-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-admin at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Michael Dawson -PSU Sent: Monday, December 22, 2003 12:52 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Atheism and Barbarians: Towards a Reasonable Understanding
> Religion does not exist.
Utter crap, Ken. Your sophomoric nihilist game can be run on any phenomenon that exists. I prefer reality, myself.
If the left were to adopt your Alice-in-Wonderland attitiude to religion, it would simply be driving yet another rusty nail into its own coffin. Billions of people practice religion, and understand themselves to be acting as such. One of these is my grandmother, a lifelong Catholic who has never hurt a fly. Her religious belief is NOT a political claim, whatever you might try to say about it.
As Lukacs once said, whatever academic games we might be playing in our heads, when there is a speeding car approaching and we're standing on the curb, we're all realists and pragmatists.
** Dear Michael Dawson,
Please read the entire post. Religion does not exist *as a RELIGIOUS object* --> hence, "religion does not exist" (i.e. for all intents and purposes, the scholar of religion cannot assume the validity and reality of a *religious* object, apart from all the material or physical objects... or even imaginary objects for that matter --> I'm basically saying that you can't study religion with RELIGIOUS commitments... you have to suspend them, which is why I referenced Muller). If you find this problematic - then you shouldn't object to the very analytic conclusion that George W. Bush is an alien from another planet brought here by pixies who populate the Evergreen forest just south of the Badlands. But I doubt you would accept that, because you don't accept the reality of *religion* as a supernatural power within the world. Of course religion exists as a "social phenomenon." I'm not disputing that. In fact, that's my position! As something that is social, it is social constructed and has no "eternal essence" - something that everyone from William James to Carl Jung want to install. The methodological problem is that there is no one definition that has been proposed by a scholar or non-scholar of religion that can logically include: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Indigenous traditions, Zoroastrianism, etc. The only definitions that include all of these things - which are by law and by institutional affiliation protected as being "religious" - is a definition that includes ALL things as religious. That doesn't seem wise to me in the context of a society that protects religion from criticism to various degrees. Geertz's definition of religion is popular because it doesn't exclude anything. You are criticising me for annihilating religion... which is no different than universalising it... I'm steering between these poles in a rather pragmatic way. Throughout North America and Europe if you take an intro to religion course you will be taught that all of these "traditions" are in fact religious. My point is actually VERY similar to yours. "We're all realists and pragmatists." We should accept "faith" as "faith-in-the-transcendental" but rather as a "political-faith." Your Catholic grandmother, who never hurt a fly, was taking a political position: non-violence, religious liberalism, I don't know... something that could be translated relatively easily into a social theory without claiming that her faith was TRUE - in the sense of corresponding with a metaphysical state of affairs. BTW - J.Z. Smith is a rather traditional historian-empiricist, very much in line with the likes of Weber and Popper... perhaps with a bit of social constructivism thrown in. The problem with traditional definitions of religion can been seen in the reality of the inter-faith conference the UN held in 2000, where the religious traditions of the world accepted responsibility for global violence (have a look at some of the transcripts -- some of them which read: violence is not a political issue!!!). How insane is that? Because religions are responsible for violence, no one else is. But what exactly does a "religious" Catholic priest in Baltimore have to do with a Tokugawa inspired neo-Confucian scholar from Japan - who in the world knows! Let me tell you: Ted Turner knows, that why he gave almost a million bucks to support the gathering. Thus governments, corporations, etc. are left off the hook. Violence = religion = ethnicity --> and all are bad. THAT's a rather glaring political problem isn't it? (so, religion does not exist as such, it does exist as a social category of scholarly and non-scholarly invention - I would add non-scholarly to Smith's comment).
thanks for getting me to clarify this, ken