Hi Arlo
> What has happened is that the neutering of religion by this secular > philosophy has left "religion" scrambling to re-identify with the > very anti-theistic philosophy that neutered it. It has tried to > re-invent itself as a proponent of the "freedom of man" when any > simple read through history has shown that "religion" has NEVER been > about man's "freedom". It took a thousand years and the collision > with a new people for "man" to wake up to the call of secular > enlightenment, and we should never forget that. This re-imaging of > "religion" is the fallout of "religion's" need to find its power in a > post-enlightenment world. DM: My background is totally non-religious. I was brought up to value the Enlightenment, freedom, democracy. However, after doing my best to make sense of the Enlightement and its benefits and problems I find myself very concerned by the dualism and scientism of the Enlightenment and interested in what both high romanticism, idealism and eventually post-modernism have to say about the limitations and ideology of the Enlightenment. In this context, I am concerned about the ideology of secularism and its entanglement with SOM. This SOM based secularism undermines the value of many aspects of experience as merely subjective. And it seems to think that knowledge can be attained via an impossibly value- neutral objectivity. Now if we reject this SOM and see our values and knowledge as inseparable and all our activity as pragmatic forms of life, where does this leave religion post-Enlightenment? Whilst accepting that religion has been strongly tied to social control and ideology, is not a part of religion about upholding values? I wonder, does not a post-enlightenment idea of values not mean that we, in as far as religion is a matter of values, need to be more open to allowing religious people to hold and explore whatever values they hold? Whilst if we are more secular recognising that this simply means we hold different values rather than somehow having better access to the truth. Is this not what diversity and pluralism really requires? Equally, we also need to insist that all people recognise that values differ and that we all have to learn to live with people who have different values and we have to find appropriate compromises where these conflict and accept that values and people change and can choose to move between different communities. David M Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
