Religion without eternal life

[PairTheBoard]

Thanks Schmitty. After reading your reply I also read a little about him in Wikipedia. His view of intuition and "feeling" (with his technical definition of the word), sounds very similiar to what I've been talking about here as subjective experience. I was suprised to find out there is a whole theory on "Interpretation" called hermeneutics which his thought evidently had a significant impact on. Once again, his ideas in this area seem to agree with ones I've expressed here. I see that my common sense approach to reading the Bible, for example, is just the standard one described as the Hermeneutic Circle. It's the same general method for interpreting all sorts of things.

Here's a quote of Schleiermacher's on Religion from Wikipedia:


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"Religion is the outcome neither of the fear of death, nor of the fear of God. It answers a deep need in man. It is neither a metaphysic, nor a morality, but above all and essentially an intuition and a feeling. ... Dogmas are not, properly speaking, part of religion: rather it is that they are derived from it. Religion is the miracle of direct relationship with the infinite; and dogmas are the reflection of this miracle. Similarly belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion; one can conceive of a religion without God, and it would be pure contemplation of the universe; the desire for personal immortality seems rather to show a lack of religion, since religion assumes a desire to lose oneself in the infinite, rather than to preserve one's own finite self."


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I imagine there are those here who will say, "Does Not Compute" and continue on with their regular routine.

PairTheBoard