Chapter 16: The Influence of Science and Philosophy on Religion
This chapter is difficult to write, because before the formation of ideas in ancient Chinese rationality, the ancient Chinese were pantheists, and there were no specific gods in ancient China, and most of the shamans were materialistic worshippers, and they were very specific when it came to witchcraft sacrifices. Pen Fun Pavilion wWw. biquge。 info For example, worshipping the gods means that a specific ceremony is held in a specific place to pay tribute to a specific god. For example, there is a specific time to hold a specific ceremony to worship the river god.
This is the embryonic period of ancient Chinese science thought, but also the founding period of traditional Chinese thought, but also the formation period of ancient Chinese natural science, the "Book of Changes" can finally form a complete set of theories, relying on the accumulation of people's summative knowledge in this period, but also laid the foundation for the later "Zhou Yi".
The formation of the Book of Changes had a foundational impact on the controversy of a hundred schools of thought in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period in ancient China, and also laid the foundation for the final formation of Chinese science. It can be said that without the I Ching, there would be no Chinese rational theory, and the I Ching is the ancestor of the Chinese "reasoning" doctrine.
Everyone should already know that the I Ching is an encyclopedia, natural science, and the first teaching material for fortune-telling for the ancient Chinese. This means that the Book of Changes advocates the theory of the laws of matter, and verifies the rational theory of the trajectory of things, which shows that there is nothing about gods and spirits in the Book of Changes, only things that deduce the laws of the development of things, so the Book of Changes is not a theistic doctrine in the final analysis.
This means that all thinkers who draw the theoretical source from the I Ching have no relationship with theistic methods of thought. This begs the question, where is the God that people often talk about?
Nothing, not at all. In other words, there is no such thing as a god in the hearts of the Chinese. In China's mind, there are only natural laws, natural laws, natural selection, natural life and death, everything is an established reality, there is no virtual soul world at all, there is, and it is also an anthropomorphic mysterious world.
It can be said that in the hearts of Chinese, everyone has their own world of gods and ghosts, and the gods and ghosts taught by Taoism have created ghosts and gods that cannot be counted, as long as you enter the station on the computer, countless gods and ghosts stories can satisfy your endless rational psychology, so that you can satisfy your god-making heart with the ghosts and gods in the hearts of novelists.
So do you believe in God or not, when your mind is full of gods and ghosts? I can arbitrarily say that you don't believe in the slightest, in the depths of your mind, you don't have the root of ghost theory, where did you come from theism? In your mind, all gods and ghosts are just your incarnation, and you are imagining that you are the righteous and awe-inspiring gods and ghosts, and you have supernatural powers, and you can defeat all the ghosts and gods that cause you trouble. The devil will send you to a world from which you will never recover, make you a heroic god, eliminate violence and peace in the heavens and the world, and achieve the ideal world that you fantasize about but cannot get in reality.
This is the ghost god in the hearts of the Chinese. In the final analysis, there is no God at all where Chinese thinkers are rooted, so where does theism come from?
From here, it is not difficult to understand the fundamental reason why the Chinese ignore spiritual ethics under the drive of rational thinking.
So how did religion come to ancient China?
So let's talk about what religion is. The word "religion" comes from the Chinese understanding of personal beliefs, Chinese believe that there is supernatural power in some very few people, such people can bring happiness to all, can transform the world, benefit future generations, people in order to remember them, worship them, fear them, so set a fixed psychological sustenance in their hearts.
With the development of society, people begin to empathize with a person or thing, develop a common psychological desire, a common heart of worship, a common heart of awe, and jointly send a voice of psychological sustenance to a person and a thing, forming the consciousness concept of common belief of many people, which gives rise to different sects and sects to educate sentient beings.
Sect is a spiritual belief, and religion is a doctrinal system. The combination of religion and religion constitutes the constituent structure of idealism, which is naturally the sphere of activity of psychological reactions, which belongs to the world of idealism.
However, under the coercive effect of rational thinking in ancient China, traditional Chinese religion is materialistic and naturally belongs to the heaven and earth of materialists, so China's religion is different from the religions of other parts of the world, and the religion of the Chinese is atheistic.
Religion comes from the inheritance and accumulation of regional culture, and from the foundation of regional culture.
Religions are divided into theistic religions, and atheistic religions, such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Japanese Shintoism, Hinduism, etc., which are theistic religions, such as Confucianism and Taoism, and Buddhism in China is atheism.
