1. "Rational thinking" is a redundancy.
2. "Irrational thinking" is an oxymoron.
3. It is false that rational thinking leads to rational results.
Chuck Grimes wrote:
> [snip]
> It has to depend on the peculiarly american habit of casting every
> political discourse in moral terms, which automatically sets
> adversaries off as good and evil. [snip]
>
> I just finished Chip Berlet's essay, `Dances with Devils'. (see:
> www.publiceye.org/Apocalyptic/Dances_with_Devils_TOC.html)
>
> It's worth the slog for its historical documentation, but it doesn't
> go into a sociological understanding of what is occurring and
> re-recurring in these bizarre apocalyptic and millennial visionaries.
>
> I suspect the entire concept of a moral order to the world is somehow
> the culprit.
>
> Clearly there isn't any moral order to world, and yet we persist in
> believing there is. More accurately, we want to believe there is, or
> that something like that is a potential achievement. Somewhere in that
> struggle has to be found the basis for these external and collective
> expressions, of which the apocalytic and fundamentalist nonsense is a
> part.
This is excellent, in part because it redefines the question in social and historical terms and moves it away from my initial formulation in terms of "crackpot" behavior -- a question focused on individual behavior. Belief in a "Moral Order to the World" can be related to actual history, both in respect to what has happened in the U.S. and in respect to contrasts between U.S. history and that of other advanced capitalist societies. We can begin to explore what in U.S. history made the concept of a moral order in the world a necessary part of American ideology.
I agree that any ahistorical conception of a moral order is implicitly a religious premise.
Carrol