Hi DMB, Matt, Mary, all, On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 3:39 PM, david buchanan <[email protected]> wrote: > > Steve began his essay: > I'd like us to try to explore the political implications of Pirsig's > anti-theism. > > > dmb says: > I think the MOQ is anti-theistic for moral reasons and the political > implications are pretty well covered under the notion that an intellectually > guided society is better than a society dominated by social values. I guess > that goes for people too. You can see how all the basic distinctions within > the MOQ bear on the issue. I mean, it's not just about the distinction > between social and intellectual, it's also about the distinction between > static and Dynamic and it's consistent with the pragmatic theory of truth and > with philosophical mysticism.
Steve: Is anti-theism really consistent with the pragmatic theory of truth? Pragmatists follow James in thinking that rationality is more permissive than the positivists would have us believe. We also think that rationality is a context-sensitive affair where what one person is justified in believing based on his history is frequently different from what someone else may be justified in believing based on a different set of past experiences. We are not inclined to follow Bill Maher in declaring ourselves distinct from the believers under the label of "Rationalists" since we don't see reason as the something that can't be employed with respect to religious beliefs just as it can to any other sort of belief. Like James, we think that many people are rationally entitled to their religious beliefs even while we are convinced that they are wrong about what they believe. If we didn't think that the religious were rational, we would have good reason ourselves to end our participation in the practice of exchanging reasons, in other words, of giving up on democracy. Pirsig: > "Phaedrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the > rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of DQ, a sign-post which allows > socially pattern-dominated people to see DQ. The problem has always been that > the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent > and are allowed to destroy the DQ they were originally intended to preserve." > (Pirisg in Lila, near the end of chapter 30) > > Some relevant comments from the Copleston annotations: > 180 "The MOQ supports religion but does not support many Christian > traditions." Steve: These quotes are not anti-theistic and are evidence against any Pirsigian militant secularism. But then you quote... Pirsig: > 208 "The MOQ would add a fourth stage where the term "God" is completely > dropped as a relic of an evil social suppression of intellectual and Dynamic > freedom. The MOQ is not just atheistic in this regard. It is anti-theistic." Steve: Why does he need to go all _anti_theistic here? Why does the word "God" need to be dropped from everyone's vocabularies? Is every possible conception of God necessarily evil? Rather than simply not believing in God and arguing against specific ways of being religious or specific conceptions of God, is Pirsig saying that _everyone_ ought not believe in God? Any kind of God??? After hundreds of years of the various religious sects trying to woo others toward their particular brands of religion, broad diversity of religious belief persists in the West especially in the US where religion especially flourishes, and it doesn't look like this plurality of religious ideas will be going away any time soon. Meanwhile, the post-Englightenment expectations of many secularists haven't been met. Though widely available, the arguments that we find so convincing against religious beliefs and for denying the existence of traditionally conceived theistic conception of God over the past few centuries haven't succeeded in convincing most others as secularist theorists expected they would.. Noting also the unavailability of any knock-down argument to settle the matter of God's existence here and now in addition to the unlikelihood that such an argument will present itself in the foreseeable future, we ought to recognize that religious voices will be around for a long time to come. The question is, what do we do about them? Both the religious traditionalists who hope to unite all under the banner of one religion and see democracy as inadequate to sustain moral values without religious constraints as well those secularists who would like to eliminate the impact of religion on politics are in a quandary. The democratic process of exchanging ideas is not going to either rid the populace of all religion or unite us under one religion. Conversation alone is not going to work to achieve the goals of either. For either group to achieve their ends, it will become necessary to achieve political dominance of one over the other and enforce their views through the coercion of government The choice is between militancy and giving up on democracy or finding reason to doubt the notion that the opposition needs to be eliminated for democracy to survive. We have already seen that the response of many of the religious traditionalists to this quandary has been to become theocrats, to give up on democracy and try to impose their religion using the power of government rather than convince the rest of us to agree with them. At the same time, perhaps