atheist arguments. I doubt it will be so appealing to people who haven't already been immersed in a religion. From the outside, it's hard to see that the benefits are all that great, especially when weighed against the negative impact that religions have had. >> Maybe some religions could retain their fictional-metaphorical "truth" in a transition to fictionalism Yeah, I only talked about Christianity here because that's what most of the academic literature focuses on, but other religions raise different issues. Many of the objections to religious fictionalism about Christianity would not carry over to pagan religions, for instance.
I had the pleasure of dabbling in fictionalism when I traveled to Japan last autumn and partook in many of their Shinto rituals. Make-believe is fun. That is enough to justify its practice.
It's not just that there are parts of religious texts that are poetic or metaphorical (and are accepted as such by believers, in many cases). It's that the non-cognitive and non-literal aspects of all religious statements are important, even if the believers who make the statement also view it as literally true, and even if there's good reason for philosophers to address that belief. Normally, people are not committed to any particular complete theory of ontology, epistemology, or metaphysics. We use statements in ways that are good enough to get by with. We're _not pretending_ to believe things, but neither are we asserting all the layers of what it might mean for the statements we use to be literally true.
There's a pragmatism seeped so deep in language that we don't even recognize it. If you look up the etymologies of lots of root words, you'll see that a lot of 'base definitions' describe how an object relates to us, to people. Water means 'the thing that is wet'. Of course, we know that there are uncountable many ways to describe the properties of things, but in the grand scheme of things, language itself is object-oriented. That's how we perceive the world.
One of you best presentations. So, the deceitful priest, if asked directly by his parishioners if he is a fictionalist would, if answering truthfully, be at risk for being excommunicated. So should a fictionalist be advised to avoid these questions or hope they just don’t come up? It seems like a basically alienating stance.
For the moral disagreement with the fiction, I think a fictionalist could make the case that the benefits offered by religion just don't include moral prescriptivism. Once a secular ethic determines a moral insight, religious stories may be good demonstrations, but the role of religion is not to go the other way. The prescriptive elements of the religion are written off as, within the fiction, fallable humans grappling with the will of God. This isn't hand crafting a theology though, as moral insight comes from consensus with others. Many of the benefits of adhering to a philosophy made by others would still apply, for example the social demand to adhere to rituals you personally are bored by could cultivate discipline.
"Pretending to believe something cannot give us a reason to do anything" Religious believers don't "pretend to believe" in anything. What "pretending to have a belief in God" would look like would be telling somebody you're a Christian and really being an atheist, it would be praying as a joke to mock religion etc. A religious believer believing "God loves everybody and therefore all are deserving of love" is them believing "all are deserving of love". If somebody were to "pretend to believe" this, it would look like something different. "A religious belief is something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference" - Wittgenstein. Pretending in religion would be acting as though you had this passionate commitment but actually not having it. Pretending that Christianity is true would be making Christian utterances disingenuously. What making a religious utterance disingenuously is like, is what it's like when somebody says "I love you" or "I am sorry" disingenuously.
Your second paragraph made me think of Hegel and the idea of revealed religion. How imagistic thinking could warrant the notion of a mediator to relay a metaphysical or ethical statement, but how once we have grasped the concept, we have past that little use of the relayer. It's also why at some point - especially in routinary religions like Catholicism - you come at a plateauing zone where there's very little beyond the trope relations to concepts that have been tenfold analyzed by priests' homilies and catechism. Parables are decent the first few dozen times, but there comes a point the main concept becomes increasingly obfuscated via attachment of pre-supposed schemas. That being said, I wouldn't precisely call pretending disrespectful. Virtue ethics calls for imitating what we deem virtuous. To what extent we can consider pretending as a form of virtue modeling is a curious matter, and yet, as I mentioned, Catholicism already ingrains script-following from an early age, when we are yet unable to rationalize how watching a puppet show could somehow be honoring god. If one sees virtue in it, despite holding the religion as fiction, one could still be seen as honoring scripture by paying heed to its instruction and abiding to its rituals.
As a now atheist with a rather traumatic experience with Christianity growing up, I'm not sure I could even sympathize with a fictionalist account of most major religions. As you highlighted in the comments on Yahweh, the actual character of many deities and 'saints' are so highly questionable that I'm not sure we really even should seek to emulate them, truth of religious stories aside.
