just got an accusation on my scienceblog from an atheist that my definition of religion is pretty “post-modern.” since i believe that religion is *purely* a construction of human cognition, i’ll take that. some religious people believe that a particular religion is bounded by inferences generated by axioms 1…n. and some non-religious people also accept that. i don’t; i think religion is whatever a person says it is. IOW, the post-modern temptation is instrumentally a good one. that being said, the problem with post-modernism when it comes to phenomena is that it pretends as if that nature (or models thereof) is by necessity wholly platonic and deterministic. though i reject the idea that all people of religion X must be bounded by a particular set of beliefs/actions, etc., i accept that one may assert with validity that most people of religion X are bounded by a particular set of beliefs/actions, etc.
as a practical matter of public policy we have to reject extreme subjectivism and simply accept central tendencies as the “true” religions. but on a deep ontological level i don’t really think that religious interpretations we treat as “true” are actually trurer than those we must treat as not true; it’s a pragmatic, not principled.
