Religion and Politics Knowledge Only Policy
My newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation enables this website to show that religion is a mixture of undifferentiated knowledge and belief; that politics is entirely the debate of belief/counter-counter-belief to one or other transient belief-consensus; that the non-religious/anti-religious oppose religion with the counter-belief which rejects both its knowledge- and its belief-contents; that unless the religious recognise and utilise this knowledge-content, the general public will continue to suffer the disadvantages conferred by anti-religious beliefs already refuted by this knowledge-content; and that both the religious and non-religious/anti-religious could have rejected political beliefs thus refuted had they referred to our long existing knowledge of human and other group-species behaviours, even if their discernment of the difference between ‘belief’ and ‘knowledge’ were merely that of traditional usage.
Thus, from this discernment, it could have been generally ‘known’ from time immemorial that while the human species has greater ability than all others to acquire ‘knowledge’ of itself and surrounding reality, its ability to create intra-species ‘belief/counter-belief’ violence, revolution and war is unique to itself; that while individuals of some species interact only for mating and care of offspring, group-species survival also depends on hierarchical social cohesion; and that while all other animal species ‘know’ enough to preserve their survival by limiting their intra-species violence, our group-species has acquired knowledge enough to increase the physical comfort of its survival beyond natural levels, but not enough to prevent the intra-species violence of belief/counter-belief which coupled with its otherwise peaceful knowledge could now result in its extinction. However, while the unconsciously acquired knowledge-content of religion did recognise our need to harmonise our innate selfishness with our innate need for cohesive survival as the group-species we are, its unconscious nature has not prevented internal violence over belief-content differences from obscuring the knowledge-content which the non-religious/anti-religious now reject as mere belief-content in all its doctrinal forms. Thus, while other species have no belief/counter-belief differences to dispute, the human species has yet to recognise that the beliefs/counter-beliefs which give rise to violence, revolution or war are resolvable only by acquiring and using resolving knowledge; and that the religious could long since have credited themselves with having acquired the necessary knowledge of human nature, whatever they may have believed to be its source or means of acquisition, while the non-religious/anti-religious have never had more than counter-belief already refuted by the aforesaid knowledge.
However, while the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ have been more or less synonymous since time immemorial, the discernible difference in current usage is sufficient to permit our archaeological/ historic records and current observations of differing human groups to reveal that all had, and still have, differing beliefs and differing levels of knowledge; that belief appears to arise before knowledge is acquired; that our tendency to believe is stronger than our tendency to knowledge-acquisition; that for every belief there appears to be a counter-belief; that these are resolvable only by knowledge-acquisition; that belief appears to be independent of reality, while knowledge appears to reflect reality; and that this non-definitive discernment of meaning permits rhetoricians to elide and conflate knowledge with belief and vice versa to the suppression of difference and the winning of arguments. Thus, we may conclude that the capacity to believe in the so-called Beyond was and is inherent and unique to humanity and has precedence over our capacity to acquire knowledge of reality, however the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ may subsequently be defined.
Prior to my newly definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy, I was aware since my schooldays that the word ‘pot’ has meaning only by reference to real pots, while the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ have no such reality-reference in traditional usage; that the analogous dichotomies of truth/ falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad also lacked definitive differentiation in traditional usage; that dictionaries provide only a distorted reflection of one on the other and vice versa in each pair; and that these pairs have thus been used synonymously by elision/conflation since time immemorial. Again, while my early discernment of meaning-difference motivated me towards science, I found that academia did not define science, nor did it differentiate science from pseudoscience by any reference to reality/unreality. Indeed, those attempting to define the former seemed to me to be defining the latter, while others discussed ‘the philosophy of science’ which I took to be an oxymoron.
Accordingly, my decision to write a history of science which would differentiate it from philosophy and pseudoscience, revealed the need to differentiate the knowledge/belief dichotomy and its analogues by some reference to reality/unreality, and suggested that such differentiation would resolve epistemology and dismiss metaphysics by revealing the impossibility of knowledge-acquisition by rationality alone in the absence of sense-perceived reality; that science would thus be differentiated from pseudoscience by showing that the former isolates a hypothetical (believed) cause from all other potentially interfering causes and observes its effect or non-effect in reality, while the latter believes two arbitrary parameters to be cause or effect of the other, and relates them by statistics or mathematical modelling which would similarly relate either to any number of other parameters; and that science is thus cause-effect knowledge of reality while pseudoscience is belief, devoid of the cause-effect relationships of science and is thus worthless. Again, while the meaning of concrete nouns such as ‘pot’ is clear from their usage respecting real pots, the meaning of abstract nouns such as ‘courage’ ‘equality’ ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ arises from the context of their usage and from a personal inexpressible input such as in speaking of God and of much of politics.
