I appreciate the effort to sort out “improper beliefs”. As a philosopher with a background in distinguishing surface-level propositions from speech acts with goals that may be masked by those propositions as such, I am inclined simply to say that “improper beliefs” are NOT beliefs. I prefer reserving “belief” for the anticipatory dispositional beliefs that you call “proper”.
This is so far just a semantic difference, but the real difference comes out when you say that people have to “convince themselves they are passionate”. From my perspective, no such “convincing” is necessary when a person moves from literal to nonliteral interpretations of mythic language, because the esoteric perspective can be as exciting and full of significance as the exoteric. People can be passionate about the real, positive benefits of religious practices: psychological well-being, social connectedness, aesthetic sensibility, self-respect, etc. Discovering these benefits as the real meaning of myths can be as eye-opening as the adoption of a counterfactual, mythic perspective.
But most people clearly DON’T treat these things as meaningless speech acts.
How do I know this? Because if you say something like “Right, because that’s just a meaningless speech act” in response to some absurdity of religion like “virgin birth” or “transsubstantiation”, people will get VERY ANGRY at you. They will not respond as though they are playing a game of words, they will respond as though you have accused them of lying. And if improper beliefs are precisely non-beliefs trying to make themselves look like beliefs, then you HAVE just accused them of lying.
The only way this comment makes sense to me is if I assume that you believe that (for example) humans reliably fail to become angry when their tribal attire is challenged, unless that tribal attire also happens to be a meaningful belief.
Do you in fact believe that?
If so, can you expand on your reasons for believing that? It seems implausible to me, and inconsistent with my observations of human behavior.
I appreciate the effort to sort out “improper beliefs”. As a philosopher with a background in distinguishing surface-level propositions from speech acts with goals that may be masked by those propositions as such, I am inclined simply to say that “improper beliefs” are NOT beliefs. I prefer reserving “belief” for the anticipatory dispositional beliefs that you call “proper”.
This is so far just a semantic difference, but the real difference comes out when you say that people have to “convince themselves they are passionate”. From my perspective, no such “convincing” is necessary when a person moves from literal to nonliteral interpretations of mythic language, because the esoteric perspective can be as exciting and full of significance as the exoteric. People can be passionate about the real, positive benefits of religious practices: psychological well-being, social connectedness, aesthetic sensibility, self-respect, etc. Discovering these benefits as the real meaning of myths can be as eye-opening as the adoption of a counterfactual, mythic perspective.
But most people clearly DON’T treat these things as meaningless speech acts.
How do I know this? Because if you say something like “Right, because that’s just a meaningless speech act” in response to some absurdity of religion like “virgin birth” or “transsubstantiation”, people will get VERY ANGRY at you. They will not respond as though they are playing a game of words, they will respond as though you have accused them of lying. And if improper beliefs are precisely non-beliefs trying to make themselves look like beliefs, then you HAVE just accused them of lying.
The only way this comment makes sense to me is if I assume that you believe that (for example) humans reliably fail to become angry when their tribal attire is challenged, unless that tribal attire also happens to be a meaningful belief.
Do you in fact believe that?
If so, can you expand on your reasons for believing that? It seems implausible to me, and inconsistent with my observations of human behavior.
The only way this comment makes sense to me is if it was written without reference to its grandparent.