07.09.09
‘God’ idea stillborn in Axial religions
Comment on Kant, Freedom, ….
Stephen P. Smith said,
July 8, 2009 at 8:24 pm ·
What is viable has to do with sufficiency. Freedom is stuck on necessity. It is necessary that we are free, but freedom won`t help the person dying of cancer. The dying person must find something sufficient, but that does not involve freedom. It involves the hard work of dying, and complete surrender.Freedom is the work of the secular.
Sufficiency is the work of religion.
Hucklebird, I think some kind of conservative boilerplate is stuck in your craw.
The dialectics of freedom leaves plenty of room for its negation. But is that the point here? Not at all.
In general freedom is a higher value than religion. In fact, religion, as modernity makes clear, threatens to become a superflous category, if not a superfluous activity. Religion is only a propaedeutic. And it might fail, at which point we can set it aside.
Whether freedom can help a person dying of cancer or not is not an argument relevant to the emergence of freedom in evolution/history. It is worth thinking about, but is it a relevant issue to our more general use of the term ‘freedom’?
The point is that the incomplete pseudo-religions of antiquity were unable to complete the metaphysics of ‘god’ and ‘soul’ with an idea of freedom (which also arose in parallel at the same time, but in Greece).
The three, ‘god’, ‘soul’, and ‘free will’ were the metaphysical grand triad in Kant’s critique of metaphysics, and should be the complete categories for religious discourse, instead of the pseudo-divinity of authoritarian religion, which made man, wrongly, subject to a kind of divine kingship, and other bullshit.
So the idea of god was stillborn in ancient religion. Perhaps man of the future in his secular bastion can remedy the lack.
Stephen P. Smith said,
July 9, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Freedom is necessary to find a deeper significance in one`s life. This much is true. But freedom for freedom`s sake does not deliver the deeper signigificance, because what we seek is not a mere condition of necessity. We seek what is found sufficient, and that has to do with the hard work that is able to reach above the sense of entitlement that freedom offers. That we reap what we sow is a higher ideal than freedom for freedom`s sake.
Freedom is the work of the secular.
Sufficiency is the work of religion.
nemo said,
July 9, 2009 at 8:44 pm
You seem to caught in a reactionary mode peddled by certain New Age gurus, to say nothing of religious conservatives, who are ambitious to undermine modernity.
Your arguments about freedom are suspicious in that regard, especially since the usage of the term ‘freedom’ as I have used it is so innocuous.
nemo said,
July 9, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Hucklebird, I doubt that you are a conservative at all. You have been kidnapped in mind in the same way as Armstrong to be a propaganda mouthpiece. Snap out of it.
It is not a funny question, and you get no license to indulge stupidities that hurt people.
So I think this nonsense is a put on.
In the end there is no forgiveness here, keep that in mind. Make no mistake.
These rightwingers are destroying an entire civilization and don’t care. If that is your game remember that there is no resolution except through violence.
Stephen P. Smith said,
July 9, 2009 at 9:38 pm
What others teach, I also teach; that is:
“A violent man will die a violent death!”
This will be the essence of my teaching.
But I only agree with these words, they come from:
http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu42.html
nemo said,
July 10, 2009 at 12:49 pm
There can be noone more violent than the conservative fascists you embrace.
The Axial Age | God idea stillborn in Axial religions? said,
July 12, 2009 at 4:24 pm
[...] ‘God’ idea stillborn in Axial religions [...]
God idea stillborn in Axial Age | Kant’s Challenge said,
July 12, 2009 at 4:26 pm
[...] from Darwiniana [...]