Originally Posted by
MSG Proctor
ptamas:
Without insulting you with an anthropology lesson, man is inherently religious whether his religion is Wahabbist Islam or secular liberalism.
None taken.
The first thing that gets me concerned is when folks think they have a universal truth (today this would be secular liberalism) and act on that basis.
quote from a paper I wrote in '04 never published
Dobkin Hall argues that it is “likely that both the rationales and the methods of bureaucratic and corporate organization [in North America] actually emerged from the domain of religion and spread from there to economic, political and social situations”(Dobkin Hall, 1998 p. 101). Hall continues from this point by mentioning that a major industrial player (‘Pope’ Dwight) and his companions in New England:
became early promoters not only of voluntary organizations with explicitly religious purposes — Bible, tract and missionary societies — but also secular organizations — reform, temperance, education, charitable, and other societies, as well as schools and colleges — which could act on the unchurched masses and move them towards the Light. (ibid., p. 104)
Second,
Where I may differ is in the ease with which you use the term 'religious'. We have a specific notion of 'religious' here. Ours is a history informed both by the wars of religion and the perfusion of Protestant values with, now, an thick overlay of new forms of religious expression most of which are constituted within bounds tolerable to the sort of pluralism that we have snowballed into (there is lots of good work out there on the limits of pluralist states whose conditions of formation did not anticipate and can not accommodate new forms of expression). That is our history.
Other folks have had very different histories and what we call religious may not map tidily onto the world in which they live. I work with the assumption that folks' horizons (secular liberals included) are suffused with the ideological/symbolic/theological/mystical (whatever term works) but I get itchy when folks use our constructs without caveat cause that leads us to think that we can understand their realities.
That conceit has cost many lives.
-peter
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