Hi All, Here is an interesting article on Richard Rorty's take on the my question about the pragmatists response to religious dogmatism: http://newhumanist.simple501.com/1440
I found it very consistent with Matt's and DMB's take. Some quotes: "The Enlightenment dethroned the divine—and Rorty was plenty glad for it—but replaced it, as Rorty saw it, with new, secular gods like Nature, Reason, Truth, Reality, and Human Nature. (He uppercased these terms to emphasise what he viewed as their exaltation or fetishization.) We are just as badly in need of eschewing God's surrogates as of God—in fact even more so, Rorty argued, because of the loosening of religion's grip on us over the last century. Religion, he remarked in 1997, "is not as much of an issue as it was in 1900." (At least not in Western Europe, he might have thought to add.) While religion in the secularised West may no longer possess the power it once did, Rorty held that we remain firmly under the spell of a foundationalism every bit as fantastic as its supernatural predecessor: we think of our beliefs and truth-claims, however secular, as corresponding to and grounded upon a reality existing beyond the language games we've invented to get on in the world. (For Rorty, they do no such thing.) ... "Scientific realism and religious fundamentalism," he argued, "are products of the same urge." Both, he said, "are private projects which have got out of hand. They are attempts to make one's own private way of giving meaning to one's own life—a way which romanticises one's relation to something starkly and magnificently nonhuman, something Ultimately True and Real—obligatory for the general public." "Whereas the philosophers who claim that atheism, unlike theism, is backed up by evidence would say that religious belief is irrational," he wrote in 2002, "contemporary secularists like myself are content to say that it is politically dangerous. On our view, religion is unobjectionable as long as it is privatised." Even in one of Rorty's most passionately secularist essays (the felicitously titled "Religion as Conversation-stopper"), he challenged his fellow atheists: there is hypocrisy, he insisted, "in saying that believers somehow have no right to base their political views on their religious faith, whereas we atheists have every right to base ours on Enlightenment philosophy. The claim that in doing so we are appealing to reason, whereas the religious are being irrational, is hokum." Rorty thus urged a shifting of the ground in arguments for secularism away from the question of religion's Objective Truth—a concept he regarded as fictional and one we'd be better off if we dropped. Thus the "principal concern" of secularists, he argued, "must be the extent to which the actions of religious believers frustrate the needs of other human beings, rather than the extent to which religion gets something right" (or wrong)." So it seems to me that the concern for atheist pragmatists is not so much about correcting people's private beliefs but keeping religious beliefs out of the public square. How is that accomplished? Whatever the defenses that have been tried, the religious right seems to have mounted a counter-attack on the wall of separation with dubious arguments about the Christianity of the Founding Fathers. Regards, Steve 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/