To me it's just a matter of which religion, and of how you construe it's narratives - bear in mind, if a narrative is fictional, we are free to change it. And I regularly enjoy religious fictionalism when the gods are those of Greek, Norse, Egyptian or - most importantly for me due to my own culture - Canaanite deities; not least because no part of the religion pretends that these deities are perfect and worth emulating
I'll even further add that the very cruel nature of Abrahamic characters, especially Yahweh, is why I find fictionalist Satanism to be so attractive - especially with how the Church of Satan have used it to exploit religious laws and push for religious freedom, defend those hurt by religion, and fight against Christian nationalism
@@adenjones1802 sure. Heaven still means outer space. I don't mind people pretending like when they die they respawn on another server, but they do need to acknowledge that they are pulling that belief out of nowhere and is not what the author's of their holy texts meant. What they meant was outer space.
Regarding the last objection, I do feel like there are certainly reasons one may not believe the truth of a religion, or indeed activitely affirm the falsehood, while still affirming that it's good to live as if it is true. If we found the biblical Paul's super secret diary that confirmed he fabricated all of the gospels wholecloth, then you could affirm the falsehood of Christianity whilst living as though no such discovery had been made, and in fact robust historical evidence conclusively affirmed the gospel story. It doesn't, but it's possible to live that way.
We could add here that its possible to gain spiritual benefits from the Christian tradition and at the same time doubt its historicity in many aspects. I don't need to believe that the world was striclty made in 6 days or that the rupture was historical fact or even that the gospels are exact biographies of Jesus. Yet I can still appreciate the Holy Scripture as an attempt to approach and relate to the divine and to a philosophical sense of God.
I know Kane B is just the CIA trying to distract me from Tiktok, but I maintain the fictionalist position that he's just a swell guy who wants me to learn.
seems like one obvious response a committed fictionalist could give to the morality objection if they wanted to go all in is that 1) I personally believe divorce is permissable and that acting as if it isn't has negative consequences 2) I accept that per the religion, divorce is not permissable 3) I either have to give up fictionalism, or my personal ethical beliefs 4) there are certain benefits to promoting fictionalism 5) the benefits of 4 outweigh the harms done in 1.
Perhaps one way to make the morality objection sharper is to note that one of the primary benefits of religion is that it's supposed to promote moral development. It would be odd to hold this view, while at the same time acknowledging that the religion leads us to the wrong moral conclusions. Of course, the fictionalist could cite further benefits of religion that might outweigh this.
Hey Bob, let's go to the church. "I'm going to pray for my mother; she's ill. I know God doesn't exist, but I'll pretend He does." "Why, Bob?" "Because even if God isn't real, the placebo effect is!"
I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don’t know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let’s say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists. (J. L. Borges, Argumentum Ornithologicum)
I'm interested in Van Fraasen's "stance" approach to philosophy of religion. I find it much more satisfying than a "religious factualist" or a "religious fictionalist" approach.
I wanted my kid to have fun with the Santa Claus story and rituals. But I never lied to him. There was absolutely no problem. We played Santa Claus. Sometimes I was Santa, sometimes he was.
The idea that meta-atheism resembles religious fictionalism is a little weird, given that 'meta-atheism' seems to be a term coined in 2009 (search 'gwern rey 2009 meta-atheism' for the paper) to describe a view that, while it's compatible with religious fictionalism, certainly isn't the same thing as religious fictionalism: "There exist no western-educated-to-a-moderate-or-higher-degree people who actually believe in God, only such people who believe that they should believe in God" (In other words, 'of the western-educated people who assert belief in God, they are all fictionalists'. The paper makes no fictionalist (or anti-fictionalist) arguments), intentionally so. The author's motivation appears to be 'As a professor of philosophy who has been obliged to teach students about the major arguments for god .. I taught them for years and, how is it that all these arguments are so weak??'
I know of meta-atheism from the Rey paper that the other commenter mentioned... I don't know what Pete's view on that is. But if that's what you have in mind, then yeah, that would probably be a kind of fictionalism, though hermeneutic rather than revolutionary. As I noted, Hume possibly held a view along these lines too. Though Rey's view, as far as I recall, is that people should stop being fictionalists. Most religious people don't actually believe in God, and they should stop pretending to because we'd be better off without religion.
@@KaneB Yeah, I think Rey is who came up with the notion. Mandik extended it to the philosophy of mind (meta-illusionism). Nobody really thinks they have qualia.
Abandoning religious practices often leads to schism due to the unifying nature of religion's primordial sentiment (reproductive system). Within the religious in-group, a comparative self-evaluation process may marginalise those who deviate from core beliefs, labelling those libertarian thinkers as skeptics and deviants. These skeptics, who question foundational beliefs like the Big Bang or the existence of God, may be perceived as threats to the group's values. For example, doubting the uncaused cause could be associated with communism or anti-capitalism, ideologies seen as detrimental to societal wealth and prosperity. This perception stems from the normative assumption that foundational beliefs are linked to external reality, thus questioning these beliefs is perceived as threatening the group's understanding of reality itself.
