The limits of secular discourse

Stanley Fish recenserar Steven Smith's The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse

It is not, Smith tells us, that secular reason can’t do the job (of identifying ultimate meanings and values) we need religion to do; it’s worse; secular reason can’t do its own self-assigned job — of describing the world in ways that allow us to move forward in our projects — without importing, but not acknowledging, the very perspectives it pushes away in disdain. 

While secular discourse, in the form of statistical analyses, controlled experiments and rational decision-trees, can yield banks of data that can then be subdivided and refined in more ways than we can count, it cannot tell us what that data means or what to do with it. No matter how much information you pile up and how sophisticated are the analytical operations you perform, you will never get one millimeter closer to the moment when you can move from the piled-up information to some lesson or imperative it points to; for it doesn’t point anywhere; it just sits there, inert and empty.

Om religion som möjlighet snarare än hot

Today’s political culture is characterized by a growing opposition between political secularism and religious fundamentalism. I take it this is a fruitless opposition that  can be overcome by a more thoroughgoing awareness of what it means to be secular. We can no longer act as if religion is an unequivocal explanation of the crisis of modern democracy. It might as well be the the lack of religion that threatens modern democracies by making democracy a purely formal system, without inherent value and purpose.
[...]
The secularist rhetoric that fears the presence of religion in society, is also misleading because we can not simply repeat the arguments from the nineteenth century in which both the state and the Church had a firm seat. Today’s challenge is not primarily to save the state from religion, but even more of saving the state as such. The crisis of democracy is the crisis of weak states and powerless governments. The state is not threatened more by religion, than by market parties, a failing public system and media
manipulation.

HJ Prosman. The Postmodern Condition and the Meaning of Secularity. (Ars Disputandi, 2011), 240

Muhammedkarikatyrerna i perspektiv

Via Religion Dispatches hittade jag boken "Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech" av Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood.

En hyfsad line-up om ett hyfsat aktuellt ämne. Det vill säga vad Muhammed-karikatyrerna kan lära oss om gränsdragningarna mellan religion och det sekulära ...

Ur ett sammandrag:

"The incident was portrayed as a clash between the liberal values of an open society and an anti-modern, authoritarian, and superstitious religion. In their essays, Asad and Mahmood convincingly argue that this narrative largely misses the point in almost every respect. It misunderstands Islam; it misunderstands the liberal political order; and it misunderstands the complex common genealogy of Christianity and secularism."
(...)
"The failures of modern secular law and politics affect everyone. The divisions within the modern world between religious and secular are not natural ones. They have a complex history. Only by going back and taking seriously some of the turns that history has taken will we understand why religion has become such a contentious topic today."

Habermas vs. Charles Taylor

Missa inte tillfället att lyssna till en högaktuell debatt mellan två av vår tids kanske största filosofer. Jürgen Habermas och Charles Taylor diskuterar religion och sekularitet här.

Om sekularism och det sekulära

Om doktrinen om sekularism som sedan länge reglerat den offentliga arenan, vilar på felaktiga epistemologiska upplysningsprinciper om en autonom, universell, rationalitet, som med rätta övergetts, hur skall då relationen mellan religion och den offentliga arenan se ut?

Är det då ens möjligt att föra ett "offentligt samtal", eller skulle vi vara utlämnade åt en kakafoni av olika språk och traditioner?

Finns det ett sätt att behålla det sekulära (förstått som statens neutralitet i frågan om vad som är "det goda livet"), utan att för den skull hemfalla åt sekularism (förstått som doktrinen att den offentliga arenan skall regleras av en neutral, icke-religiös, sekulär rationalitet)?

Bör vår samtid i så fall kännetecknas av en strävan mot post-sekularism snarare är post-sekularitet?

Många frågor blir det ...