Reading: Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Hardcover)
by Stuart Kauffman (Author)
Kauffman is one of the major critics of standard Darwinism, and this book (which I will comment on later) continues the saga of self-organization, which confronts the ID challenge head on, without finally settling its own question.
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Is There At Least One Self-Evident Moral Truth?
Surprisingly, Christianity has a hard time answering this, at least to the satisfaction of skeptics: time for some Kantian studies of the categorical imperative, and a question for our Nietzschean secularists (as opposed to non-Nietzschean secularists): do Kant’s deductions resolve the question, and do so, contrary to appearances in Kant’s writings, by makind divinity secondary to the derivation.
The New Atheists have (or had) an opening here: Kantian attempts at such derivation, however problematical, give form to the question. But our Darwinian ideologists are too enamored of the economic real-politik scofflaw Nietzschean social darwinist free-for-all to actually press their case for an intelligent ‘new atheism’.
And they wonder why fundamentalism is resurgent.
James comments on Science, atheism, and metaphysics:
Somehow I don’t think that evangelicals reflect Kant’s subtle views
Right-O, but actually there is a branch of Kantians trying to invade Kant-Studien for evangelicals: check out Stephen Palmquist (type Kant in Google, and his large site is somewhere in the top five to ten), and the Kant-L at yahoo (after the old original pre-yahoo Kant-L was shutdown, in part to escape my clutches, sorry) was for a while little more than an evangelical kant list.
It is worth considering (and the eonic materials, especially the third edition) Hegel’s remark that he was the completion of the Protestant Reformation. That seems a bit presumptuous, but his point is apt. Between the Reformation and the phase of German Classical Philosophy we see a unity as the revolution in religion issues in the modern age, next to science, and then is taken to a new level of intellible discourse by the sudden and mysterious explosion of philosophy, especially Kant. You can, of course, argue that the completion of the completion takes off, on the one hand, in direction of Schopenhauer, evocative of Buddhism, and on the other (beside Hegel) Feuerbach (and the biblical critics, socialists, etc,, of the 1840’s), thence downshifting into scientism. The peak moment seems to be Kant to me, although the gesture of Hegel, whatever you think of him, tackled more directly with the actuality of religion confronted with modernity.
I don’t buy it, but Hegel’s gesture shows his ‘boast’ to be in some fashion correct: Protestantism moves thusly to an abstraction that sublates beyond theism and atheism (’spirit, Geist’???) to end in a dialectical mystery evocative of non-dual Vedanta, etc,…
If you look at figures like Tillich (and he is but one instance) or even Kiergergaard, the influence of this ‘upgrade’ is obvious.
I should think then that Protestants (and Christians) ought to wonder if they aren’t still frozen in time, and the ‘religion within the limits of reason’, to use Kant’s phrase, has passed them by, only to be trampled by the persistent momentum of traditionalist mobbing of modernity, Newton’s third law of religious idiocy.
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Kant’s views on theism have deprived too many of the insights he gives into metaphysics. I am not a theist (or atheist or agnostic) and don’t bat an eyelash at the theistic formalism that emerges from his ethical theory. It seems unfortunately however that vestigial religious concepts got an upgrade that traditionalists can’t appreciate. Kant’s remarks on ‘faith’ settle the question, but tend to fall back into sub-orbital religiosity using Kantian language.
Schopenhauer must have noted the theological cooptation of Kant and thought it fitting to strip the whole vestigial conceptual structure of theological jargon away from transcendental idealism.
Actually, to me, Kant is a clever atheist who saw fit in the context of his own time to recast theism into something that wasn’t really theism. But the point is a battle for the body of Patroclus, witness the activities of the Palmquist gang who wish to recast Kant as a religious traditionalist.
James comments on Vegetarian Religion
Excellent comment, but I should offer a pro forma challenge to any ‘tradition’ that says Gautama wasn’t a vegetarian. The stakes are hight for such a possibility, so the interpolators could also be charged with mischief here.
I really don’t know, but I doubt that Gautama, hard-pressed and competing with the Jains, would have compromised here. But of course we don’t really know.
But we do know that despite all the vagaries of Hinduism, that tradition remained fixed on this issue, to its great benefit.