The English philosopher Philip Goff is a "religious fictionalist". I take it as a pragmatic position. If one acts as if x, y, z, are true, then good things result. (Or if one *pretends* that x, y, z are true....) I would argue that Goff takes the same pragmatic view on panpsychism too. That is, if individuals and society a whole become panpsychists, then various positive things will occur, regardless of the actual truth of panpsychist claims. (Goff has explicitly written and said as much, on many occasions.) Thus, Goff ties both religion and panpsychism to certain positive societal and political results. All that said, Kane B's video concentrates on more technical matters. Recently, certain writers have classified Richard Dawkins in a similar way. That is, as a "social Christian" who doesn't believe in the truths of Christianity. That said, many have claimed that Church of England religious leaders adopted these kinds of "fictionalist" views decades ago - perhaps, in some limited cases, even centuries ago.
The power of positive thinking. Mere faith, regardless of its basis, is self-reinforcing. That's why religion is so persistent. Dawkins seems to be almost a kind of anti-Nietzsche. And there's something to be said for that. Too many atheists fall into the trap of devaluing ideas from religious traditions, rather than understanding that they were woven into religious narratives for their timelessness.
See Philosophical Religion: From Plato to Spinoza. You will see there another option, which is far more viable and compelling. These Jewish, Christian , and Islamic philosophers realized that religion and scripture use symbolic language, myths, and allegories to point to deeper truths. They believe this while still believing in an unknowable divine reality.
How I see it in a lot of Christians is that yes on one hand on a conversation you can say they may engage in fictionalism, like God exists means that people have intrinsic value. But on the other hand they still engage in literalism as a part of liturgy, which is a sort of immersion in that reality. Catholics for example literally believe they eat the flesh of Jesus Christ in the ceremony. But the whole point is what that ritual does to you.
It's very difficult to nail down Peterson's views on this topic. Alex O'Connor did a video on him that makes a good case that he is charitably interpreted as a fictionalist, but I'm not sure that Peterson should be interpreted charitably here because I suspect that his obscurantism is intentional. That's not intended as an insult: there are traditions of mystical and apophatic theology from which we could make a case that obscurantism is an important aspect of religious experience, and I suspect that Peterson has been influenced by that.
@@KaneB I wonder if the subjects of religious fictionalism, and now, Jordan Peterson, tie into the old idea of "the God of the philosophers". I'm not saying that Peterson or C of E vicars are philosophers, but I would bet that their fictionalist attitudes - were they made known - would send shivers down the spines of "true believers". I suspect, then, that only philosophers and "intellectuals would ever be "religious fictionalists".
Premise 1: Authentic belief in a cultural practice requires genuine membership in the culture and acceptance of its underlying assumptions. Premise 2: Anthropologists studying a culture are not genuine members and do not share the culture's underlying assumptions. Conclusion: Anthropologists cannot authentically believe in the cultural practices they study, even if they participate in them.
@@uninspired3583 And the fictionalist would further the case for religion as a fiction by accounting for how sex drive, taboo and violence are fictions of world religions that are identical to the entertainment horror drama at the local theatre.
@philosophicalmixedmedia sex drive, taboo, and violence are red hearings. Your first premise addresses authentic belief, the fictionalist doesn't have this. Thus refuting the first premise, the argument doesn't address the fictionalist position.
@@uninspired3583 However ‘authenticity’ within a cohort as a determiner of beliefs (fictions qua frontal cortex) arguably (needs research) correlates to determinants group (religious) sex drive, taboo and violence structural functional dynamics.
The point of the ethics of the deity/deities you're worshipping tho is important Yahweh, as a fiction, encourages war, the state, cusheteropatriarchy, violence, vengeance, justice and the like Maybe it's best to just worship nature Like the pagan religions do Chaotic, no claim to any perfection Or to oppose the systems Yahweh represents head on And embrace the god of Anarchy With Satan and Satanism
Sounds pretty gay. Just worship Jesus and pretend the Old Testament is morally explainable through the teachings of Christ… wait, that’s just Christianity lol
There's a kind of "religious fictionalism" that regards religion as a symbolic expression of real esoteric truths, and another kind which sees it as a useful social engineering mechanism for the manipulation of the herd. The former is what I subscribe to.
