3 ms·

Aren't you describing philosophy instead of religion, in the sense that philosophy is thinking about it, while religion is extracting rules/guidelines and/or do

• jerf 14y ago
  Philosophy and religion are really easy to draw a bright line between when viewing them from 30,000 feet. It's a lot harder to draw a bright line on the ground. Sure, there's some things that are pretty clearly one or the other, but there's a lot of really fuzzy stuff in the middle that's harder to characterize, especially down in the area of the axioms you take. In this case by religion I mean the sort of things commonly associated with religion, minus the "clearly" religious stuff. For instance, consider utilitarianism. It's a "life-guiding philosophy", which is already treading into religious waters, but the real killer is, what utility metric do you use? Many people who claim to be one or another variety of utilitarianist often try to use some sort of global metric that accounts for not just their own subjective utility, but that of others. But... why? Why not just act based on your own utility? (Including an enlightened utility metric in which one understands that harming others is generally not the right answer due to retaliation or general degradation of the local environment, so not just stereotypical selfishness.) It's awfully easy to call that a sort of non-god/non-spirit religious decision, because there's no objective rational basis for that metric. (And there's not necessarily an objective rational basis for choosing any particular metric when it comes down to it.)