{"id":680,"date":"2004-04-15T23:19:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-16T05:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=680"},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"-0001-11-30T06:00:00","slug":"belief-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/04\/belief-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Belief and Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

I said<\/a>, “I don’t think that belief is central to LDS religion: it is important only as part of the practice of religion, not in itself,” and Susan asked<\/a>, “Are you saying that LDS religion helps you to practice religion better and live better than you would otherwise?” Good question.
\n
\nSorry to have made such an off-the-cuff but non-obvious remark. Many think of a religion as a set of beliefs. I don’t. In fact, if I use LDS terminology, I think that assuming belief to be the core of religion is one of the effects of the apostasy. In broad, but more philosophical terms, it is a Hellenistic rather than Semitic idea. I think of religion as a set of practices (both formal and informal) that reveal the world in a particular way. Beliefs are part of those practices and are important as such, but they are neither important nor meaningful in themselves, separated from the practices in which they occur. So, the belief that Joseph Smith was a prophet is important to LDS because holding that belief is a practice, among others, that makes sense of the world in a particular way. <\/p>\n

One result of this is that I’m not very interested in a philosophy of religion that tries to understand religious beliefs in themselves, separated from the practical contexts in which they occur. I have described that understanding of the relation of religion to belief as “atheological.” Obviously, I think that LDS belief is fundamentally atheological.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I said, “I don’t think that belief is central to LDS religion: it is important only as part of the practice of religion, not in itself,” and Susan asked, “Are you saying that LDS religion helps you to practice religion better and live better than you would otherwise?” Good question.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy-and-theology"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}