Kenneth MacKendrick:
> 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.
This ain't necessarily so -- it certainly doesn't apply to Theraveda Buddhism, for instance, and probably not to other religions which we might call discursive -- but in any case I think it's an evasion of the problem here, a sort of _tu_quoque_.
> 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.
The problem is that (as a number of people have pointed out) something pre-rational has to happen before reason can be applied; at least, the subject has to choose reason before using it. But that being the case, a great number of axioms and assumptions are set up, going all the way back to our prokaryotic ancestors, before the wheels start to turn, and one's particular irrational, perhaps involuntary collection of them must affect the outcome of the grinding. In other words, reason won't keep us from being Nazis. It is, as famously noted, the slave of the passions, and we'd better not forget it. After all, the passions are what got us here.
But if Habermas wants to reject this, he must attribute to _ratio_ some sort of divine afflatus which keeps it from going "bad" -- a god. Yet since he knows better than to do this out of hand -- there are too many examples of reason being made to serve ugly passions -- he posits instead an imperfect middle-class sort of god. A clever move, but it won't do, as far as I'm concerned. It has the same dubious goodness all tools possess.
Anyway, that's what I mean by religion. I suppose one could argue that reason is a cultic practice, as well, but please note that _I'm_ not doing that at the moment.