In this bias I am going to lay out my general approach to religion and parareligion (or “secular religion”), mostly as a base to build off of in future articles. I want to establish a general framework that can be used to analyze religions and similar philosophical structures in a comparative way. I’ve always been frustrated by the apprehension with which people approach comparing so-called eastern and western religions, or organized and folk religions, or modern and ancient religions, and so on. We continue to make these comparisons because we see there are certain similarities and I think we’re right to do so. My goal here is, I suppose, to try and make sense of the things that link differing thought systems together in a category.
The basic thing to understand when analyzing religion is that it is an attempt to speak to a person’s entire worldview, or what I will call their observance. The difference between a religious system and a non-religious ideological system is that the latter addresses three tiers of observance while a religious system addresses all four. We’ll leave the question of why a religion would want to shape a person’s observance out for now, except to say that despite the negative images that are ready to jump out at many modern readers, this sort of shaping can be intended for helpful reasons as well as harmful ones.
The term “religious system” should be understood to include spiritual-theological religions as well as parareligions or conglomerate systems of belief, as long as they address the four tiers of observance. That said, I will use “religion” and “religious system” interchangeably throughout. It’s because of this that I can call Confucianism (even without the Daoist, Buddhist, and other allied beliefs) a religion while I will not say this about Western secularism. I will expand more on this later.
The four tiers of observance or worldview are general abstract levels of knowing and understanding the world. Through these lenses, a person figures out how they should live and act in the world. These tiers are (1) the cosmos, (2) the world, (3) the society, and (4) the self. These are addressed by the four discourses: (1) cosmology, (2) epistemology, (3) axiology (or teleology), and (4) deontology. In this context, each has a specific definition that I’ll go over now.
- Cosmology is the investigation of all things that cannot be seen or directly known but which have an undoubtable impact upon one’s life. In terms of observance, this does not encompass the literal explanation of the planets, but rather it is examining the ultimate origin of things, deities, the supernatural, the fate of the dead, and so on. The core questions which cosmology discusses are “Why and how did the universe come to be?” and “In the face of death, what is the purpose of life?”
- Epistemology is the rubric by which a person understands the world as-it-is. This world is, of course, created through the cosmogenesis, but it can be directly interacted with in what most people know as waking life. Through epistemology, new experiences are made understandable, and different epistemologies can therefore produce different understandings of the same experience. The core questions of epistemology are “What is the world like?” and “How do I get what I need to live?”
- Axiology (or teleology) is how one believes that people fit into the world. It is about discovering axioms or final goals of society: what ideas society should revolve around and what things it should value. The core questions of axiology are “What is a person?” and “What is a good person?”
- Deontology is what one believes about how specific people should act, primarily themselves. While axiology is concerned with society, deontology is concerned with the self, and therefore its interpretations of the conclusions of axiology aren’t direct copyings. The core question of deontology is “How should I live my life?”
As should be clear, each of these discourses implies the next one. If God the Great and Powerful has created the universe and created heaven and hell, that implies that following an epistemology based around sin is the best way to understand the world. If sin is a major part of an epistemology, then avoiding sin becomes a social virtue of one’s axiology, and then specific behaviors to avoid sin in known and unknown circumstances become part of deontology. Conversely, should any discourse come into crisis — if someone encounters a sin their deontology is not equipped to avoid, for instance — it refers to the discourse above it to compile an answer.
Western secularism, as an ideological tendency, is not a religious system because it rejects cosmology and rebuffs deontology. Secularism is agnostic, which is to say that it makes no claim about the core questions of cosmology (in this analysis, Western atheism is also agnostic, though these two terms are usually distinguished in America). This is because the technique of empiricism, when adopted as a worldview, did not rely on the cosmos: it relied only on the world. Previously, in order to get answers from nature one needed to place those answers within an existing cosmological system. With the empiricist epistemology, no cosmological system was necessary to get useful answers. Despite this, many if not most people needed something more than empiricism to truly make sense of their lives. By rejecting cosmology, empiricism could never give people answers to cosmology’s questions, and therefore it does not hold together as a complete philosophical system.
A “complete philosophical system” and a “complete religious system” are the same thing. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the general act of thinking about any topic; it includes all of the listed discourses, any combination of them, and their subdivisions. An ideology is a philosophical system which combines the discourses of epistemology, axiology, and deontology, while ideology (definite) is the generic term for the exploration of ideologies. A religious system, as said earlier, combines all four discourses, and for that reason a complete religious system is also a complete philosophical system.
Having said this, it is possible that a non-religious ideology could try to answer the questions of cosmology. What is the thing that separates religious thought from non-religious thought? Most people would say it’s the supernatural. I agree in a way, but I think we can state it more generically. A religious worldview is one which gives answers to the core questions of cosmology. While I did say that a non-religious ideology could try to answer the cosmological questions, only a worldview which takes its answers from outside nature can actually give a final answer to those questions. Empiricism may find out how the universe came to be but it will never answer why and it will never give purpose to life. Those answers cannot come from nature. Therefore, any answer to those questions will be supernatural by definition.
Most if not all religious systems today are disputed or, in a more religiously-allied manner, compromised. The presence of empiricism and the contradictions it poses to constructed cosmologies strongly affects how cogent religions can be. In most cases, a wholesale reordering of doctrine would be more disruptive than making concessions to empiricism, so concessions have generally been the policy of religions, with a coinciding weakening of their authority. In the past, both Christianity and Islam operated as total complete religious systems in many places, and other religions achieved this as well. The Roman religion was similarly a total complete religious system, or a major aspect of different such systems.
It is getting late for me here so I will end for now. I hope what I’ve gotten through makes sense and it would be great if it’s of any use to you. I do intend to return to this subject later, which is the purpose of this bias. I had other ideas for this particular piece but next time.
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