The two objections in the post basically miss what I’d consider the “core problem” with religion. It’s not that religion explicitly promotes false things, so much as that religion centers around symbols which are basically-decoupled from semantic truth.
This does not necessarily imply an “aversion” to religion, but it does mean that one needs to go into basically-every religious context with the assumption that the literal semantic content of any words/symbols are basically decoupled from truth. There may be useful things to find, true things to find, but they won’t just be the literal semantic content. (To be clear, this does not mean the literal semantic content is always false—that would be just as useful as content which is always true! It means that the truth-value of the literal semantic content is random noise.) The core question to ask is basically-never “is this religious claim true?”, but rather “what does it tell us about the world, that this religion promotes this claim?”.
(Note that all of the examples in the OP are basically compatible with this—none of them are about the truth of the literal semantic content of an explicit religious claim.)
(Also note that the same problem applies to a lot of nominally-scientific research and basically-all politics; it’s not exclusive to religion.)
(One specific frame which makes this explicit, mainly applicable to Western religion: Western religion is almost-exclusively a simulacrum level 3-or-4 phenomenon.)
I thought scientific content is supposed to be very correct on a technical level. Is there some field were correctness on an “essential” or “metaphorical” level makes it okay to have technical errors? What you are probably meaning that nominally-scientific research is no research at all but opinion pieces.
The two objections in the post basically miss what I’d consider the “core problem” with religion. It’s not that religion explicitly promotes false things, so much as that religion centers around symbols which are basically-decoupled from semantic truth.
This does not necessarily imply an “aversion” to religion, but it does mean that one needs to go into basically-every religious context with the assumption that the literal semantic content of any words/symbols are basically decoupled from truth. There may be useful things to find, true things to find, but they won’t just be the literal semantic content. (To be clear, this does not mean the literal semantic content is always false—that would be just as useful as content which is always true! It means that the truth-value of the literal semantic content is random noise.) The core question to ask is basically-never “is this religious claim true?”, but rather “what does it tell us about the world, that this religion promotes this claim?”.
(Note that all of the examples in the OP are basically compatible with this—none of them are about the truth of the literal semantic content of an explicit religious claim.)
(Also note that the same problem applies to a lot of nominally-scientific research and basically-all politics; it’s not exclusive to religion.)
(One specific frame which makes this explicit, mainly applicable to Western religion: Western religion is almost-exclusively a simulacrum level 3-or-4 phenomenon.)
I thought scientific content is supposed to be very correct on a technical level. Is there some field were correctness on an “essential” or “metaphorical” level makes it okay to have technical errors? What you are probably meaning that nominally-scientific research is no research at all but opinion pieces.