If the rule of law is categorized, all denominations that hold the idea of humanity are theists, and all sects that hold rational ideas are atheists. If we elaborate further, anyone who holds the supremacy of spirit (human nature) is a theistic religion, and anyone who holds the supremacy of matter (reason) is an atheistic religion.
Since theists are spiritual supremacists, there is only the problem of God's unity in the world of God, no matter what kind of flying vehicle you take to heaven, as long as you go to heaven, whether you follow God or take refuge in the Buddha, God bless you to be treated equally, and the Buddha will give you different levels of treatment, anyway, you just need to come to "me", "I" is with you, "I" is in your heart. Therefore, theists do not have the idea of personality worship, but in the world view of atheists, there is the psychology of personality worship, that is to say, personality worship is an inevitable phenomenon in countries or regions where rational thinking is metaphysical, because there is no specific god in the group of people who hold material supremacy, only special people, only superpower leaders. Within a particular organization or group, it is easy to form a concept of individual worship, because atheistic religious believers believe that God is only something outside of their rational understanding, such as God is just a "man" in heaven who lives outside the human world, which is very specific. The old god in the hearts of the Chinese is also called the Jade Emperor, also called Changshengtian, and the name and surname are the descendants of the Yan Emperor, because the person has made outstanding contributions to the ancient Chinese, and his image perfectly alludes to the image of the Jade Emperor, so the Chinese personify and designate him as the old God, so as to worship him and remember him.
It can be said that all the gods of the Chinese are like this, and they all correspond to an ancient person who has contributed to the Chinese, which is the reason why people with rational thinking put concrete facts at the front end of their understanding, and it is also the inevitability that constitutes the materialist element, which also forms the ideological source of the cult of personality.
In the spiritually supreme theist, the theist believes that God is truly God, God exists above the mind, God is in the spirit, God is God not man, and God ceases to exist apart from man. For example, Christianity believes that God is a triune God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Holy Spirit), the priest created the heavens and the earth, and the Son of God, Jesus Christ (the Savior), came to the world in full flesh on earth to save the world, God is the true God, and God should not be tempted, but only worship God and serve God, God is the Spirit, and should be worshiped with spirit and truth, and placed on the soul. So theism holds that God is universal and has no power beyond nature.
After Christianity separated from Judaism, it introduced the law of the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, formed the theological concept of the Trinity, introduced the theological thinking method of objective thinking into theology, and used the objective idealistic spiritual outlook to preach to the people, and finally formed the universal cultural spirit of Westerners.
In order to better understand Christianity, it is necessary to re-understand the history of Western philosophy, Western philosophy is also known as ancient Greek philosophy, Chinese and Japanese call philosophy, English: philosophy, Greek called: Φiλoσoφ?a, according to the etymological Chinese meaning love and wisdom. The reason why the Chinese call it philosophy is because the Japanese have given this term according to the structure of Chinese characters, so people in the Chinese character system call "philosophy" philosophy.
As early as the sixth century BC, Greek sages began to explore the origin of the universe, explore the origin of the world, and find inspiration from theologians, which is the same as the ancient Chinese along the Yellow River valley to find the answer to the origin of the universe from the mouths of wizards and witches, thus forming a school of thought.
However, after the fifth century B.C., some of the wise men of Greece shifted their research direction, and the chronological order was from the third to the fourth century B.C., and due to the emergence of Socrates, Greek philosophy completely detached itself from the natural sciences and turned to the study of human beings.
During this period, ancient China was in the Spring and Autumn Warring States period, and the I Ching that appeared in China during this period basically defined the scope of ancient Chinese natural science, and the emergence of the I Ching set the principled tone for the methodology of the Chinese and laid the foundation for the emergence of a hundred schools of thought in Chinese humanistic thought during this period.
It can be said that whether it is Western philosophy or the science formed in ancient China, to be precise, it is the study of the methodology of how human society solves practical problems, and simply put, it is to find ideological methods for human civilization, and political ideology is at the metaphysical level, and the method of survival among the people at the metaphysical level; and then in layman's terms, it is to look at the ideological concept of the political system and the method of dealing with the birth, old age, sickness and death of the people. If the name of philosophy is accurate, it should be called "Human Ethical Relations".
