DentArthurDent wrote:
In countries ruled by religious law a mass movement would be required to change to secular governance, after all those in privileged positions do not offer them up easily.
In the more advanced industrialised countries we already have a secular form of governance, if then there was a mass exodus away from religious belief I do not see any problems with maintaining social cohesion through other means.
You may want to read some of Jurgen Habermas's writings, a lot of his thoughts about religion are to the extent that there are things to be learned from religion about how cohesion works on the framework of what the human psyche is and isn't, just that as an atheist he is about extrapolating the more pragmatic aspects.
DentArthurDent wrote:
Anarchy is never a good way to install change, by its very definition absolute chaos would reign. This is why I am a revolutionary socialist, yes the old needs to be stripped away but it needs to be done in a cohesive, principled and programmatic manner, not an ad-hoc, pragmatic, conjunctural one.
I tend to think that it needs to move slowly, just so we're sure that we know what we're stripping away, why we want to strip it away, and coming up with means that bring smooth transition.
On the issue of religious or even spiritual faith though, I tend to think its best - yes respected - but kept in its own realm as separate from the physical world. It seems like a lot of the things that many atheists and liberals are really wanting to fight are things like racism, bigotry, imperceptive approaches to inequality, and dogmatic outlooks on 'morality' on say substances (marijuana, etc.) or personal ethics in one's own life. It seems like a lot of those things are being successfully moved, you have a few islands of the very old school of beliefs (Pat Robertson is a good example) but people clinging to that sort of outlook are fewer and farther between as people coming up - in especially generation x, y, and beyond who identify with having a faith, are measuring it against the world's knowledge as it's progressed and realizing that their God - if he's worth his salt - can't be arrogant or ignorant of the situations or realities that he himself has created, which is why they do progressively better at staying spiritual/religious but analyzing the world through somewhat of a secular lens (IMO the best outlook is that the world and the way it works from the ground up is the best way to learn about the will of the one who created it - if one is to lean theistic).
I think its still important to note that - while science serves our analytical capabilities and needs to seek out natural causes for things, our emotional and psychic orientations mean a lot as well, as our very sense of reality stems from that - everything from transcendentalism to nihilism has its adaptions and maladaptions. Its why I can't throw the idea of a God off as patently absurd either - having something in us that so strongly desires transcendentalist aims means that have some degree of something beyond the sheer material but, what we're really at a loss on is what to do about it and I think the most important project is carefully studying reality, through the most empathetic lens possible, and working our way outward from there.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
25 Jan 2010, 2:32 pm
(<- Contemporary history of Japan student here, starting from Bakumatsu and currently going through Meiji-ishin, and sadly i hardly know much of the Edo period and before which was in the class last-session-that-i-did-not-take =.= )