Comment from SK: i didn’t think tibetan buddhists we re traditionally vegetarian, were they?.
The problem here is that primordial Buddhism was aggressively vegetarian. Yet by the medieval period the spread of the religion is compromising, or forgetting this. The original Buddhists would have considered such a great decline in their teaching.The problem is one of discontinuity, restoration, and renewal: as the fate of Tibetan Buddhism hangs in the balance, and suffers a period of discontinuity, the question arises as to its potential restoration: which Buddhism is to be restored?
Second Letter to a Christian Nation Read the rest of this entry »
For Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and others, religion in general is a poison that has fuelled violence and oppression throughout history, right up to the present day. The urgency with which they produce their anti-religious polemics suggests that a change has occurred as significant as the rise of terrorism: the tide of secularisation has turned. These writers come from a generation schooled to think of religion as a throwback to an earlier stage of human development, which is bound to dwindle away as knowledge continues to increase. In the 19th century, when the scientific and industrial revolutions were changing society very quickly, this may not have been an unreasonable assumption. Dawkins, Hitchens and the rest may still believe that, over the long run, the advance of science will drive religion to the margins of human life, but this is now an article of faith rather than a theory based on evidence.
It is not atheism that is the problem, as such. But the puerile attitude toward religion and the refusal to even study it, or consider its broader context.
The New Atheists should consider the legacy of the Feuerbachian generation that spawned Marxism, for example, and then consider the extermination tactics going on in Tibet.
The seeds you sow will bear fruit in the fruits, the charge of violence against religion being hypocritical, since violent atheist attempts to violently destroy, e.g. Buddhism, are suddenly front-page news.
I should note that Christians of a certain ilk will certain stand by and secretly support this extermination of their rivals.
Noone is objecting to a critique of religion, but the current efforts based on Darwinian, scientistic, and one-dimensional humanistic approachs are self-defeating.
Thanks for your comment, I was worried, and also wary that someone might actually try my ‘meditation retreat’ suggestion, which was a bad one, since 1. I don’t do retreats (I am not a guru), and 2. I didn’t describe the situation referred to, which was far too severe to induce meditative states.
As to fakirs, much of the spirituality of Sufism was done among beggars, wanderers, and in situations modern surburbanites would find not to their liking (including jihadic battlefield situations of a harrowing nature). But then again difficult situations are often counterproductive to development, so who can say. I am not a sufi, nor do I have a ’spiritual path’, so my remarks, actually, were misleading. But fakirs are fakirs, wanderers, homeless persons, and ‘idiots’ at the next to last stop.
If you can eat garbage and ride freightrains you can survive handily in a dynamic economy like the American. It can be tremendously relaxing to suddenly stand outside the economic system, outside of its pressure, it is a miniature enlightenment in itself to suddenly see your ‘robot motivator’ unhooked from the social machine.
But such liberations are brief, and there is no real ‘outside the system’, so courting the outsider’s existence is not, as such, the answer to anything. The hobo’s path tends to be downhill.
The classic buddhists, one should note, did court outsider status, and did so systematically, ritually, and quite practically, as a group exercise. Beggars bowls and world renunciation. In that form the outside path chugged uphill.
But it is better to never imitate anyone, so I will file away these autobiographical details.
Here’s a link to some photographs to the Dalai Lama’s residence: Dalai Lama’s excessively ritzy crash pad with a superficial spiritual decor.
I feel compassion for the Dalai Lama: he is the victim of events, and as a reborn boddhissattwa he starts life from scratch, like every other honest joe. Recovering the starting point you once achieved can be difficult, let alone advancing from that, and for a high lama, maybe impossible: caught up in politics. That’s the catch in Tibetan lama system, perhaps. How would I know? Just some thoughts, or worries at the Tibet disaster.
I say this because Tibetans are having a problem and they don’t seem to be able to proceed in a practical fashion towards resolving the Tibetan problem.
by Brian Fitzpatrick, Senior Editor
Culture and Media Institute
http://www.mrc.org/listmanager.asp
3/24/2008
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Tibet is caught in an acute difficulty, a theatre of rightist and leftist collision. The previous post cites a leftist expose routine, but its point is nonetheless essential to consider: Behind the anti-anti-China Olympics campaign. The left, witness the action of the Marxist cadres, a truly braindead faction of, yes, the bourgeoisie at its most sadistic, is clearly at a dead end, culturally if not politically.
