Believers are right when they say that to understand a religion properly you need to get under its skin. But to understand it fully, you cannot stay there: you have to take a more objective view, too.
Interpretation
Understanding a religion requires both immersion and a detached perspective.
Julian Baggini emphasizes the importance of fully understanding a religion by not only immersing oneself in its beliefs and practices but also by adopting an objective viewpoint. This dual approach allows for a deeper appreciation of the complexities and nuances of religious systems, suggesting that a comprehensive understanding requires a balance between subjective experience and critical analysis.
In practice
In a discussion about religious tolerance, one might say, 'As Julian Baggini noted, understanding a religion requires both immersion and an objective view.'
The modern believer is not suspicious enough, which is perhaps why when they try to construct arguments in their defence, the convictions are left doing all the work and reason, debilitated by neglect, weakly fails to prop them up.
When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it.
The supramental transformation, the supramental evolution must carry with it a lifting of mind, life and body out of themselves into a greater way of being in which yet their own ways and powers would be, not suppressed or abolished, but perfected and fulfilled by the self-exceeding.
Philosophy consists very largely of one philosopher arguing that all others are jackasses. He usually proves it, and I should add that he also usually proves that he is one himself.
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.
Kindness’ covers all of my political beliefs.
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