10.30.08
Religion, secularism, the eonic effect
Many of the confusions of religion and secularism clarify if we expand the scale to include the whole of world history.
And I can only recommend a study of the eonic effect to get a grip on the way evolution is undergoing its strange transformations in the evolution of civilization. The Axial Age is at first baffling, but the key to many issues, seen rightly.
We can see that the impulse to proceed beyond religion in a secular modernity, as discussed in the previous two posts, is an historic impulse with a sound foundation, save only that you must graduate from the evelenth grade to go to the twelfth. Ay, there’s the rub. You can’t skip grades.
Science, instead, is producing something like technical experts, who are hillbillies.
Secularists need to transcend religion, and not regress to something less.
Modern secularism, in the fashion many take it, is based on amnesia about the past, and simple negation. The problem with transcending religion is that you must understand what you are transcending and go to something higher and better. And, by and large, secular society is doing that. But…
But it seems that now we are getting sidetracked in the Dawkins-style atheism crusade. OK, up to a point, if that’s what you feel like doing. But keep in mind that religion is not about ‘god’, or ‘no god’. The question of god, relative to secular society, is not the issue. Yak, yak, yak, god, no god. It is a game Kant exposed completely. What not just change terminology and start over.
Kant, it should be noted, spoke of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’. That formulation seems antique now, but the point was that in the context of the Enlightenment the difficulties of religion could be addressed philosophically in a secular context.
It helps to really study the modern transition, to see what really happened, so that the false equation of the enlightenment with fundamentalist science and Darwinism is seen to be false. It is a dangerous dumbing down that is feeding the resurgence of religion.
And it is critical to broaden education. Scientists should stop setting themselves as spokesman for ultimate reality based on physics training, or half-baked talking points based on Darwinian biology.
The road to historical understanding of religion is long, and there aren’t any shortcuts.
The modern scientific cadre, let’s face it, is ignorant at all points save the technical details of science specialties. Let specialists be specialists. But the grasp of what real secularism is requires a much broader study of modernity. And that’s the irony of the situation. Too many secularists champion their freedom from religion in the name of secularism. But they don’t even understand their own secularism, or its history.