Sources
Having found that my first two books1,2 on the acquisition of environmental knowledge had no effect on the environmentalist belief which now drives what ought to be knowledge-only environmental-policy, I wrote my third book3, The Rational Trinity: Imagination, Belief and Knowledge (March 2010), which is the source of my consequent websites4,5 including this one. This third book achieved the first ever definitive differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy together with those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad by showing that reality stimulates our imaginations through our senses to beliefs transformable to positive or negative knowledge by evaluation of their compliance or non-compliance with reality, or to those which can only be accepted, rejected or suspended as beliefs beyond reality-evaluation in principle or pro tem practice, but which cannot be accepted as knowledge. As a consequence of this differentiation, my third book shows that reality-evaluation of specific beliefs (hypotheses) produced the craft- and self-knowledge which secured our group-species survival from time immemorial and the science which enhanced our welfare from the seventeenth century onwards, while our knowledge-based development of social cohesion was variously disrupted by conflicting religious beliefs, by knowledge-rejecting non-religious (secular) beliefs or by the reaction of ignored reality in ways which belief is unable to anticipate, avert or correct. It also confirms that the imaginative sense-perception of the human species greatly exceeds that of all other species.
This source book, thus seeks ubiquitous acceptance that political beliefs must now be reality-validated for acceptance or reality-refuted for rejection before any implementation as policy; that the absence of reality-evaluation leads to belief-driven violence, revolution and war; and that its lax application corrupts what otherwise would be the social, economic and environmental sciences to the pseudoscience now responsible for deteriorating personal behaviour, diminishing social cohesion, recurring financial crises, and increasing uncertainty of material and energy supply by diverting resources from real to unreal problems. This book also defines the Ur-belief of religion as that which, being beyond reality-evaluation in principle, can only be accepted, rejected or suspended on personal preference, while showing that the knowledge-content of our traditional behaviour codes harmonises our selfishness with our need for socially cohesive survival as the group-species we are; and that while the belief-contents of these behaviour codes ought to be optional, their authoritative implementation is socially divisive as between one religion and another and even between the sects of each religion .
Again, this source book shows that while such as the Pythagoreans and Plato believed mathematics to be abstracted from the Beyond by rationality alone, they failed to recognise that their axioms arose from reality; that in mathematical analysis, the first statement (equation) is transformed through all equivalent statements to the concluding statement, this being the meaning of the recurring equality sign; that no new knowledge is added, the concluding equation re-presenting the initial knowledge in more useful form; that while rationality and logic ensure the absence of mistakes in proceeding from premise to conclusion whether symbolically or verbally, the conclusion is definitively wrong if the premise is definitively wrong, both being non-compliant with reality; and that while Plato’s Good could not be accessed from the Beyond by rationality alone as he believed, its knowledge-content arose from his unconscious observation of the reality of human nature, as did the Ten Commandments of Moses.
Consequently, this source book definitively shows that secular (political) beliefs are no more valid than religious beliefs per se, though the former are capable of reality-evaluation to positive or negative knowledge, while the latter respecting the Beyond are incapable of reality-evaluation in principle; that identifiable beliefs as to individual behaviour were nonetheless unconsciously reality-validated to knowledge of our need for socially cohesive survival; that secular (political) beliefs whether already implemented or not, must now be evaluated as to whether they would work in reality if knowledgeably implemented; that the failure of belief-only policy implementation whether religious, non-religious or antireligious leads to belief/counter-belief disharmony, violence, revolution or war; and that acceptance of belief in preference to knowledge is currently corrupting what could be the social, economic and environmental sciences to the pseudoscience now causing behavioural deterioration, diminishing social cohesion, financial crises, and the current uncertainty of energy and materials supply.
