Dear Jeyamohan,
I am listening. your talks on YouTube almost every everyday. I think you are trying to separate the philosophy of religion from religion. Is it really possible to do so? I am skeptical in this matter.
Rajaratnam
Dear Rajaratnam,
I am looking at your argument in a very different way. Religion does not create or develop the philosophy you refer to as ‘religious philosophy,’ nor is it inseparable from religion. My idea about the relationship between philosophy and religion is more historical and dialectical.
I think the core of philosophy is always vision—I mean a cosmic vision, which emerges in the minds of seers. It is entirely nonreligious and purely intuitional. Philosophy then incorporates this vision into its framework and initiates a logical discussion of it. Then religion adopts them for its cause. It develops rituals and customs to propagate them. Over the years, vision and philosophy became the properties of the religion.
Essentially, religion is a set of faiths. It develops customs, rituals, and icons to install that faith. It creates institutions to protect the faith. Vision and philosophy are secondary things to religion; only small numbers of intellectuals in that faith actually care about vision and philosophy. The majority of religious followers never learn philosophy.
Without philosophy, a religion can operate without any loss. The original vision is not religious, so the philosophy is also not religious. So we need not hand them over to religion. A true philosophy can exist independently of religion.
We have to separate philosophy from religion because faith is something totally against the basic nature of philosophy, which is logic. We are separating philosophy from religion only to save it from being a simple faith; being a faith is the death of philosophy.
jeyamohan
