To start with here, I'd like to thank all of you for your participation and intend to do my best in this post to address much of the noteworthy material in the thread. Sadly I can't get to all of it as you have certainly been stimulating conversation partners here.
In what is often called "the modern situation" we are collectively being faced with increasingly diverse mindsets from those around us. Pluralism isn't going anywhere and I definitely doubt how well this old perspective on religion is going to hold up moving forward, religion as "a set of supernatural beliefs" may start to grind roughly against people around the world who don't self identify that way or understand the practice of religion along those lines.
This is especially true of Near Eastern and Eastern cultures. It's not a guess on my part but almost certainly a fact that there are people living near you who don't think of (just as a few common examples) their Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, or Buddhist beliefs as necessarily supernatural.
If you don't mind me asking: what kinds of doctrines and sects are we talking about?
I had never heard of a group being both unitarian and universalist before this post. Frankly I'm very curious to hear from unitarians why place as much importance as they do on following ethical and other philosophical concepts within the Bible, if they don't believe in its supernatural elements. It's difficult for me to understand all of those teachings being true for people without what I see as much of the impetus underlying them.
It's curious to me how many people take issue with the idea of exclusivism. Having come from such a religion it has always made perfect sense to me how religions around the world, some of other varieties than monotheism included, can be mutually exclusive. There are fundamental contradictions in how they understand reality, so of course such people aren't going to believe in the possibility of a round square.
Well, my friend, as it turns out I'm an agnostic for mostly the same reasons
I'm not so sure your given example lends credence to the idea that groups of people are responsible. However, now that I think on the issue further it really was too narrow minded of me to assume that groups as a matter of course can't be responsible.
Instead I've observed that they have more of a tendency to act out of self interest first, and responsible, sensible behavior isn't guaranteed or even all that likely in a lot of scenarios. You have correctly pointed out that the scales tip towards the other end as well, and such behavior can definitely be more likely. I hardly need to point out any examples of unethical and destructive behavior engaged in by companies.
Ah, but if a definition is just about anything then it isn't much of a definition, is it?
Not to be too presumptive about your exposure to religious thought, but I'm inclined to think that the modern Western dialogue on this subject has conditioned you into having those perceptions.
Ideas like anti-rationality, Reformed Epistemology, "faith vs reason", and so on actually happen to be more of a recent trend in the grand scheme. In the past, untold volumes were written by the religious about how they rationalized their beliefs and the relationship between theology and philosophy may have been messy at times, but it was an open one nonetheless. There were those who were critical of applying disciplined thought to religious dialectic, but by the same token there is no shortage of those on the other side of the aisle, rather there is a noteworthy abundance and it may be edifying for modern thinkers who subscribe to your perspective to check that against the writings of authors such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Avveroes, and Al-Ghazali, just to name a few.
It is interesting that you have mentioned Empiricism here because the Rationalists and Empiricists who did the most during the course of their debates to form the scientific method today (which is actually not identical to the school of philosophy known as Empiricism but a continually debated and emended synthesis of both Rationalism and Empiricism) were, by and large, religious themselves. At the time they called themselves "natural philosophers" and they didn't see faith as inimical to reason.
In fact, given any extended linguistic study it can be argued that the ancient root words for "faith" in Hebrew, Greek, and Classical Latin
are all examples of words that imply a specific reasoning process themselves.