But the real threat from the right springs from lamaism itself whose history is ambiguous, and almost unknown, and never properly told (almost impossible to do). Read the rest of this entry »
Since it’s easter it is worth reiterating what I posted last easter (or the year before), noting that Anthony Flew is under severe slippage on this: Flew Impressed by Evidence for Resurrection: Resurrection: Fact or Fantasy. Read the rest of this entry »
The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris
By Chris Hedges, Free Press. Posted March 22, 2008.
From demonizing Muslims to believing we can use science for our own moral advancement, the New Atheists preach a dangerous faith.
“I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (Free Press, 2008) by Chris Hedges.Share and save this post:
The following is adapted from the new book by Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists (Free Press, 2008). Read the rest of this entry »
The link on Parenti on Tibet, cf. earlier post today.
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Christians Clash Over Whether or Not to Be Green [VIDEO]
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Chris Hedges, salon
A lot of people would find it counterintuitive that you would go from your last book, “American Fascists,” which was a scathing critique of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S., to writing against atheism. Do you see these as connected projects?
I do. Read the rest of this entry »
Comment on More on Kantian Ethics
James said,
March 11, 2008 at 7:52 pm ·
I think it depends on what you mean by “Buddhism.” Classical Theravada, for instance, explicitly rejects the “crazy wisdom” ideas of the Mahayana non-dual systems and other Indian religions. Theravada scripture, for instance, would claim that the precepts (categorical imperatives) will naturally be followed as one attains stages of “realization:”
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James comments on Kantian Ethics 101.
James said,
March 11, 2008 at 1:13 pm
“Even if we back away from Kant’s strict thinking, we are left with the acute nature of his stylized analysis which uncovers something deep that Buddhists must confront as the barrier of ‘desire’ blocks the deeper man. ”How so?
Actually, I think you are doing a doubletake here, since associating Buddhism with Kantian ethics is counterintuitive, and in many ways quite false. Many yogis and self-styled esoteric spiritual types (consider Gurdjieff or Crowley) are quite hoitytoidy and consider themselves quite beyond mere ethics for mortals, it seems. Crowley almost seems to produce a demonic mockery of the Kantian discourse on will. Who gets the last laugh?
My point was merely that where a ‘Buddhist’ would use meditation to generate consciousness in the friction between the desire body and some higher aspect of himself, an active ethical self-realization after the manner of Kant would produce essentially the same effect, at least in theory (what a difficult discipline), a point long lost in Christian religious churches but historically present in some orthodox monastic traditions, and certainly in many sufistic traditions. Study the Pietist movement(s) in the mainline of Protestantism (kant’s background, which he rejected, but which influenced his ethical cast of mind), and you see something like attempts at active spiritual practice, too often resulting in cultic confusions, but nonetheless the closest humble Christians come to the world of meditation.
But, perhaps, your head-scratching ‘how so’ is right. We can’t really equate such different things. I will say, again, that the strangely arrogant stance of many who consider themselves esoteric spiritual wonders toward the spiritual commoners in exoteric religion gets a bit tiresome in my book. The ordinar religionist may be in a hopeless muddle, but who isn’t, the ethical void of many high-priced gurus (high priced whores) simply shows the way they have sold their will for the ‘cheap success’ of high octane self-consciousness.
There is an important clue to such types: most wouldn’t be intelligent enough to grasp Kantian thinking, and hide behind their ‘higher consciousness’ with pompous bluff.
I am no fan of that especial devil Gurdjieff, but he at least pointed to the fact that the ‘path of will’ stands beyond the paths of the yogis. Well, maybe, but who has found that way? It is a latent evolutionary possibility that none of us has the wit to realize.
Actually, it is always with us, and always has been, in the default, or defunct, format of Christianity (or Islam, etc…). The beings in this path are on this path by a technicality of logic, but everything after that is the daily turnover of their ‘original sins’.
