full transcript
From the Ted Talk by Kwame Anthony Appiah: Is religion good or bad? (This is a trick question)
Unscramble the Blue Letters
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic hdnuisim, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion wokrs. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paadrigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a reogiiln, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and jdiasum has a chacne of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
Open Cloze
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic ________, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion _____. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of ________ religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a ________, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and _______ has a ______ of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
Solution
- chance
- paradigm
- works
- hinduism
- judaism
- religion
Original Text
Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list?
Frequently Occurring Word Combinations
ngrams of length 2
| collocation |
frequency |
| large parts |
4 |
| religion works |
2 |
| natural world |
2 |
| creation story |
2 |
| intellectual division |
2 |
| soul disc |
2 |
Important Words
- account
- atheistic
- bad
- buddhism
- captures
- cases
- chance
- concept
- definition
- excludes
- find
- forms
- good
- hinduism
- idea
- judaism
- list
- paradigm
- point
- purports
- reason
- religion
- religions
- religiosity
- shows
- starter
- test
- view
- works
- wrong