practice and belief

by havoc

This NYTimes blog post scrolled past the other day, a discussion of an article by John Gray. John Gray has this to say:

The idea that religions are essentially creeds, lists of propositions that you have to accept, doesn’t come from religion. It’s an inheritance from Greek philosophy, which shaped much of Western Christianity and led to practitioners trying to defend their way of life as an expression of what they believe.

The most common threads of religion, science, and philosophy I learned about in school shared this frame; their primary focus was accurate descriptions of outside reality. Which is fine and useful, but perhaps not everything. In some very tiresome debates (atheism vs. religion, “Truth” vs. “relativism strawman”), both sides share the assumption that what matters most is finding a set of words that best describe the world.

There is at least one alternative, which is to also ask “what should we practice?” not only “what should we believe?”

If you’re interested in this topic, I’ve stumbled on several traditions that have something to say about it so I thought I’d make a list:

  1. Pragmatist philosophy, for example this book is a collection of readings I enjoyed, or see Pragmatism on Wikipedia.
  2. Unitarian Universalism, which borrows much of the format and practice of a Protestant church but leaves the beliefs up to the individual. I’ve often heard people say that their belief is what matters but they don’t like organized religion; UU is the reverse of that. (Not that UU is against having beliefs, it just doesn’t define its membership as the set of people who agree on X, Y, and Z. It is a community of shared practice rather than shared belief.)
  3. Behavioral economics and psychology. For example, they have piled on the evidence that one’s beliefs might flow from one’s actions (not the other way around), and in general made clear that knowing facts does not translate straightforwardly into behavior.
  4. Buddhism, not something I know a lot about, but as explained by Thich Nhat Hanh for example in The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching. Themes include the limitations of language as a way to describe reality, and what modern bloggers might call “mind hacks” (practical ways to convince the human body and mind to work better).
My Twitter account is @havocp.
Interested in becoming a better software developer? Sign up for my email list and I'll let you know when I write something new.