What might religious people have against secularism? — TiredThinker
secularism is the dominant principle of society which, by design, leaves room for religious practice — Bitter Crank
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.”
Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.
The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.
The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.” — Stanley Fish
— Stanley Fish — Wayfarer
'religious people as opposed to secular people' already injects an air of adversity into the discussion. — Wayfarer
I think of the world as a gleaming machine that is larger than any of us. We are its teeth and its food. — five G
It seems like secularists and religionists have opposed each other for quite some time. — Bitter Crank
1) the separation of religious institutions from the institutions of the state; 2) freedom of conscience for all individuals, circumscribed only by the need for public order and the respect of the rights of other individuals; 3) no discrimination by the state against individuals on the basis of their beliefs.
2) freedom of conscience for all individuals, circumscribed only by the need for public order and the respect of the rights of other individuals;
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. — Stanley Fish
Another aspect of the secular state is that it is concerned with providing the economic and physical infrastructure within which citizens are free to practice any religion or none. — Wayfarer
We don't bother to figure out where it's all going, perhaps because it's impossible. — five G
he also stresses that religions need not be true in order to function and even dominate — five G
Isn't that the 'creative destruction of capitalism?' Constantly reinventing itself, always rushing towards the new, the new tomorrow, the new product, the new idea. John Coltrane, jazz saxophinist, was tormented by having to reinvent music all the time, jazz became cliched - as soon as it was recorded it was no longer sufficiently new. — Wayfarer
They weren't simply dream states or hallucinations, he actually vogaged to these realms through dreams. I think any kind of mystical transport will be like that. It will be an awareness of entire domain or realm of being which all us mortals, the hoi polloi, would never be aware of. Not anywhere spatio-temporal but on a different plane altogether. Those who visit come back speaking of visions, and we think they're seeing things or making it up.
Actually the final myth of secularism is space travel, really. The conquest of the stars. I'm sure it's the sublimated longing for heaven or 'the life eternal' in material form. — Wayfarer
Erudite and scientifically informed but shallow, in my opinion. — Wayfarer
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