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A2 Religious Studies: Implications. Some Notes for Westphal To understand this article, it is important that you remember the difference between God and religion and between revelation and reason. Georg Hegel. Hegel was an idealist: he believed that non-physical things have a higher, purer existence than physical things. This distinguishes him from materialists or empiricists like David Hume. Hegel believed that a finite thing can only become free when it has become infinite, because finite things are determined by their boundaries. It is religion that helps us to achieve this, but that it needed reform. Hegel was concerned that ‘deism’, which is the belief in a God that is beyond human experience and that cannot be known, was taking over and that humans were being denied the opportunity to think about, let alone experience God or the transcendent: deism is the movement Hegel deplored. Hegel believed, on the contrary, that humanity was evolving to a position of ‘Absolut Geist’ or absolute spirit. A humanity that exists in absolut geist, is one which is based upon reason, has complete freedom and is not a slave to the passions. Humans who are free are happy and moral and they can see the world as it is objectively, not subjectively. Hegel believed that religion is basically true, but that it presents the world through images, symbols and metaphors: as much as the individual person can handle. Philosophy on the other hand, using reason, deals with pure thought, pure concept (which he called Begriff). For Hegel, absolute geist, Begriff, reason, God, all can be known by human beings. He believed that it is wrong to argue that God is beyond our understanding. Immanuel Kant. ‘Augustinian’: the idea (in this context) that all human beings are fallen and sinful and rely upon the grace and help of God to turn away from evil. ‘Pelagian’: after the British monk Pelagius, who argued against Augustine that humans can live a sinless life by exercising their will. Kant believed that true religion should be governed by reason alone. For him, religion was not about trying to please God, or performing rituals; it was about living a life according to the moral law that we each discover using reason. The moral life should be the sole object of religion. Reason is universal. Westphal. A2 Religious Studies: Implications. ‘Apart from a good life-conduct, anything which the human being supposes he can do to become well-pleasing to God is mere religious delusion and counterfeit service of God.’ Kant believed that God was not needed for us to obey the moral law: only reason. Morality does not depend on religion, but morality does lead to religion because in order for us to be moral, we postulate immortality and the existence of God. Kant, like Hegel, distinguished between the pure world of reason (the noumenal world) and the world of the senses (the phenomenal world). He believed that humans do bad things and live immoral lives because they are slaves to the passions and the senses which are part of the noumenal world. The human who lives a good moral life is exercising their freedom which comes from using reason. Reason involves thinking in the abstract. Truly religious thought should, for Kant, be governed by reason. For Kant, ‘God’ existed in the noumenal realm. For Kant, the highest form of life is the moral life lived according to reason. Kant believed that for humans to live good lives, they had to discover the moral law using reason and live according to it. He understood that humans did not always do this and wrote about ‘radical evil’ which is where a human freely chooses to act according to evil, rather than good. Kant argued that a sinful human needs moral regeneration: they need to turn their will towards the good. Kant believed that there are examples of morally perfect prototypes: like Jesus. He was not concerned with whether or not he actually existed, but held him up as a universal example of a morally pure human being. Kant’s vision of a religion, was of a community devoted to living morally perfect lives. He wrote about the church invisible and the church visible. The church invisible is the ideal, where human beings exist together under direct, divine rule and live the moral life. The visible church is the actual group of moral humans trying to live according to the moral law as best they can. For Kant, such a ‘church’ would be free of superstition and internal division: in other words, all meaningless ritual (‘fetishfaith’ he called it) and differences between religions would disappear. Kant did accept that there is a human need for things that the senses can grasp hold of and that the visible church may need rituals and scriptures, but they must exist to help people to discover the moral law. In this sense he is like Schleiermacher (in affirming a religious need) and Jung (in arguing that religion helps us to make meaning of life). Kant strongly objected to ‘priestcraft’ where the clergy keep aspects of the religion mysterious and make rituals more important than the moral law. Friedrich Schleiermacher: you can think too much… Schleiermacher was writing at the end of the 18th Century (1700s). He was concerned that the Enlightenment had led to the belief that morality, aesthetic awareness (appreciation of art etc) and reason alone were enough as a basis for human life and that religion was superfluous Westphal. A2 Religious Studies: Implications. (not needed). He argued against this that religion was a profound and essential part of being human: "Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self." Schleiermacher believed that the individual, the ego, was a reflection of the universe as a whole and humanity as a whole (a bit like Jung’s idea of the archetype). For Schleiermacher, the universe is not to be understood through cognition, thought or reason, but through feeling and self-consciousness. If we are self-conscious, we can achieve supreme unity of thought, or what some call enlightenment. For Schleiermacher then, religion comes from immediate experience, it is not mediated through the intellect or the mind. This is very similar to what H.P. Owen argues, who is mentioned in the Donovan article. This kind of ‘direct awareness’ is not popular with philosophers, particularly those like A.J. Ayer. Baruch de Spinoza. Spinoza was a rationalist and believed that knowledge of the universe could be achieved by exercising reason alone. He believed that the universe was logically arranged in a rational order, but it cannot be comprehended fully by the senses, which are imperfect. Spinoza believed that there is only one true substance in the universe, and that substance is God. For Spinoza, everything in existence is somehow in God. God did not create nature; God is nature. Thought and space are simply two of God’s infinite attributes, the two attributes we have access to. God is impersonal for Spinoza; like a geometric formula. There is no personal God for Spinoza. Spinoza influenced Schleiermacher heavily because his God present in everything was available to be experienced directly. Spinoza was a determinist: he believed that all human actions were determined by prior causes. It is not possible for humans to be fully free: only God can be fully free. Spinoza did believe that we can overcome our passions however, but this comes from a deep understanding of what causes us to act. In a way he was describing a form of psychotherapy: to be free, we have to fully understand how our mind works and how our passions motivate us. Westphal.