Download The Philosophy of Religion: Philosophy Shorts, Volume 27 AudioBook Free
A number tries to provide a logical basis for religious sentiment are obviously mentioned and carefully critiqued, most of them being proven to fail. At the same time, it is argued that the legitimacy of religious sentiment is by no means undermined by such failings, since any prospect whose legitimacy depends upon the results of logical or empirical inquiry is designed for that very reason a non-religious prospect. And the explanation for this is not that a religious prospect is a stubbornly irrational one. It really is that the false historical and cosmological doctrines that religions require their fans to accept are mere foils. In believing, for insufficient a better expression, that Christ walked on water, you are receiving Christ's teachings; you are not actually receiving the apparent falsehood that some man walked on normal water. Unless one's approval of the teachings took the form of quasi-acceptance of apparent fictions, one's approval of them would be as delicate so when motivationally inert as any other reason-based opinion. By the same token, because the falsehood in question is invariably of any patently infantile kind, one's approval of it signifies an existential determination on one's part to a certain life-style. These apparent truths are lost on philosophers of religion, given their tendency to consider all statements practically and their consequent failing to give credited to weight to unstated contextual information. In general, so the present work demonstrates, philosophers who have examined religion have succeeded only learning projections of their own brittle rationalism, which, it seems, merely cloaks an root desire to come back to the very pieties these same philosophers claim to spurn. This isn't to state that religious opinion is not to be analyzed, but instead that it comes within the bailiwick not of the logician, but of the psychoanalyst.