Thus this source book, and the websites to which it gives rise, conclude that our current maladies can be rectified only by a general recognition that knowledge-only policies conducive to our species survival and to our social and physical welfare are properly defined as true and wise, right and good, while counter-beliefs non-conducive to these objectives are properly defined as untrue and foolish, wrong and bad; that political manifestos must now start to offer knowledge-only policy options for elective prioritisation of implementation within national resource limits, and identify as such any belief-only policies necessitated by pro tem ignorance, and as thus requiring rectification if refuted by their implementation in reality; and that political Change must now be from belief-only policies to knowledge-only policies, if progress is ever to be continuous, the term ‘belief-only’ meaning the absence of knowledge and the term ‘knowledge-only’ meaning the absence of belief.
Having definitively differentiated the above dichotomies and having reached these conclusions, my third book defines opinion/counter-opinion as belief/counter-belief supported by partially selected facts/ counter-facts (i.e. pro and con evidence) neither set of which is conclusive knowledge; and defines debate as the rhetorical presentation of facts/counter-facts which produces a respective but transient belief consensus in the absence of conclusive knowledge. It also recalls that Socrates recognised the possibility of elective consensus being reversed by a change of debaters on the same topic; and that while he frowned on the tricks of rhetoric which made this possible, he was unconscious of the knowledge-absence which causes debate and of the knowledge-presence which terminates it. Thus, I define democracy, then and now, as the continual adjustment of belief-consensus by continuous debate of belief/counter-belief in the absence of conclusive knowledge, and I define the much vaunted Enlightenment as a misunderstanding which conflated/elided rationality with knowledge itself, in failing to recognise that knowledge cannot be acquired without my definitive reality-evaluation of belief.
Having thus reached the self-styled rational Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, we have reached the start of the self-styled rational challenge to religion, and it is this challenge which I now rebut once and for all by reference to the foregoing differentiation of the knowledge/belief dichotomy and its analogues. The rebuttal consists of showing that the knowledge-content of traditional behaviour codes refutes the belief-content of the behaviour codes of self-styled Enlightened liberalism and its associated license which disregards our need for survival-related social-cohesion, while the Ur-belief of religion remains immune to the Big Bang which does not refute the belief in something being created from nothing. However, before proceeding to develop this rebuttal, it is essential to compare the beliefs/ counter-beliefs of the religious themselves with those of the non- and anti-religious; to recognise that both sides are complicit in a debate of belief/counter-belief in which no reference is ever made to definitive knowledge by either side; and to recognise that both sides are willing to engage in violence when this is justifiable to them in their respective circularities of belief and their consequences whether rational or irrational.
Thus, having differentiated our knowledge-only progress from its belief-only disruptions by noting the presence or absence of my co-defined reality-evaluation as in chapter 1 of my source book; having shown how our innate capacity for this reality-evaluation transformed our beliefs as specific hypotheses to our craftsmanship and to the knowledge-content of our traditional behaviour codes from time immemorial to the Iron Age in chapter 2; and having shown in chapter 3 how belief in the here-and-now being a manifestation of the Beyond, led to our early search for knowledge through rationality alone: I proceed to show in Chapter 4 how the contending Christian and Pagan beliefs beyond reality-evaluation in principle, could only be resolved to orthodoxies by Imperial Edicts such as those of Constantine and his successors until the maintenance and development of orthodoxy devolved to successive Popes. In contrast, Chapters 5, 6 and 7 of my source book show that religious and non-religious beliefs touching on reality were respectively resolvable and were being resolved by reality-evaluation, initially by direct observation and later by the experimentation which initiated physicochemical science.
Thereafter, Chapter 8 of my source book, shows how physicochemical science transformed craftsmanship to technology and provided other sciences with deeper knowledge than the directly observable, while Chapter 9 shows how physicochemical science has thus far explained the evolution of Universe, Earth and Life and has taken technology to its current levels, all within our innate and finite capacity to imagine beliefs capable of reality-evaluation by experimentation. In contrast, Chapter 10 shows philosophy to be pure belief in its reliance on rationality and its rejection of sense-perceived reality-evaluation, while Chapter 11 shows how the secular/political now legislatively implement arbitrary interpretations of belief in equality, freedom, rights, economics and environmentalism to the extent of corrupting the knowledge-content of traditional behaviour codes, commonsense, general and specific knowledge, and even the scientific method itself, in ways never attempted by the religious. Again, Chapter 12 shows that only knowledge can harmonise religion with secularism, environmentalism with science and technology and sociology and economics with commonsense; and that current disillusion with belief-only politics could become enthusiasm for its knowledge-only alternative to the benefit of all at home and abroad.