See my point, and don’t take that the wrong way. We can condescend, and reject, Christianity, and perhaps with good reason, but it’s worth going to see a AA meeting, a congress of ‘hopeless cases’, real drunks, sitting through their ‘path of will’ that has no ‘will’ whatsoever, but perhaps some possibility of ‘repentance’ or redemption (both decayed terms of the path of ‘will’). This goes a long way toward explaining our difficulty with something like Christianity as we mature and wish to move beyond it (and we should be free to do so).
Anyway Kantian ethics is like an apparition out of the blue. Note that it is a gesture of philosophy, an abstraction. It may be of no practical use!? Kant insists on the significance of ‘ordinary moral understanding’ and claims no more than to try and clarify the basis of what is already present in the most ordinary of men (a species character, as it were), but subject to confusions and blights on its inherent vitality as an aspect of human nature.
The comments in previous post referenced Kant’s moral theory. Here’s a quick link:
Philosophy 302: Ethics Kantian Ethics, below.
Nemo: Kant raises a question that haunts Buddhists and yogis: the nature of will, desire, and inclination.
Kant’s strict moralism seems at first foreign to standard public usage, but the interaction of will and inclination is a crucial one. Even if we back away from Kant’s strict thinking, we are left with the acute nature of his stylized analysis which uncovers something deep that Buddhists must confront as the barrier of ‘desire’ blocks the deeper man. Kant, no yogi, nevertheless stumbled on this through the pure contemplation of ethics.Here’s a short snapshot from the link source, with the remarkable gist, “Kant believes only actions performed for the sake of duty have moral worth”:
Introduction: An attraction to the Kantian doctrines of obligation is begun along the following lines:
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Having raised the question of ‘mysticism’ with ’sillykitty’ in several posts: Schopenhauer and atheism, here, and here.
Sillykitty, I denied the label ‘mystic’, and for good reason. Read the rest of this entry »
The Lippard blog has some info on the Dawkins lecture tour: Richard Dawkins lecture at ASU.
The question of Dawkins’ intemperate views on religion is not especially relevant. Who, after all, expressed the most intemperate views of all on the subject of religion? the religionist Rajnesh (cf. his The Rajneesh Bible) as he founded his new ‘religion’!
The problem is that Darwinists are stuck on the metaphysical illusions of natural selection and can’t for the life of them grasp anything about what religion is about, its history or its tendency to produce large-scale movements degenerating into ‘mega-cults’ with mechanized cadres suffering mechanized consciousness. The latter is what secularists tend to call ‘religion’, but the dimensions of religion are larger. Attacking these symptoms doesn’t define the nature of religion. Read the rest of this entry »
NY Times, March 4, 2008
Generation Faithful
Violence Leaves Young Iraqis Doubting Clerics
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
via Marxmail
BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq,
exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious
extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and
skeptical of the faith that they preach.
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From Dawkins site
Leaving the Faith
BigThink.com, Ayaan Hirsi Ali
See many more videos like this at:
http://bigthink.com
Leaving the Faith: Ayaan Hirsi Ali went from political Islam to apostasy. How has her attitude toward the religion changed?
http://www.bigthink.com/features/284
More videos by Ayaan:
http://www.bigthink.com/user/ayaan-hirsi-ali
Videos by Sam Harris:
http://www.bigthink.com/user/sam-harris
Comment on Religion and Violence.
The commentere is apparently the same ‘John’ who has submitted a series of spam comments for that creepy guru Da Free John
I don’t find this kine of one-sided denigration particularly appropriate, especially from the Da Free John quarter.
The violence and savagery of the Hindus against the Buddhists (who weren’t choir boys either) pretty well scotches this idyllic view of the world of gurus and their ashrams. Is the Bhagavad Gita not about religious war? Forget Gandhi’s finesse here. The Gita is a now distorted war cry in the war against Buddhism from the reactionary neo-Brahmins, and a figure like Da Free John is certainly among that number.
So, spare us your ashram/guru propaganda. Da Free John is an especially nasty predator.
Hitchens and Boteach’s Great Debate
It’s one thing to oppose religion, but that doesn’t guarantee understanding it.
What about the Old Testament in the context of the Axial Age?
Secularists have missed something (as have religionists).