> I think religion, as a specific discourse, like science or secular
> philosophy, has its own internal logic, truth and validity claims
> which ca't be explained or explained away by other
> incommensurate discourses.
I would be very careful about taking the "every discourse has its own logic, truth, and validity" line. This ends up making any kind of sensible talk impossible, since anyone can easily invent their own kind of "discourse" in which whatever they say is true, and whatever anyone else says is false. In fact, that's what religious fanatics do, and why it's impossible to argue them out of their views.
> All of us know sexually secure and happy people who are also religious
> as sexually anxious ridden, insecure folks who have no interest in
> religion.
Right. That's the Achilles' heel of Reich's sexual theory of religion, IMHO. (Of course, he and his admirers have a very strong temptation to make their argument circular by assuming that all religious people have *some* sort of sexual problem, and sometimes they can't resist the temptation.)
> I also wonder whether it reflects a post-Hellenistic Western
> experience where sex is considered separate from other spheres of
> life. Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Chinese and varieties of
> other civilizations considered sex! and religion as parts of a larger
> fabric, actually sex and religion interpenetrate each other in all
> sorts of interesting ways, thus either sex or religion seems to an
> absurd proposition from their civilizational vantage points.
And whether to use the world "religion" or not about anything beyond the Western monotheisms is a hotly debated question.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty