Habermas does not want to embrace religion wholesale for he does not want to give up the “cognitive achievements of modernity” — which include tolerance, equality, individual freedom, freedom of thought, cosmopolitanism and scientific advancement — and risk surrendering to the fundamentalisms that, he says, willfully “cut themselves off” from everything that is good about the Enlightenment project. And so he proposes something less than a merger and more like an agreement between trading partners: “…the religious side must accept the authority of ‘natural’ reason as the fallible results of the institutionalized sciences and the basic principles of universalistic egalitarianism in law and morality. Conversely, secular reason may not set itself up as the judge concerning truths of faith, even though in the end it can accept as reasonable only what it can translate into its own, in principle universally accessible, discourses.”

As Norbert Brieskorn, one of Habermas’s interlocutors, points out, in Habermas’s bargain “reason addresses demands to the religious communities” but “there is no mention of demands from the opposite direction.” Religion must give up the spheres of law, government, morality and knowledge; reason is asked only to be nice and not dismiss religion as irrational, retrograde and irrelevant. The “truths of faith” can be heard but only those portions of them that have secular counterparts can be admitted into the realm of public discourse. (It seems like a case of “separate but not equal.”) Religion gets to be respected; reason gets to borrow the motivational resources it lacks on its own, resources it can then use to put a brake on its out-of-control spinning.

The result, as Michael Reder, another of Habermas’s interlocutors, observes, is a religion that has been “instrumentalized,” made into something useful for a secular reason that still has no use for its teleological and eschatological underpinnings. Religions, explains Reder, are brought in only “to help to prevent or overcome social disruptions.” Once they have performed this service they go back in their box and don’t trouble us with uncomfortable cosmic demands.

if one renounces the assumption that what is present in different parts of space has an independent, real existence, then I do not at all see what physics is supposed to describe.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.” — NY Times,Does Reason Know What it is Missing?

In my understanding, a physical language per se is purely a communication protocol for coordinating human actions, that is to say physical languages per-se do not transmit information about the world from the mind of the speaker to the mind of the listener. — sime

You can wear any consumable pop-culture items you want to showcase individual identity, but it becomes illegal to wear clothing showcasing cultural identity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now say what that exactly means. I think you will find that it does not exactly mean anything. — tim wood

My understanding is that much of science gave up on cause as an explanatory at least about 100 years ago, using it if at all as a convenient and informal fiction. — tim wood

When they couldn't behead priests fast enough with the guillotine they built barges with removable planks so they could fill them with chained prisoners and sink them all at once. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Trump prides himself on his ability to free hostages held in foreign prisons, yet he presents himself as helpless when it comes to bringing back Abrego Garcia — even though we are paying El Salvador to imprison deportees. — Nicholas Kristof, NY Times

In February, Dr. Hall (a leading nutritional scientist at the N.I.H) said that N.I.H. officials told him he couldn’t be listed as an author on a yet-to-be-published scientific review on ultraprocessed foods that he co-wrote with a group of university scientists. This was because the review included language about “health equity” (it acknowledged that some people in the United States don’t have access to healthy food). This discussion may not have aligned with President (Chairman?) Trump’s views on diversity, equity and inclusion. If Dr. Hall wanted to stay on the paper, they said, that section would need to be modified. — NY Times, Leading Nutrition Scientist Depart NIH, Citing Censorship

Liberalism has tools for punishing individual bad actors and... that's it. It can address discrimination by outlawing specific actions but falters when inequality results from patterns that no one individually chose. — Benkei

Liberalism’s emphasis on rights also tends to obscure the role of duties. If rights are powers granted through the mutual structure of society, they ought to imply obligations to that structure. But liberal theory tends to treat duties as secondary or voluntary. — Benkei

That, although the Desert Fathers (and through them Christianity writ large) borrow terms from Pagan philosophy, they actually use them very differently. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The key examples of the "ruthless" pursuit of liberalism that came to my mind is the US attempt to foist liberal democracy and social norms on Iraq and Afghanistan by force of arms, — Count Timothy von Icarus

For them liberalism is an abomination; becasue it allows difference of opinion, it allows false belief. — Banno

Liberal theorists have long been offering solutions to this paradox. Whether they have succeeded in theory is questionable.[2] Whether they or any others have succeeded in practice seems plain to view. They have not. All those in professedly liberal states who, for whatever reason, do not accept the liberal doctrine, or are suspected of not doing so, become enemies of the state. They must at the very least be watched carefully, and if their unbelief in any way proceeds to attack against the liberal state and its interests at home or abroad, they must be hunted down and rendered harmless. The liberal state has proved itself as ruthless against its opponents as any illiberal state is supposed to have done. — Peter L. P. Simpson, Policital Illiberalism: A Defense of Freedom, 3

Do you think that all murderers necessarily think of themselves as murderers rather than, for instance, as committing acts that according to their moral compass was justified? — Joshs

I really like Hadot. His "Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates of Foucault" is quite good, although I do think he misses some of the important ways the Christian tradition of late antiquity differs from the Pagan — Count Timothy von Icarus

That dogma in fact arises out of the Judeo-Christian premise that every human being is created in the image of God. This was an anthropological premise which logically grounded what has now become the liberal dogma. The liberal wants to retain the dogma while dispensing with the Judeo-Christian support. — Leontiskos

I don’t wish to shut down the search for meaning, despite my view that meaning is made, not found. — Banno

Here's the rub: What's the alternative? — Banno

A shared vision is not an authoritarian religious regime.
— Wayfarer
I'm not assuming it is. — Banno

The idea that we need a shared vision of the good to live together—that’s exactly what liberalism resists. — Banno

Ancient philosophy ...is animated by a concern for people to live well. To be a philosopher in ancient times, just meant that you had to be committed to wisdom. You could be a philosopher in the robust sense and never publish anything. You wouldn't meet minimum performance standards at the University of Sydney. You would practice these disciplines. One of my main thinkers is a French philosopher who collated these together and gave us a palette of spiritual exercises.

For Hadot, famously, the means for the philosophical student to achieve the “complete reversal of our usual ways of looking at things” epitomized by the Sage were a series of spiritual exercises. These exercises encompassed all of those practices still associated with philosophical teaching and study: reading, listening, dialogue, inquiry, and research. However, they also included practices deliberately aimed at addressing the student’s larger way of life, and demanding daily or continuous repetition: practices of attention (prosoche), meditations (meletai), memorizations of dogmata, self-mastery (enkrateia), the therapy of the passions, the remembrance of good things, the accomplishment of duties, and the cultivation of indifference towards indifferent things (PWL 84).Hadot acknowledges his use of the term “spiritual exercises” may create anxieties, by associating philosophical practices more closely with religious devotion than typically done (Nussbaum 1996, 353-4; Cooper 2010). Hadot’s use of the adjective “spiritual” (or sometimes “existential”) indeed aims to capture how these practices, like devotional practices in the religious traditions (6a), are aimed at generating and reactivating a constant way of living and perceiving in prokopta, despite the distractions, temptations, and difficulties of life. For this reason, they call upon far more than “reason alone.” They also utilize rhetoric and imagination in order “to formulate the rule of life to ourselves in the most striking and concrete way” and aim to actively re-habituate bodily passions, impulses, and desires...

And still, what is the alternative? — Banno

For Lefebvre, liberalism isn’t an economic theory, but a moral and political framework for coordinating life among individuals with different wants, values, and needs. It’s not about GDP. It’s about decency. — Banno

And how can man turn to the spirituality of the erotic ascent if he has been taught—has been indoctrinated into—the belief that Eros is fundamentally a matter of acquisition and consumption, a laying claim to a commodity (a commodity that "dimishes when shared," and so which sets up a dialectical of competition)? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Are you comfortable having "the wise" tell you what you can and can't do? With them enforcing their view through state-sanctioned violence? — Banno

I agree that liberalism is preferable to collectivism or theocratic culture where values are imposed. But at the same time, there is a kind of hollowness at the core of the secular culture with which liberalism is entwined. — Wayfarer

Classical thought doesn’t settle the question—it opens it. — Banno

The idea inherent in all idealistic metaphysics–that the world is in some sense a product of the mind–is thus turned into its opposite: the mind is a product of the world, of the processes of nature. Hence, according to popular Darwinism, nature does not need philosophy to speak for her: nature, a powerful and venerable deity, is ruler rather than ruled. Darwinism ultimately comes to the aid of rebellious nature in undermining any doctrine, theological or philosophical, that regards nature itself as expressing a truth that reason must try to recognize. The equating of reason with nature, by which reason is debased and raw nature exalted, is a typical fallacy of the era of rationalization. Instrumentalized subjective reason either eulogizes nature as pure vitality or disparages it as brute force, instead of treating it as a text to be interpreted by philosophy that, if rightly read, will unfold a tale of infinite suffering. Without committing the fallacy of equating nature and reason, mankind must try to reconcile the two.

