As for the specifics, I doubt that the LBO list is a useful place to have a more substantial discussion, given some of the responses posted so far. -Chip
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Well, look who is closing the door before it's even opened. Doug mumbled something about different standards of evidence, which sort of gets to the point, but not nearly enough. What the faithful need isn't tolerance. They need an argument.
Strauss (yes, grumbling aside) spend a lot of time on what he called the theological-political question, which in more concrete terms translates into the separation of church and state. I've been reading some of it in small pieces because its hard to swallow, but it does apply to the US fundies and current thread. Here are some points that are contra Strauss that are of use in arguing with the faithful.
Most of them have not considered what their doing or how old this debate is, or that it lays at the foundation of the modern nation state, the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions. Every generation or so it seems has to learn these lessons all over again.
The political principle of the separation between church and state is based on a philosophical distinction between Revelation and Reason.
The philosophical question about the difference between belief and reason, became one of the fundamental premises of modern science, as well as part of the basis for forming a modern secular state. It is more than just a question of superstitions, methodology, or evidence.
Consider that the ultimate law giver in Christianity, Judaism and Islam is God and the word of God is law. The question is how do we know what God said. There are two answers. The first is the Bible, Torah or Quran tells us. How do we know these were God's words? We are told they were revealed to Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad. In effect the laws we are to live by are based on revelation and promulgated by religious authority. These religious authorities depend on a tradition of interpretations in canon, talmud, and hadith. These faiths make a point that admission to heaven or at least escape from oblivion depends on a sincere declaration of believe that their respective books are the revealed word of God. The lengthy interpretations set out the laws and customs to live by and are therefore fundamentally political. They deal with how we are to live.
Consider some of the political implications that flow from the above. The word of God is absolute in the sense that the Ten Commandments are absolutes. These are not like premises in an argument. The word of God can not be false. Acceptance of the word of God is made by declaration of faith. Belief is thus made absolute. To make arguments and debate the word of God is heresy. The only political process is from God to prophet to current religious authority. A society based on a religious world view is fundamentally a hierarchy and in the case of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, an all male hierarchy at that.
While one of the central pillars of the philosophical Enlightenment was ordering human knowledge into categories of belief and reason, one of its main political distinctions was between a society based on submission to authority under the divine right of kings, and a secular constitutional authority based on reason. This is the concrete or political translation of the debate between belief and reason.
A secular society whose constitutional authority is based on reason is necessarily relative, in the sense that its institutions, laws, and social processes can be debated and demonstrated false, mistaken, or ineffective and changed accordingly. The operative conceptual model is dynamic and changeable and its trajectory is indeterminant.
In contrast a perfect hierarchy based on the reveal word of God is in principle both timeless and unchanging, since presumably the words of God don't change, while the City of Man waxes and wanes toward greater or lesser perfection. At most such a world oscillates about a still center.
There are other contrasts. The revealed word takes place within, a matter of private consciousness, a private realm where its truth is measured in terms of its ecstatic authenticity. Of necessity, the world of reason is public and its natural form is a dialogue where premises are given and agreed upon or denied in advance of the argument. The truth of reason follows from the order of the argument and the premises, unlike the revealed word, can in principle be demonstrated as false.
The ends and means of the religious world are fixed, timeless, ideal, unchanging and absolute. In a world of reason or at least its political manifestation, the ends are made relative while the means are fixed as a process toward indefinite ends. For example, the processes of making laws in a constitutional democracy under a representative government are fixed by constitutional agreement. Meanwhile the content or ends toward which the laws are directed are relative, dependent, changeable. While government processes or means are fixed, the ends, that is the laws are not fixed, since they can be nullified, amended or rewritten entirely.
Notice for example that in the US constitution there is very little about the ends of government or the content of its laws, while most of the document is devoted to outlining the process or the means of government. Most of the content or law is contained in the Bill of Rights which are mostly devoted to prohibitions on government authority to make law.
Instead of the words, `Congress shall make no law that abridges...', imagine that we substitute the word God for Congress. God shall make no law?
The confrontation with religion is not about tolerance or intolerance, but about the kind of government and the nature of the society we want. Through the American War of Independence and the French Revolution the ideal of a society based on reason was also overthrown. Neither God, the divine right of kings, nor reason, but rather the will of the people became the ultimate founding principle, that is the most ephemeral and relative of all principles. In effect the will of God, the will of a king, and all the best of reasons were supplanted by the will of the people. (Unfortunately that will seems a little twisted at the moment...nevermind)
The fundamental link between the religious right and the neoconservatives centers on their mutual antagonism toward the Enlightenment in both its philosophy and politics. Where they find their agreement is in a return to an ideal, changeless, and perfect order. Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, or whoever. Both impulses are profoundly anti-democratic and reactionary in the deepest sense of the word.
They are terrified by the fluidity, indeterminacy, and ephemeral nature of the world grounded in historical change, and yet they depend on that very relativity and change in their drive to seize power and fix it in place for themselves.
CG