In focussing on knowledge/belief differentiation with respect to religion and politics, this website reproduces only some of the chapters of its source book while others are abstracted, and yet others are omitted where the histories of craftsmanship, science and technology per se would distract the attention of readers from its main religious/political theme. As to other websites derived from my third book, the first relates to the general benefits of knowledge-only policy, while the second describes the specific benefits of such policy in respect of the environment. The steps towards my second website were that I was invited to write a series of weekly articles for the Newsletter of the International Spill Control Organisation (ISCO) based on my first two books; that I submitted a parallel series of ISCO documents to the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) of the International Maritime Organisation IMO of the UN and to the International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund Assemblies (IOPCF); and that I subsequently used the newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation of my third book to re-work all of these books and documents for my environment website, the first of my subject-specific websites, the existence of which was announced to all Member States of the foregoing UN Organisations in 2016. This third website applies my knowledge/belief differentiation to religion and politics. Other subject-specific websites will follow as these are prepared.
As to religion, my third book has already shown inter alia that my newly definitive knowledge/belief differentiation enables the knowledge-content of the Bible to be differentiated from its belief-content; that the knowledge-content of the behaviour codes of the Old and New Testaments reality-refute the counter-beliefs of so-called liberalism, and that the Ur-belief of religion in a Creator God is beyond reality-evaluation and is thus not refuted by its denial; that the human tendency to accept belief or counter-belief is common to the religious and the secular, though only the former openly refer to their belief or faith, while the latter cite their self-styled rationality in seeking to discredit as irrational all who disagree with them whether religious or secular/political. Thus, this website advises the religious to recognise the knowledge-content of religion and to reject anti-religious counter-beliefs as having no knowledge-content in being not only counter-belief but also counter-knowledge.
However, having extended the clarity of language by definitively differentiating the knowledge/belief dichotomy and with it those of truth/falsehood, wisdom/folly, right/wrong and good/bad, to avoid their respective elisions and conflations in the everyday usage of all languages, I now identify the need to consider other aspects of language usage with respect to religion per se and with respect to translation from one language to another, particularly when the source language is no longer in everyday use. Again, we know that usage and meaning change with time in any one language; and that both are further obscured when the subject is beyond reality and thus has no reference to it. Thus, while we translate ‘pot’, from any language to any other by reference to real pots, how are we to speak of God, the creator of reality and of life itself? Are we not mistaken when attributing our current usage and meaning to those of other times and other languages no longer in use? Can we reliably differentiate metaphor from actuality? Does Jesus of Nazareth feed his listeners with loaves and fishes, or satisfy (fulfil) them with his message? Does he walk on the water or does he wade out to the boats as they approach the shore? In seeking answers to such questions in light of the imprecision of language and the fallibility of human reportage, it is advisable to rely on our knowledge of reality as far as it will take us, this reality being there for our reference as created, we know not how.
Again, was the early Church not mistaken in resorting to violence in disputes over beliefs as to whether the members of the Holy Trinity were of the same substance (ousis), of different substances, or of different states of the same substance? As to the answer, we know that such questions do not arise in the Bible itself and were intermittently resolvable only by a series of Imperial (political) Edicts? Yet again, is politics not mistaken in electively resolving all beliefs/counter-beliefs to one or other belief-consensus intermittently enforceable only by governmental legislation? As to the answer, we know that all belief/counter-belief respecting reality is resolvable to positive or negative knowledge for unanimous acceptance of the former, and unanimous rejection of the latter; that the Bible deals with the behavioural relationship of humanity to God and vice versa in terms of our behavioural relationships with each other; these having been reality-validated to the positive knowledge which harmonises our innate selfishness with our innate need for socially cohesive survival as the group-species we are; and that the Old Testament recalls the consequences of forgetting and remembering to maintain these relationships while the New Testament exhorts us “to do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.