Thomas wrote:Blatham --
I don't know how familiar Americans are with Berthold Brecht, who happens to be one of my favorite dramaticians. In one of his plays, "The Life of Galilei", there is an exchange between him and his student Andrea. It takes place after Galilei revoked his astronomy under pressure from the Catholic Church. Andrea is disappointed because he had expected his master to stand up and fight for Copernican astronomy, damn the inquisition. The exchange culminates in the following two lines.
Andrea: "Hapeless is the country that has no heroes."
Galilei: "No, hapeless is the country that needs heroes."
This seems to sum up nicely how we disagree about religions which have no intellectuals. The doctrines that make religions valuable are immediately obvious to me without much intellectual elaboration: Love your neighbor, respect your elders, don't steal from, nor lie to, nor cheat on, nor kill each other, and don't covet other people's stuff. Conversely, it seems immediately obvious to me that everything else is best discarded without much intellectual elaboration. In either case, intellectual elaboration of religious questions seems like a waste of brains and time to me. Worse: The perceived need for such elaboration indicates that the religion is in trouble, just like it indicates trouble when a country is beginning to need heroes.
So when evangelical Americans feel they don't need such elaboration, I agree with them rather than count it against them, as you appear to do. (But I grant you that I would disagree with them about the stuff to be discarded of.)
thomas
It's rare for me to read a post of yours wherein I disagree with nearly everything you've written.
First, the sort of rules for happy social life you enumerate can and do stand quite happily outside of any theological framework. To suggest that they, or something like them, constitutes the core of religious belief/practice would be imprudent. They are rational statements which pretty much any social group would arrive at (and have arrived at) in negotiating how to co-exist...rather like the manner in which any culture which developed individually-piloted automobiles would also pretty predictably develop stop signs and speed limits. So I agree that such rules, functioning for the general good, are social positives. But they aren't 'religion'.
Such rules, though, may gain an added heft through linking them into a truly religious framework, that is, through fitting them into a schema of sacred/profane or through insisting that such rules are not merely the product of human rationale and experience but that they are originated from a supernatural source, therefore immutable.
Note that where such rules are developed outside of a religious framework, they are quite open to analysis and re-negotiation. Where they evolve within a religious framework, they become much less malleable. And here is the problem. A thing is right or it is wrong, a thing is sacred or profane not as a consequence of rational thought and experience, but as a consequence of immutable authority. And there's the problem. So Darwinian evolution cannot possibly be factual because it stands in contradiction to a literal reading of Genesis. Or gay relationships cannot possibly be morally ok because a literal reading of a single passage in scripture speaks against it. Or all other religions must be false because a sacred text claims that it alone represents truth.
It's a bit odd to find myself forwarding catholic history as an example of open-mindedness (Galileo, as you and george point to is the more common situation) but it is accurate to do so when comparing to the evangelical community in America over the last few hundred years, even if much of such analysis sought only to support existing presumptions and dogma.
For example, catholicism has (beginning very early) taken up the challenge of trying to explain how it could be so that evil might exist where god is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent. That's a real philosophic problem for anyone who bothers to face it. In contrast, the American evangelical tradition has been far happier with the avoidance of 'God works in mysterious ways'.
It is the above element of religious belief and practice which I abhor and abhor with passion. It isn't merely pre-enlightenment, it is pre-Greek. The great gift the Athenian Greeks gave us was the liberating notion that truth wasn't necessarily in the possession of authorities, who were not to be trusted, but that truth was available to each of us through our rational minds.
Clearly, the temptation to fall back on authority has a psychological component. Equally clearly, the temptation to organize a social group using such immutable authority has advantages for 'order' and 'coherence', and (this is important) it has clear advantages in maintenance of existing social hierarchies. Nero wasn't merely leader, he was god-stuff. George Bush isn't merely a leader (to many evangelicals), he is god-stuff.
Earlier, you resisted agreeing to any descriptor other than 'bad guys' to describe the folks who wish to organize this society in the above manner. That is simply not adequately discerning or explanatory. Whether one might find 'authoritarian' or 'fascistic' or some other term more accurate, some such term is indeed appropriate.