How distinguishing between the pre-Babylonian captivity definitions of El (God) and Elohim (sons/beings of El) versus the post-captivity syncretized definitions could resolve contradictions and cast the Yahweh figure of Genesis 2-3 in a very different light from the transcendent Elohim portrayed in Genesis 1. Pre-Captivity Definitions: In this framework, the supreme creator deity is simply referred to as El - God. The Elohim are understood as a pantheon or "sons of El" - lesser divine beings subordinate to El. This aligns with ancient Canaanite and older Israelite religious conceptions. Under these definitions, the Genesis 1 account would refer to the transcendent El as the prime creator, with the Elohim (plural) potentially being celestial forces/angels enacting aspects of the creation. The Ruach Elohim (Spirit/Breath of the divine beings) hovering over the primordial waters connects to surviving traces of this worldview. Crucially, this allows one to separate the Elohim of Genesis 1 from the distinct Yahweh Elohim first appearing in Genesis 2 to form man from the dust. Based on references like Deuteronomy 32:8-9, the pre-captivity perspective viewed Yahweh as one of the sons of El (an Elohim) rather than conflating him with El itself. This de-syncretization casts Yahweh as a separate, lesser, more anthropomorphic deity associated with the ancient Israelites - perhaps retained from their Canaanite heritage. His behavior and commandments in Genesis 2-3 and elsewhere in the Torah would then represent the teachings of this tribal desert deity, not the supreme metaphysical creator El. The Garden Scenario Reframed From this vantage point, the events of Genesis 2-3 can be interpreted not as ordained by the most high El creator, but rather as humanity's initial tragic entrapment by the lesser devolved being Yahweh within his constructed realm of mortality, suffering, and cosmic privation. Yahweh's wrathful conduct, his placing of humans under a yoke of commandments, his expulsion from Eden's paradisiacal environment, and the subsequent violent legacy of his covenants and laws all derive from the subjugating delusions and stunted, anthropocentric conception of this finite Elohim - not the infinite plenitude of the supreme El. Contradictions Resolved Separating El from Yahweh along the pre-captivity definitional lines could resolve contradictions in several important ways: 1) It distinguishes the transcendent, metaphysically profound cosmic creator portrayed in Genesis 1 from the all-too-human tribal deity of the remaining Torah material. 2) It allows for a reframing of the Torah's teachings around blood sacrifice, ethnic conflicts, law codes, etc. as the cultural mythological traditions of ancient Israelite history rather than attributed to the most high El itself. 3) It creates space for the Christ figure of the New Testament to represent a re-emergence of the supreme El's sovereignty and universal spiritual path - overriding the outdated covenants, ethnic segregations, and violent subjugations prescribed by the lesser Yahweh consciousness. 4) Humanity's existential struggling, our proclivity towards violence/evil, and our fundamental state of cosmic imprisonment can be metaphysically associated with the fallout of our ancient reunion from Yahweh's corrupted influence rather than the designs of the supreme El consciousness. 5) Competing depictions of the divine across different books (wrathful/peaceful, loving/cruel, spiritual/legalistic) can be added to different nodes of the El vs. Yahweh consciousness schisms. While still requiring some nuanced interpretation, this delineation allows for a coherent reintegration of Old and New Testament perspectives under a broader metaphysical framework. It preserves the universal spiritual integrity of the highest Creator from the cultural mythological contexts surrounding the more finite tribal deity Yahweh. By embracing the pre-syncretized definitions and recognizing the conflation of El and Yahweh as a later imposition, one can reconnect with deep streams of ancient Hebrew theological diversity. This presents an intellectually robust path for understanding the unified trajectory of the biblical texts as exploring a single universetheological consciousness's reassertion over more contingent, anthropomorphized deviations and exiles.
