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Dear Socrates
Dear Socrates
Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.
Dear Socrates,
I have been engaging a friend of mine in a conversation on the topic of religion. We were wondering if you could answer a question for us: What establishes the veracity of a religion?
Thank you,
Jeremy Vass
Dear Jeremy,
Before I can address your question, it would help to know what religion is. Shall we take anything that anybody calls a religion to be an instance of it? I don’t know if we would make much progress that way: There seem to be no limits on what people have labeled “religion.”
Has it some essence, then? As I look about the world today, I see a great divide between East and West regarding the nature of religion. Roughly three billion souls (two billion Christians and one billion Muslims) consider God to be the touchstone of religion, while an equal number consider many gods (for example, Hinduism) or even no god (for example, Buddhism) to be compatible with it.
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