Hi all, Can an MOQer make the claim that theists are irrational?
Jeffrey Stout from "Rorty on Religion and Politics: "Because Rorty and I have both been persuaded by our pragmatist forebears to treat rationality as a more permissive and context-sensitive notion than Victorian critics of religious superstition took it to be, we are inclined to agree with William James that some theists might well be rationally entitled to their religious commitments. Thus we are not disposed to join Sam Harris and Peter Singer in impugning the rationality of theists en masse. Like Harris and Singer, we would like to say that what worries us about militant Islamic theocracy, the new religious right, and church opposition to same-sex marriage, but we prefer to do so without using the concept of rationality as a club." Why does pragmatism lead Stout and Rorty to want to drop rationality as a way of distinguishing believers from nonbelievers? If "some theists [and presumably then not others] might well be rationally entitled to their religious commitments," how do we tell which ones are rationally entitled and which ones are not? Best, 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/
