On Sat, 30 Oct 1999 15:50:16 +0100 Vikash Yadav <vikash1 at ssc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On the whole, I find that discussions and debates with pomos
tend to less rewarding than the debates that I sometimes
have with religious believers in the atheist newsgroups on
Usenet.
Amen!
> The pomos are confident that there is no such thing as truth
but that they possess it anyway. Generally, I find pomos
to be far more dogmatic and less openminded than
religionists. Most curious I should say.
I'd have to disagree with this though - I tend to see religious praxis as a product of postmodernity (terminological clarification, I tend to use the term religionist for someone who studies religion, not someone who practices). From a strictly theological perspective, there is no politics, no freedom. Theology is a perspective *from* the viewpoint of God. There is no room for disagreement here (not if the theologians is doing textbook theology). Take Augustine for example. One will rarely find a more authoritarian thinker. City of God is an allegory, from the perspective of God - there are two kinds of people - the damned and the damned. Original sin has corrupted the very *nature* of human beings and so, while they aren't free to do good, they are still responsible for evil. However, God, in *his* mercy, forgives some. To follow up, Aquinas wrote that the joys of heaven are articulated in the chorus of angels celebrating the suffering of the damned, who are getting exactly what they deserve (eternal punishment). Now, people today might not argue like this, and the general meaning of the word theology has changed (liberation, public, negative, political, systematic, feminist, sacramental, whatever) into something more like "narrative" - which, more than anything, illustrates the nature of postmodernism. Postmodernism *is* the state of liberal capitalism - of private property, a productive and colonial ethic, and radical individualism. So, oddly enough, religious moderates, as I would say that people who hold to [unquestionable!] religious presuppositions have been coopted by postmodernism in the contemporary forms of theology (rhetorical games, plurality of narrative structures and so on). Those who haven't gotten on the bandwagon of "narrative" theology (poetic, metaphorical, aesthetic) are, rightly, pre-modern since they borrow a model of authority directly from tradition, custom, history, or ritual. So, just as a working definition (in progess) of religion - its either po-mo or pre-mo, either that or it isn't religion at all (religion in modernity is translateable into other discourses - like science, politics, or art (which forfeits any transcendental or unique claim).
Segundo, The Liberation of Theology (one of the first attempts to think theology against itself, which is not a liberation theology, rather, the liberation of theology from itself, and while it keeps the contents of faith, it destroys the form of religion - an old thesis but one made relevant as a critique of capitalism and colonialism)
M. Hewitt, From Theology to Social Theory (a marxian evaluation of Segundo's work)
M. Hewitt, Critical Theory of Religion (an analysis of feminist "theology" aside the Frankfurt School)
Browning and Fiorenza, eds., Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology (one of the most remarkable texts on theology that I've read)
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