>Habermas must mean, by "rationality", something complete
>different from logic or _ratio_, if he thinks it's any defense
>against evil. Perhaps it's a religious concept?
Religion in ground in a cultic practice, the meaning of which is closed to those who do not have access to the meaning systems that are frozen in the cultic praxis.
Habermas entire theory revolves around bringing frozen communicative relations into a wider circulation, something that can only be accomplished by providing an explanation, which means 'disenchanting' the spellbinding power of the sacred into everyday language, ie. so that non-religious adherent can 'understand' what is going on. Of course, when religion is translated into any other discourse other than religion, it looses is magik, and becomes mundane. Thus, religion resists any attempt to translate its meaning into other concepts; hence the duality of religion today: an aggressive structure seeking to colonize other meaning structures and its defensive posture in regards to its truth claims. So... after all, Habermas's analysis is anything but religious.
ken