RELIGIOUS PLURALISM 77It follows that:
3 No MIB can be said to be a cause of religious experience.
The same thing holds if we try to talk of “being what we respond to in
religious experience” or the like. The idea such talk expresses is that the
Real contributes something to religious experience and we contribute
something to religious experience. But no MIB can be said to be something
we respond to or something that is a co-contributor to experiences.
It is obvious that:
4 There is nothing that can be said about an MIB by virtue of which it is a
cause of moral virtue in us.
5 There is nothing that can be said about an MIB that would make any
response to it more appropriate to it as an MIB than any other.
6 There is as much to be said in favor of moral neutrality or moral
viciousness being an appropriate response to an MIB as there is to moral
virtuousness being an appropriate response to it.
An MIB cannot be said to have any relationship to any sort of moral
character in any thing. So when we find RP saying that the Real is what lies
beyond all religious experience, or what all religious experience is a
response to, or the like, what it says is logically inconsistent with its
doctrine of what can be said about the Real. No MIB can do what RP
desperately needs it to do. This is important in understanding religious
pluralism, since RP also desperately needs that the Real be an MIB in order
for religious pluralism not to be plainly false. Here are some of the
defusing strategies:
1 Talk about myth, not doctrine.
2 Use the word “true” to mean something other than “true.”
3 Given 1 and 2, let a true myth be one that tends to produce behavior
you approve of.
But such strategies do nothing to provide RP with content.A critical discussion of RP: Part three
Besides the inconsistency, another basic problem arises. Suppose one posits
that there being something X will explain there being something else Y.
This is a candidate for being an explanation only if X is said to have some