Determinism

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sun Jun 30 00:08:11 PDT 2002


At 2:09 PM -0400 6/29/02, Joe R. Golowka wrote:
> > You are not "thinking for yourself" here, as what you wrote above
>> simply reproduces an old charge that "Marxism is a secular religion."
>
>Just because people in the past have made a certain claim does not
>mean it is true or false. The
>claim that the Earth is round, not flat, is a reproduction of a very
>old claim but that doesn't make
>it false. My assertion is that any ism named after a person has a
>strong tendency to become what you
>call a "secular religion."

In the previous post, I simply rebutted your claim that you are "thinking for yourself" in your opinion about Marxism. The claim you are making is a received idea (with a very old metaphor to boot).


> > In fact, the charge that "X is a secular religion with its own dogma"
>> must be at least as old as conservative reactions against modern
>> revolutions in the age of the Enlightenment. Here's an example from
>> Edmund Burke: "It [the French Revolution] is a revolution of doctrine
>> and theoretic dogma. It has a much greater resemblance to those
>> changes which have been made upon religious grounds in which a spirit
>> of proselytism makes an essential part" ("Thoughts on French
>> Affairs," 1791). In short, your rhetoric is stuck on the right in
>> the 18th century!
>
>Just because people I disagree with made claims that happen to have
>a superficial resemblence to mine
>centuries ago does not make it false. Burke also claimed that the
>world is round, does that mean
>everyone making the same claim today is false? Of course not.

So far you haven't introduced any evidence that your claim is true. Just how many Marxist writers have you read? -- Yoshie

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