In traditional theology and metaphysics, the natural was largely conceived as the evil, and the spiritual or supernatural as the good. In popular Darwinism, the good is the well-adapted, and the value of that to which the organism adapts itself is unquestioned or is measured only in terms of further adaptation. However, being well adapted to one’s surroundings is tantamount to being capable of coping successfully with them, of mastering the forces that beset one. Thus the theoretical denial of the spirit’s antagonism to nature–even as implied in the doctrine of interrelation between the various forms of organic life, including man–frequently amounts in practice to subscribing to the principle of man’s continuous and thoroughgoing domination of nature. Regarding reason as a natural organ does not divest it of the trend to domination or invest it with greater potentialities for reconciliation. On the contrary, the abdication of the spirit in popular Darwinism entails the rejection of any elements of the mind that transcend the function of adaptation and consequently are not instruments of self-preservation. Reason disavows its own primacy and professes to be a mere servant of natural selection. On the surface, this new empirical reason seems more humble toward nature than the reason of the metaphysical tradition. Actually, however, it is arrogant, practical mind riding roughshod over the ‘useless spiritual,’ and dismissing any view of nature in which the latter is taken to be more than a stimulus to human activity.

The effects of this view are not confined to modern philosophy. — Max Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason, Pp 10-11

What do social animals need? How can a society of animals get the maximum portion of what they need with a minimum of suffering? — Vera Mont

On Monday afternoon, Harvard became the first university to refuse to comply with the administration’s requirements, setting up a showdown between the federal government and the nation’s wealthiest university. By the evening, federal officials said they would freeze $2.2 billion in multiyear grants to Harvard, along with a $60 million contract.

There's an excellent account of liberalism to be found in the work of the Professor of Politics and Philosophy at The University of Sydney, Alexander Lefebvre. Lefebvre shows how liberal ideas developed as a way of coordinating individual needs and wants, and how much of the general ethic underpinning our interpersonal relations is implicitly liberal. Liberalism is a practical ethic for life among equals. It's embedded in how we relate; in respect, consent, reciprocity. We live in liberal ways, often without noticing. Liberalism isn’t just a political system or economic ideology. It’s also a moral culture—something ordinary, even beautiful, in how we deal with one another. — Banno

The idea that the physical properties of particles are why particles combine, but are not why certain groups of particles are conscious, is not a contradiction. — Patterner

The physical properties of particles are why particles combine, and the subjective experience of particles is why certain groups of particles have a group consciousness.

There is no contradiction between the two parts of that sentence. — Patterner

The justices endorsed Judge Xinis’s previous order that required the administration to “facilitate” the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia. But they stopped short of actually ordering his return, indicating that even federal courts may not have the authority to require the executive branch to do so.

And yet Mr. Miller, in his appearance on Fox News and in the Oval Office, portrayed the ruling as an unmitigated victory for the Trump administration.

He said, for instance, that the Supreme Court’s instructions that the White House had to “facilitate” getting Mr. Abrego Garcia out of custody meant that Trump officials could assume an entirely passive stance toward his release.

“If El Salvador voluntarily sends him back,” Mr. Miller said on Fox News, “we wouldn’t block him at the airport.”

But whether that position flies with Judge Xinis remains to be seen. She has scheduled a hearing to discuss what the government should do for Tuesday in Federal District Court in Maryland.

Testing what? If Trump can follow normal practice of power under the constitution of the US, or if the guardrails of US democracy actually works? — Christoffer

Is the US too corrupt, too stupid, or too incompetent? — Christoffer

I like Dawkins, but his view is human centric — James Dean Conroy

We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. — Richard Dawkins, preface to The Selfish Gene, 2nd Edition