> if you accept that not all religions can be true I think, actually, that once you accept that no one religion contains Ultimate Truth, it is much easier to s

> if you accept that not all religions can be true I think, actually, that once you accept that no one religion contains Ultimate Truth, it is much easier to see that every religion is a facet of something true and powerful. Dogma is what insists that only one religion, only one way of doing things, can be the correct way; dogma is always false. But beneath the dogma lies fascinating insights. Personally, I find that the simplest religion, and therefore the "truest", is Taoism. The Tao Te Ching is goddamn gold: short, succinct, and brilliant. Buddhism is similarly philosophically inclined; Hinduism is fantastic, and quite explicit in telling you that its gods are metaphors for the world, characters that turn insights about life into stories. Christianity's God-as-man metaphor is a fascinating one that can lead to some very interesting thoughts about our relationship to everything around us. So on and so forth. Those long scholastic traditions are part of why people who don't utterly hate religion argue that anti-theists are missing something important in their insistence that religion be razed to the ground. For all the horrors of dogma, and those horrors are many, the religious tradition has collected millennia of collected human experience and wisdom – it's a treasure trove for anybody seeking to discover those parts of themselves. Let's get rid of the dogma and blind faith, but acknowledge that religion has been a monumental accomplishment for the species that should be respected for what it's done for our race. > So, what method would you propose for determining which academic fields are worthwhile, in their current state? The less dogma, the better. Luckily for us philophiles, philosophy is more obsessed with ending dogma than just about anything, so I guess we'll have to keep it around forever!