It is precisely because of the continuous expansion of human civilization's demand for "human ethical relations" that both Eastern and Western cultures are speeding up the construction of "human ethical relations", and by the third century B.C., there was a Confucius in ancient China, and Socrates appeared in ancient Greece more than 80 years after the appearance of Confucius. Confucius thought rooted the tone of "human ethical relations" on the dualistic theory of yin and yang, and established it on the natural science with the "Book of Changes" as the ideological method, while Socrates in the West built the "human ethical relations" on the virtual human spirit, got rid of the shackles of natural science on the humanistic spirit, and established an objective idealistic edifice with the theory of three views as the theoretical keynote.
Later, Mencius in China perfected the Chinese rational doctrine on the basis of Confucius's thought, and Plato after Socrates also perfected the Western philosophical doctrine of objective idealism based on Socrates' thought. Later, the Eastern and Western scholars of "human ethical relations" followed these two paths to improve their own different theories of "human ethical relations", and finally formed today's Eastern and Western cultures.
Whether it is the dispute between Eastern and Western philosophical theories, or the dispute between Eastern and Western humanistic spirits, in the final analysis, it is also a methodological dispute between Eastern and Western "human ethical relations", because "the highest purpose of philosophy is to confirm the unity of thought and experience, and to achieve the reconciliation between conscious reason and reason existing in things, that is, to achieve the reconciliation between reason and reality" (Hegel). The purpose of philosophy is to find ways of thinking and summarizing experience, and to use scientific methods to achieve the harmony and unity of reason and human nature. If one day the harmony and unity of reason and humanity are realized, the world will truly realize the integration of Eastern and Western cultures and realize the great harmony of the world.
Returning to this topic, when it comes to the influence of science and philosophy on religion, it is still the influence of ideological methods and principles on religion.
The religions produced by ancient Chinese civilization are only Confucianism and Taoism, and the formation of Confucianism and Taoism is not much to say here.
Because China's "human ethical relations" is a study based on the "rationalist" ideological method, that is, a study based on materialist thought, that is, the study of material conditions first, and spiritual induction later, therefore, the ancient Chinese religious belief does not have the idea of original gods, that is to say, the traditional religions of the Chinese are atheists, which also includes the imported Buddhism spread in China, which is also the root of the ancient Chinese do not attach importance to the development of human nature.
That is to say, religious people in the Oriental region under the influence of traditional Chinese culture are bound to be atheists as long as they believe in the three teachings of "Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism" in the traditional Chinese region.
The traditional Chinese doctrine of rationality defines the central idea of the Chinese culture of the three religions.
This is the influence of traditional Chinese rational doctrine on religion, religious belief is precisely the method of thinking that spreads among the people, and only affects the psychological world of the people, which should be the ideological method of spiritual supremacy, but because Chinese traditional culture is a study kidnapped by natural science, Chinese religion is also a religious belief based on natural science, which only has a relationship with dualistic structuralism, and does not have an "opposing and unified" relationship with the Western philosophy of spiritual supremacy of objective idealism.
Rationalists despise humanists and disagree with the objective idealist views held by humanists. This is the reason why the two cultures are developing in opposition to each other.
Due to the influence of objective idealism in Western philosophy, Western religious figures all hold theistic ideas, which forms a completely different development path between Western religion and Eastern religion.
Due to the influence of Greek philosophical thought, Western religion introduced the law of the ancient Greek philosopher Thales after the fifth century AD, forming the concept of Trinity Christian theology, that is, forming Western scholasticism.
Since the Trinity philosophy is introduced into the doctrine of Christianity, Christianity will inevitably become the ideological world of objective idealists, and the ideological method of Christianity naturally comes from the theory of three views, and the ideological basis is the ideological method derived from the three-view world, that is to say, the original foundation of Christianity is based on the ideological basis of the theory of three views, which affirms the existence of objective idealism and the ideological basis of theism.
It can be seen from this that the Eastern religions with rational thinking put the material before the spirit and looked at the development process of things from the materialist viewpoint in the exploration of ideological methods, while the Western theists put the spirit before the material and looked at the development process of things from the viewpoint of idealism in the exploration of ideological methods. As with the distinction between philosophy and science, the key is that there is a principled difference between the material conditions and the preconditions of mental induction.
This means that there is a difference between the two religious beliefs in nature and principle, and if this difference really becomes unified one day, it will be the same disappearance of the two completely different ways of thinking, and then a unified new concept will be formed, otherwise the consequence will be a life-and-death struggle until one day one side completely annihilates the other side, forming a unified ideological concept, and also forming a unified religious belief.
This is the influence of science and philosophy on religion.
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