07.26.09
Prerequisites for religion discussions
Here are a few issues and tasks needed for a religion discussion, invariably absent in the current crop of scientific commenters on religion:
the ‘god’ issue is perhaps the least important: the concept of god, and its label are so confused that it might help to drop the term ‘god’ and start over with new concepts and terms. The Israelites used the ‘hyper-onymous referential IHVH’ to evade the semanticc quicksand here. They failed, but at least secularists can learn something here. Unfortunately the god concept is useful football and they are often the worst offenders in its use.
Some discussion of the Axial Age is essential, since it shows how religion evolved in historical times, in opposite directions. The total silence on this (except in Karen Armstrong who, revealingly, distorted the evidence out of shape) by most scientists shows that they are afraid of the hard evidence of something macroevolutionary at work in the emergence of religion.
The Armstrong tactic of sausaging religion is totally useless, a failed propaganda tactic. The basic conceptual gateway to, say, Buddhism must be respected for what it is, and must be referred to in its classic terminology of ‘enlightenment’, reincarnation, etc,….
the list goes on, and is long.
The bad habit of commentators referring to ‘religion’ when they mean Christianity, which is criticized, the criticism then left to apply to all religion is outrageous….
In general, adherents of Darwinism, and its crackpot thesis about the evolution of altruism, should be considered crackpots on the subject of religion/secularism discussions.
People like Wright and Armstrong are dangerous and will provoke violent reactions in the end. Who wants to be analyzed like specimens by the likes of Wright, Armstrong, or the New Atheists using Darwinian categories. It is the most imbecile substitute for science.