many secularists have responded by becoming the militant variety where their secularism is not understood merely in terms of religious freedom but rather as seeking to expunge religion all together from political reason-giving. They may see _all_ religious influenced reason-giving as inappropriate and theocratic. Religious voices in political discourse are perhaps thought to need to be silenced for the sake of democracy. But why not just regard religious reason-giving and argue that such religious reason-giving is unconvincing instead of work towards a state of affairs where such reasons ought never be aired in public? Isn't it enough that a particular religious conception is just one voice among many given equal consideration of all other voices, or must all views that cite religious justification be ruled out of the conversation, period? If so, how should that ruling-out be done? If militant secularism can only be furthered through the undemocratic means, of coercion, it is as much a threat to democracy as is theocracy (if not to the same degree since militant secularists have never had the sort of power to justify anyone's fears about them). When Harris says that we no longer have a right to our myths, what does that mean in practice? I don't think he actually intended to propose any coercion (though he erred in leaving himself too open to being misunderstood in that way). I think he is trying to exhort us to hold people's religious beliefs up to the same conversational pressures that our other beliefs face. I agree that we should, but what is the point then of condemning _all_ religious beliefs as irrational _en masse_ and _in advance_, the same beliefs that supposedly have not already been held to such pressures? While Harris who wrote an article called “Science must destroy religion” and his fellow "horsemen" have condemned all religion as irrational, he has also (in his controversial speech "The Problem With Atheism") argued that atheism is "too blunt an instrument" at certain times. He doesn't want us to self-identify as atheists in a blanket attack on all religion. His concern is not that we throw the baby out with the bath water, but that we don't treat all religion as equally evil when some religious practice are far more problematic than others. But isn't it also possible that some religious practices can be not merely less evil or innocuous but actually good? We atheists tend to think of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell when we think about religious influence on politics, but some liberal believers first think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu. Unfortunately there seem to be a lot more Jerry Falwells than MLKs, but such examples should make us wary of condemning religion _en masse_ as something we need to eliminate in order to protect democracy. Given the history of attempts to expunge religion all together, even if we see nothing at all redeemable about any religious practice, we should still note that stamping out all religion is an unachievable goal; therefore, opposing religion as such rather than targeting specific ways of being religion is an impractical goal. For pragmatic and philosophical reasons, I for one am satisfied with promoting religious freedom and the need for _better_ religion instead of working for a Godless world. I have no idea whether _everyone_ would be better or worse off if there were no such thing as religion, and even the religious could not possibly disagree with my desire for better religion (that is, until we get into discussion of what we think would make some of our current religious practices better.) I also don't want to prevent anyone from making arguments in religious terms. In fact, if those are the reasons that motivated taking the stand in question, I welcome it. Though religious traditionalists lament being hamstrung by having to phrase their concerns in secular terms, I think (and Harris would agree) that it would be better if we could confront the actual reasons that convinced religious people to take their view in the first place instead of arguing against the secularized arguments that the religious have fabricated in an attempt to taylor their discourse to for a wider audience. For example, if someone starts arguing that we ought to disallow homosexual marriages because statistics indicate that...better parents...blah, blah, blah, when the actual reason that convinces them that we ought to forbid it is some verse in Leviticus, we waste our time arguing against their dubious statistics, and we never get to hold the real justification up to scrutiny and present a case against such reasoning. We don't get to point out that Leviticus also requires us to murder people for all sorts of other acts that none of us any longer even regard as crimes. We are likely to gain allies even among the religious in opposing poor religious reasoning if such reasons are permitted to be aired. And since the vast majority of the population is religious in some sense, we certainly can't afford to refuse their support for our criticisms by promoting an agenda of militant secularism rather than seeking religious freedom and better religion. After all I've said, I know I'm still two posts behind in responding, DMB, but I'll try to get back to you tomorrow. 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/md/archives.html