Based on the connections you've outlined between the Canaanite mythology of the Baal Cycle, the figure of Yam/Yaw who later becomes associated with Yahweh, and the symbolism of sea beasts/dragons in the biblical Book of Revelation, I can certainly explore how one could construct an argument that these represent recurring manifestations of an ancient "Unholy Trinity" antagonistic to the supreme divine principles. The Baal Cycle as Prototype In the Ugaritic Baal cycle myths, the deity Yam (meaning "Sea") is portrayed as a primal, chaotic, serpentine force threatening to upend the fertile, ordered cosmos established by Baal and the other high gods. Yam's bestial aspects like the seven-headed serpent Lotan (Leviathan) and Tannin represent the untamed, destructive energies of the primordial waters resisting divine structure. This mythological motif echoes widespread ancient Near Eastern conceptions of great Sea Beasts/Dragons embodying the negative forces of entropy, disorder, and existential dissolution that the high creator gods must perpetually defeating in maintaining reality's integrity. The Babylonian Tiamat is another classic iteration of this archetype. Yam's jealous, tyrannical ambition to usurp rulership from the highergods, employing his monstrous Sea Beast avatars, could symbolize a disruption of cosmic harmony by a lower, chaotic did force challenging the natural, life-affirming order and hierarchy. His name change to Yaw/Yahweh potentially tracks this devolved figure's adoption into early Hebrew traditions. The Sea Peoples and Bronze Age Collapse Significantly, you note the intriguing potential connection between this Sea Beast mythology and the enigmatic Sea Peoples cited as a key factor precipitating the chaotic Bronze Age Collapse that upended many ancient Mediterranean civilizations around 1200 BCE. Their striking association with maritime invasion forces emerging from the chaotic primordial seas to shatter long-standing centers of order and sovereignty does vividly evoke the symbolic potencies of figures like Yam and his serpentine avatars representing primal disruptive forces overturningestablied harmony and hierarchy. The biblical Book of Joshua's accounts of the Israelites' violent subjugation of Canaanite city-states could plausibly mythologize this same historical convulsion. Revelation's Sea Beast So when the biblical Book of Revelation describes a saturated return of the ancient Sea Beast/Dragon archetype, replete with its seven heads, ten horns, and ability to make "war on the saints", we could theorize this as a symbolic reeruption or recapitulation of that same primal Yam/Yahweh current - the malefic, idolatrous, and anarchic spirit forever antagonistic to the highest order and harmony represented by the Lamb/Christ figure. Within Revelation's dramatic astrological/metaphysical chronology, the reemergence of the Sea Beast/Dragon from the chaotic subsistent depths could denote the final, eschatological phase where the ancient countervailing forces congregate in one ultimate push to overwhelm and dissolute God's perfected new creation - the New Jerusalem consciousness. The Unholy Trinity Persists Crucially, the Sea Beast's liaison with the subservient Beast from the Earth and the binding Satanic Dragon of Revelation 13 does present a sort of triune, demonic perversion or aping mockery of the Holy Trinity's unific creator principles. Where the Trinity represents the eternal soul, logos, and Divine spirit, this "Unholy Trinity" signifies the deceptive corporeal idolatries, abyss-born disruptions, and scattering/veiling influences that continually obstruct spiritual illumination. Across pivotal junctures, this triune Anti-Cosmosmic force symbolically persists in its primordial enmity towards the highest vibrational harmonies, wielding distorted socio-political reifications to dissipate souls further into materialistic entropy. Its repeated manifestations, from the Mesopotamian Sea Chaos Monsters to Yam's beastly avatars to the eschatological Book of Revelation, betrays its origination in archetypal human experiential realities transcending cultures and eras. Perennial Adversary of Transcendent Order So in summation, I believe one could quite coherently posit the Sea Beast composite of Revelation as yet another symbolic instantiation of those same primordial, adversarial counter-forces to divine cosmic order that run throughout ancient mythology and scripture under disparate names - whether Mesopotamian Tiamat, Canaanite Yam/Lotan, or Hebraic yahwist Leviathan. Its resurgence could represent the ultimate materialization of those same deluded spiritual impulses springing from fragmented human idolatries and entropic identifications that the highest religious wisdom has forever aimed to redeem and re-integrate into holistic sublimity. The Sea Beast/Unholy Trinity thereby emblematizes the culminating stage of the human existential struggle against the veiled alienation effects of our psychic subjugation to de-evolutionary forgetfulness. Under this archetypal lens, the sweeping eschatological conflict depicted in Revelation's climax emerges as the eternal spiritual battle writ cosmic - the final confrontation between fractured mortal travail and the infinite liberating consciousness heralded by the redeeming God/Christ/Logos figure. Regardless of how one ultimately evaluates this hermeneutic model's plausibility, it undoubtedly presents a rich symbolic tapestry for meditating upon the deepest quandaries of human consciousness, cosmic origins, and our shared metaphysical/existential yearnings across cultures and ages.
religious fictionalism seems a lot more reasonable to me It would easier to take a person seriously if they said: "look at this fairytale, maybe you can learn something from it" instead of: "this fairytale is the absolute truth and if you dont believe me you'll end up suffering for eternity in the afterlife"
It's a bad name, you're claiming fiction as a baseline. Get pride out of the way, few are willing to suppose even as an experiment that spirits might exist.
It seems unrelated, but did you ever try to read Heidegger? I've read the first few pages of Being and Time, and it's beautiful. The problem is that it seems too connected to the German language, and I don't speak German.
@@KaneB I said it was beautiful, not that it made sense. Also, the cover for the Romanian translation looks cool and the book was expensive, so I didn't throw it through the window. It is also quite heavy, and it may harm someone.
