tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post3615916901918666483..comments2024-03-15T17:06:31.642-05:00Comments on The Piety That Lies Between: A Progressive Christian Perspective: Partisan Politics in Christian Guise: Santorum's Disturbing SuccessEric Reitanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06135739290199272992noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-23407746715372144612012-03-06T13:44:29.272-06:002012-03-06T13:44:29.272-06:00I just want to say thank goodness for Jon Stewart....I just want to say thank goodness for Jon Stewart. If not for his incredible sense of humor I would be crying about all these issues.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-25378220865436412702012-01-08T00:36:29.797-06:002012-01-08T00:36:29.797-06:00Evan
Yes, I think that's right, and such trad...Evan<br /><br />Yes, I think that's right, and such traditions of inflexibility deserve to be criticised. <br /><br />Does ethical objectivity need to be grounded in reality? I think it is objectively the case that my car is parked outside, insomuch that anybody examining the evidence with full knowledge of the circumstances (so with a concept of car on board, for example) would reach the same conclusion. But as to the reality beneath this statement (is existence any more than a human concept, is time real etc etc) who knows?<br /><br />Could ethical truths be grounded in the same way? Perhaps they describe the way we bump up against the world, but not necessarily anything about the underlying structure of that world. Might it be enough to define ethics pragmatically, in terms of those value sets that best allow us to express our human nature in a satisfying way. At this point, as with our description of the physical world, any position is possible, so long as it can be made to work, and if it can be made to work for anybody considering it, we might use the label objective?<br /><br />And as in science, reaching best descriptions becomes a process of listening, testing and rejecting nothing purely on principle? Not sure if that works, but it's where my instincts lead me.<br /><br />BernardBernard Beckettnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-75461447363502752682012-01-07T18:52:21.246-06:002012-01-07T18:52:21.246-06:00Bernard:
You may be right. I have to admit that t...Bernard:<br /><br />You may be right. I have to admit that the one thing that bothers me most about Dawkins and crew is their occasional (?) descent into the same kind of in-group/out-group, "us vs. them" tribalism they decry religion as a cause of.<br /><br />As for the question of where our ethical standards come from, I agree that science has a huge, possibly insurmountable problem here. In fact, these days I have no idea what is supposed to objectively ground our ethical norms, though I still consider myself a "moral realist." This is an area where I am definitely open to suggestions<br /><br />Unfortunately, religion, or at any rate some versions of it, tend to shut down ethical discussion in any form, because they tend towards "divine command theory" forms of ethics (which Eric has so effectively critiqued in his book). For many people, including authors I have read, God not only exists, but is the sort of God who could divinely authorize genocide (as in the book of Joshua) and still be considered "good." So certain forms of religiously-based ethics shut down ethical discussions as much as they do scientific ones with "the Bible says so."<br /><br />I also think that Christianity has traditionally often resulted in dogmatism, because Christianity from its earliest days required not only right living but right belief, and the church has coupled its insistence on orthodoxy with a paranoid fear of "heresy" which might imperil that orthodoxy. <br /><br />So maybe it's not religion per se that's the problem, but religion too narrowly obsessed with orthodoxy and the purification of a "holy society" against wrong belief?Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04785536166985273625noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-70408204027843827412012-01-07T16:58:55.115-06:002012-01-07T16:58:55.115-06:00Eric,
Interestingly enough one finds in the Gospe...Eric,<br /><br />Interestingly enough one finds in the Gospels “Santorum-like” figures, i.e. people who use religion as a means. <br /><br />What I find more surprising is the silence of the American Christian institutions when Christianity is abused for political gain. The hypocrisy is disturbing. Again some parallels with the Gospels here too. <br /><br />You might enjoy reading “The Greek Passion” by Nikos Kazantzakis. The original title was “Christ Recrucified” and the story is precisely that: A Christ-like figure appears in a modern setting and the local Christian church moves for his elimination.Dianelos Georgoudishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09925591703967774000noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-58988570923129396952012-01-07T12:35:43.586-06:002012-01-07T12:35:43.586-06:00Hi Evan
Interesting thoughts. Might the counter a...Hi Evan<br /><br />Interesting thoughts. Might the counter argument be that while religion provides no set standard against which say, ethical stances can be assessed, neither does the scientific narrative? Science provides a means of collective discovery in the world of physical modelling, but not in the world of meaning creation. Hence, an atheistic viewpoint may be just as supportive of damaging tribalism. This then might not be an opposition between theism and atheism, but rather one between dogmatic belief, present on both sides, and the liberal viewpoint that allows that consensus can only be built upon curiosity and compromise.<br /><br />What do you think?<br /><br />BernardBernard Beckettnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6215077578479252542.post-45991539795736611492012-01-05T16:48:04.690-06:002012-01-05T16:48:04.690-06:00Hi Eric,
I'm intrigued by your notion of &quo...Hi Eric,<br /><br />I'm intrigued by your notion of "religionism." I recently read Dawkins's book <i>The God Delusion</i>, finally... I decided it was finally time to actually read it rather than just read what other people say about it. I'm tending more and more these days towards an atheistic position, despite having formerly described myself as a theist. So I was more sympathetic to Dawkins than I might once have been.<br /><br />You write:<br /><br /><i>When one racial group brutally oppresses another, we blame racism, not race. When people of different nationalities go to war out of misplaced pride, we blame nationalism, not nationality. When rival ethnic groups practice "ethnic cleansing," we blame ethnocentrism, not ethnicity.</i><br /><br />The way I read one of the main arguments of <i>The God Delusion</i> is that religion, even "moderate" religion, lacks a standard of evidence that sufficiently guards against misuse of its tenets. It is all very well and good, Dawkins seems to be saying, to point out that there is such thing as "moderate" or "liberal" religion, but the very nature of the reasons people give for believing in God/following a certain religion-- such as personal religious experience, Scripture, and so on-- lead to the unavoidable reality that no standard exists by which those who draw unethical ideologies and behaviors from religion can be criticized. For instance, I can say that I have had experience of God and that God tells me being gay is not a sin, while someone else can claim, with apparent validity that they too have experienced God and God has told them that being gay really is a sin. How do we decide between the two if we cannot decide the issue either by logic, science, or some other "third-person" method? All the reasons we have for holding our respective positions with regard to our religion are "in our heads" (the problem of other minds rears its head, I think) so we cannot peer inside each other's brains to figure out who has "really" heard God.<br /><br />This, I think, seems to be the point behind the criticism of Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others, that "moderate" religion creates an environment where extremism can thrive, because the epistemological status of religion and "faith' is such that we cannot decide between competing claims for "God's will." Thus even if religion does not really "poison everything" as Hitchens's grandiose subtitle put it, it may very well be that religion leads, in the final equation, to more harm than good.<br /><br />So in dialogue with your notion of "religionism" being separate from "religion," I wonder whether perhaps religion might have a strong tendency to develop into religionism, or at least have no defense against it, because it is so problematic to criticize religious claims with other religious claims, given that they all derive from such subjective epistemological foundations.Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04785536166985273625noreply@blogger.com