An obvious first question: which religion? (Orthodox Christianity, in her case; condolences to all you heretics.) An obvious follow-up question: what about the excluded middle option, that we decided “religion” was useful despite considering and rejecting the possibility of its truth?
And the possibilities aren’t limited to “true” and “useful-but-false” anyway. A religious tradition might contain some true psychological observations, some effective social technology, some beautiful mythology, some destructive doctrines, some historical falsehoods, and some metaphysical claims whose truth remains undecidable. “Is religion true?” is absurdly underspecified.
As much as I love aphorisms, epigrams, etc. as a form, I can never fully relax around them. Their rhetorical tidiness, which makes them so attractively quotable, also makes it easy to overlook all the flaws. We can be swayed by the seemingly-self-contained presentation to think that the matter has been settled. In reality, the compact saying might be a little Procrustean bed, with all the important details littered on the floor around it.
Even there, though, it’s too broad to complain about “aphorisms, epigrams, etc.” There are multitudes of good and bad examples. I’m mainly just inherently suspicious of rhetorical confectionery. Certain formulations arrive pre-glazed. The antithesis is perfect, the cadence closes neatly, the conceptual roles are cleanly assigned, and the reader gets the little reward of understanding before he has actually had to understand very much. The sentence gives the sensation of intellectual completion. When you’re younger, the sweetness itself can register as intensity: Christ, what a line! After enough reading, you start tasting the corn syrup, and your aging taste buds revolt.
A useful distinction might be between compression and reduction. A good aphorism is compressed: there’s more in it than the sentence can explicitly contain, and unpacking it makes it stronger. A bad one is reduced: inconvenient possibilities have been removed so that the sentence can achieve its pleasing shape. Unpacking it makes it weaker because you discover that the apparent depth depended on nobody asking obvious questions.
We have acquired this strange retrospective suspicion that polished symmetry is somehow an artifact of generative AI, when humans have been mass-producing parallelism, antithesis, metaphor, repetition, and strategic omission for centuries. No transformer required. All you need is an ear for cadence and a willingness to let the melody carry you along.
The old anti-sophistic suspicion is that persuasive form can become detachable from truth, belief, or character. Give the skilled rhetorician a proposition and he can make it sound weighty; give him its opposite and, with enough ingenuity, he can make that sound weighty too. The listener experiences the force of conviction without knowing whether any conviction exists behind the performance. This may explain some of the anxiety around LLMs. They demonstrate clearly that the external signs we associate with thought — fluency, balance, confidence, elegant qualification, apt metaphor — can be generated without anything resembling human conviction behind them. But that revelation cuts backward too. We were already too willing to treat those signs as evidence of depth when humans produced them. The clankers merely industrialized a snack food humans had been making at home for millennia.