Rob Osborn, did you ever read the article somewhere on the bloggernacle about the Jewish legend that Enoch was a shoemaker whose intense, religious focus on doing his very best at his profession was what cleansed him to walk with God? It was talking about there being no secular life in Zion. I’d find it for you but all I’m turning up are the search terms from the last time I tried to find it again.

I obviously have no problems seeing religion as a set of intersecting tensions. Coming to terms with this, is I think, a key development in one’s maturity with any type of belief.

But I don’t think I can agree with the statement that religion is exclusively about meaning. It is also about the dynamics necessary for group coherence, about priming phenomenological signals, about staged structural responses to heuristically keyed potentials, about ways to explore shadows, etc. Getting these ends out of the structure is neither linear nor formulaic. There is too much feeback and feedforward between group, individual, structures and their various signals. Often times the benefits associated herein can’t occur without some type of a-factuality or other seemingly counter-productive errors.

This gets to Dave’s point about the book. Once you make that move away from only considering formal religion then you can see the same 5 principles at work more broadly. Instead of being formal problems they are more tensions where one can get out of balance. So for ‘literalism’ the question is much more the problem of analyzing interpretation in terms of history versus interpretation in a kind of socially given way. However the danger in going too far down the historic interpretation is you accrue all sorts of odd trappings and have the danger of abstracting or transforming the topic in question into something new. This happens in formal religion when Zeus gets abstracted and transformed into the Platonic One or the entire Universe for the Stoics. In contemporary thought you have something similar with Fowler’s stages of faith. Within a more secular mindset you see oddities with interpretation of quantum mechanics or the kinds of relativism one sees in Foucalt inspired college activists.

So I agree with Dave’s point with the book. I just think it ends up being a tad more complicated. And of course the very move from formal religion historically situated or give to this more abstract kind of evolutionary religious cognition participates in just that sort of danger. (Am I transforming religion too far)

In this sense, religious-like insight, introspection, and ways of knowing may in fact be better at predicting nuclear war than hyper-rational macro-economic-like models.

“It gets so blurry I’m not sure how one makes the divisions”

Not sure what you mean here. Snowden’s Cynefin framework is a pretty good place to start.

I confess I’m a bit skeptical thinking of places of dispute like say nuclear war, global warming or the like. Admittedly in such places one has to distinguish between science and a certain political community technically separate from the science. It gets so blurry I’m not sure how one makes the divisions.

Knowing how to situate natural tendencies and group-dynamic-behavioural-wells offers tremendous personal and group level insights. It does however, lead directly to factual vs practical reality questions. The good news is that it does so with fewer baggage around the times when religion (practical reality) is supra-positioned above science (factual reality).

For instance, Stuart Kauffman’s take on this is that religion and intuition are generally more useful for forward prediction than hyper-rationalized science. Science is better in a Bayesian way (using past histories for pattern prediction). Religious like intuition is better at anticipating black swan events. Thus science excels in areas that are complicated while religious-like thinking comes into its own in areas of complexity.

Now you might say that merely because they’re Mormon any criticism they make of Mormonism is self-criticism. I’m not sure I can agree with that. For one it seems to “personify” the Mormon community in a way I’m not sure works. It’s also not that somehow GAs are somehow ‘more’ than other Mormons. Quite the contrary. It’s that they typically don’t hold the views they are criticizing. Someone criticizing a view they haven’t really held just can’t be called self-criticism as I see it.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have a copy of “The Great Partnership” on my shelf, but I haven’t read it yet. I will now. I can, however, recommend another of his books, “Not in God’s Name,” which addresses the topic of religious violence. It is one of the most balanced and objective assessments of this sensitive issue I have come across.