Contradiction and the Absolute

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There are two types of beliefs: absolute and empirical.

If two beliefs are true opposites, then if x is true, then -x is false. This form of contradistinction only appears absolutely. Most opposed beliefs are not true opposites, meaning that if p is true, q can either be true or false, and vice versa.

Because it is sometimes difficult to determine if two different beliefs are true opposites, we add a couple of truth values. In total, we have: (1) x, (2) -x, (3) x and not-x, and (4) neither x nor not-x.

If (3) or (4) are possibilities, then we are not dealing with absolute beliefs. For instance, if it is possible for theism and atheism both simultaneously to be false, then belief in God is empirical. This is alright for everyone but those obsessed with finding truth at all costs. Most truth is permanantly provisional.

Another example of empirical belief is the belief in selfhood. It is possible for the self to both exist and not exist. We break formal laws of logic establishing this, but paraconsistent logic allows us to consider such true contradictions as non-explosive. The Buddhist tetralemma kills metaphysics.

One book that forms the core of Buddhist theory is the Diamond Sutra. The whole book is one extended lesson in thinking beyond dualistic dilemmas. Four-valued logic, the tetralemma, requires a bit of restructuring of the mind to apply consistently.

The advantage is that we also avoid the circular logic behind the law of non-contradiction because we get to selectively choose when it does and doesn't make sense to obey the law of non-contradiction.

This is part of why philosophy itself only got us so far for thousands of years and why the scientific method moved quite a ways past it. The flaws in our perspective are so myriad that we can go on ad infinitum practically speaking in making half-baked inferences and postulates and no one will really know it until we've found some experimental way to figure out whether a truth claim is absolutely true, absolutely false, or much more likely true in some cases and false in others. Science is where should's are buried in the graveyard by 'is'. Even philosophy at it's best, like the types of pantheism that gave us the concept of the great No-Thing, or 0 behind the 1 or monad, that seemed to predict the realities of subatomic physics - these were only certain schools of philosophy where no matter how strong their arguments might be they still have to deal with other school's ideological barriers and would have to argue more abstractly; ie. there was no such thing as a peer-reviewed or a set of peer-reviewed studies revolutionizing philosophy everywhere because the grounds of argument were too subjective for a new idea to flush out in unanimous or near-unanimous embrace.

That said scientific discovery is a relatively new method, it's barely covered any territory with respect to the human experience yet, and so there's a lot of important terrain where people have to make important decisions in terms of how they live their lives with little or no given clarity as such. Ambiguity seems to breed dogma, especially with people who are really lacking in understanding that their belief choices in this regard are essentially crafted based on their own home-grown philosophies and, worse in a lot of cases, that if they're really woefully misinformed, uneducated, egotistical, or worse - of the habit of bending facts to suite themselves with little regard to truth - such people seem to find a lot of 'something' to draw on, just that his something is mostly evolutionary atavism which is antisocial even at the best of times.

This is part why I think it's so important for us to do both science and philosophy as lucidly as we can. We need science to educate us where the real can be clarified and well-built philosophy to keep us sane enough in covering the important areas where we can't have clarity yet.

I would say that religion, not philosophy, is what keeps us sane beyond the scope of our knowledge. I began this thread by describing the experience of Buddhist Enlightenment. Buddhism is all about being in your right mind. Its prime goal is sanity. Alternatively, Judeo-Islamo-Christian beliefs ultimately express the knowledge needed for agriculture and animal husbandry: hence, the importance of genealogy in the Bible.

Philosophy has its own uses. It's like exploratory surgery, a look into beliefs and why we believe them. Some of these have been useful in the realm of science. People like David Hume have shown us what sorts of knowledge we cannot possibly have, but which we need for thought. For instance, we need inductive logic to make inferences based on our experiences, but there is no way to know, absolutely, whether our experiences are accurate. We assume that our experiences are repeatable. Also, we cannot know for absolutely certain what moral system is accurate. We need to base our morality, in the end, on what we feel is right.

How would you separate the two?

The only definitive line that I can see between religion and philosophy is revelation and a dogmatic body of work.

Buddhism and Hinduism are religions in a context of foundation books but function much more like philosophies in action. The equivalents in the west, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, are similarly philosophies that are imbued with a great deal of ritual, ceremony, meditation, and in the case of Hermeticism you can add theurgy to that mix.

I've often heard when people examine Rosicrucianism from the outside they see it as a system of philosophic living rather than a religion, and perhaps its founding in the early 17th century meant to blur that line. It's interesting because it does have foundational texts and mythological people, ie. Christian Rosenkreuz and his handful of disciples who later discover his seven-sided funerary vault and describe the kabbalistic, alchemical, and astrological wisdom coded within it.

In a way I think I would consider religion a subset of philosophy with it's only ideocynracy being that it enshrines a particular book, person, or group of historical events. It might not be easy to even draw a crisp line aside from saying that there are a lot of religions out there which behave more like philosophies of living and interacting with one's environment than being the sorts of outward-focused societal power accumulators that the Abrahamic traditions have often been.