On Tue, 27 Feb 2007 02:06:30 -0500 "Yoshie Furuhashi"
<critical.montages at gmail.com> writes:
> On 2/27/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > (And
> > like I 've said, I've actually read the Qur'an cover
> > to cover -- about as far out as the Bible.)
>
> The question is how people read the Bible, Qur'an, etc. and what
> they
> get out of them. Certain leftists -- such as yourself -- insist on
> reading them literally, but if you do so, all you understand is what
> literal-minded fundamentalists may get out of them. The thing is
> that
> most people of any religious faith are not fundamentalists, so they
> don't read the texts literally, which is the reason why they can
> reconcile faith and science.
Well Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that religion and science could be understood as two independent and non-overlapping magisteria. But the problem with that argument is most forms of religious faith that exist in the US and elsewhere do not have much in common with religions like Unitarianism or Quakerism, for which Gould's argument would work.
Indeed, the major Western religions in their most popular forms are far from accepting the sort of dividing line that Gould proposed for separating the magisteria of science from religion.
Gould's proposal essentially reduced religion to simply a code of ethics but religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are far from accepting a reduction of their claims to the purely ethical. All three of their religions make pronouncements concerning the nature and structure of the universe and man's place in it. Most Christians accept as an article of faith that Jesus rose from the dead, and that he and his followers performed all sorts of miracles, and these articles of faith are not taken by most believers as simply symbolic, rather they are seen as being literally true. Christian fundamentalists still vehemently reject evolution. Gould's proposal would work if religionists were Unitarians, Quakers, or Ethical Culturalists but such is not the case. Gould, might well have gotten some liberal theologians to agree with his proposals but they would hardly be acceptable to most of the folk who populate the pews on Sunday mornings. Gould in my view seemed rather naive concerning the nature and sociology of religious faith as it actually exists in the US and abroad. Most American Christians are, after all, not would be Paul Tillichs.
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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