Nov 10, 2021
Welcome back to another episode of The Liberal Soul. This episode is a hashing out of something I have been thinking about for a while, as well as a concept alluded to in episode 4 of this podcast with Cole Kander. It is that I have always considered Religion to be much too broad of a term; thus allowing for confusing disagreement and talking past one another when debating its merits. As such, I have broken the concept of religion (specifically Christianity for this episode) into four separate categories in order to specify what is or isn't useful about them. Namely they are: Empirical claims about the world, Metaphysical claims about the world, the Social Ethic that comes with religion, and the Psychology of the stories.
My argument is that basically the first two are incorrect, completed, non sensical or damaging aspects of what we call religion and should be more or less discarded. But also that the latter two contain much wisdom, compassion and insight and deserve to be incorporated into modern life more tightly.
Either way, religion is not a useful term all on its own, and this is my first stab at asking what we are talking about at any given point under the rubric of "religion". Below are the time stamps for each of the four concepts. Enjoy!
Empiricism - 14:25
Metaphysics - 25:17
Social Ethics - 35:30
Psychology - 46:15