Ward on religion

Religious studies itself may be inseparable from these logics. It is not only the child of modernity, it is the heir to the aspirations of modernity for systematizing knowledge. It is heir to the Faustian dreams and desires for total knowledge: that all practices of belief can be catalogued, and that in and through this cataloguing they become many aspects of the one religion, varieties of human spirituality.

Graham Ward, ”Review Essay: Religionists and Theologians: Toward a Politics of Difference”, Modern Theology 16, num 4 (2000): 545.

Dags för Skolverket att uppdatera sin värdegrund

Så här inför adventstid så har Skolverket gjort ett försök att tydliggöra sina riktlinjer för skolsamlingar i kyrkan. Skolverket ger sitt medgivande till sådana samlingar med förbehållet att det inte finns några religiösa inslag i ceremonin. Det är alltså inte tillåtet att ha en adventssamling i kyrkan om prästen "förmedlar religiösa budskap".

Jag blir så klart nyfiken på hur Skolverket definierar "religiösa budskap", och på hur dessa kan tänkas skiljas från sekulära budskap. Lovisa Bergdahl påpekade i en debattartikel för en tid sedan att det tycks som att en protestantisk syn på ”ordet allena” lever stark inom Skolverket. Detta då det ”religiösa" som Skolverket invänder emot tycks begränsa sig till "inslag som bön, välsignelse, trosbekännelse, predikan eller annan form av förkunnelse". En av Bergdahls poänger var att medvetenheten om kyrkorummets, symbolernas och bildernas förkunnande potential helt saknades i Skolverkets religionsförståelse. Det tycks hon ha helt rätt i!

Men så tänker jag på skolans uttalade värdegrund. Denna skall ju vila på "etik som förvaltats av kristen tradition och västerländsk humanism". Kristen etik tycks alltså vara OK så länge den uttolkas och förmedlas av skolan själva. Men de som förvaltar den kristna traditionen, det vill säga kyrkan, får alltså enligt Skolverket inte själva uttala sig i frågan. Jag misstänker att detta har att göra med att kyrkan inte uppfattas som "neutral", utan snarare som en "religiös" ideologiproducent. Här menar jag att Skolverket behöver uppdatera sin syn på möjligheten till neutralitet, samt ideologins ofrånkomlighet.

Vad gäller frågan om hur "religiösa budskap" skall definieras, så misstänker jag att Skolverket tänker sig att dessa har med metafysik att göra. Det vill säga att religion handlar om föreställningar om hur tillvaron är beskaffad och bör vara, som inte går att verifiera empiriskt. Med en sådan syn ställs religion och metafysik förstådda som subjektiva försanthållanden, mot vetenskap förstådd som objektiva sanningar. Men, konsekvensen av en sådan förståelse av religion blir dock att alla typer av värderingar ligger illa till. Även så kallade "sekulära värderingar" som frihet, jämlikhet och broderskap blir i denna mening religiösa. Det är alltså dags för Skolverket att uppdatera, inte bara sitt religionsbegrepp, utan även sin värdegrund.

--
Läs även Henrik Ehrenberg i Aftonbladet.

För tidigare bloggposter på samma tema, se: här, och här.

Cornel West on philosophy

"You’re made in the image of God. You’re a featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces. Thats us. One day your body will be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. You know that. Be honest. Put on your three-piece suit if you want to, but thats not armor against death. The question is: Who are you going to be in the meantime, in this time and space? You don’t get out of time and space alive."

- Cornel West - Hope on a Tightrope, s. 28

Taylor om Dawkins syn på tro och vetenskap

Charles Taylor skriver träffande i en fotnot till A Secular Age:

Dawkins’ reasons for believing that science can sideline religion hardly inspire confidence. They draw heavily on an oversimple distinction between “faith” and “science”. “A case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate. Faith, being belief that isn’t based on evidence, is the principal vice of any religion.” As for science, it “is free of the main vice of religion, which is faith.” But to hold that there are no assumptions in a scientist’s work which aren’t already based on evidence is surely a reflection of a blind faith, one that can’t even feel the occasional tremor of doubt. Few religious believers are this untroubled. 

Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2007. s. 835 not 27

The myth of the Secular

Ideas är ett utmärkt radioprogram på CBC - den kanadensiska motsvarigheten till BBC. Jag upptäckte just att de i slutet av oktober kommer att sända sju program på temat The Myth of the Secular. Att döma av gäster och upplägg ser det fantastiskt intressant ut:

Monday, October 22
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 1
Western social theory once insisted that modernization meant secularization and secularization meant the withering away of religion. But religion hasn't withered away, and this has forced a rethinking of the whole idea of the secular. IDEAS producer David Cayley talks to Craig Calhoun, Director of the London School of Economics, and Rajeev Barghava of India's Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. 

Tuesday, October 23
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 2
The secular is often defined as the absence of religion, but secular society is in many ways a product of religion. In conversation with IDEAS producer David Cayley British sociologist David Martin explores the many ways in which modern secular society continues to draw on the repertoire of themes and images found in the Bible. 

Wednesday, October 24
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 3
Early in the post-colonial era, politics in most Muslim countries were framed in secular and nationalist terms. During the last thirty years, the Islamic revival has dramatically changed this picture. Anthropologist Saba Mahmood talks with IDEAS producer David Cayley about her book, The Politics of Piety. 

Thursday, October 25
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 4
The Fundamentals was a series of books, published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles between 1910 and 1915, which tried to set the basics of Christianity in stone. Fundamentalism now refers to any back-to-basics movement. Malise Ruthven's Fundamentalism asks what all these movements have in common, in this feature interview with David Cayley. 

Friday, October26
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 5
"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts." So wrote German legal theorist Carl Schmitt in a book called Political Theology. American legal theorist Paul Kahn has just published Political Theology: Four New Chapters in which he argues that the foundations of the American state remain theological. He explores this theme with IDEAS producer David Cayley.

Monday, October, 29
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 6
In 1990 British theologian John Milbank published a five-hundred-page manifesto called Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. The book argued that theology should stop deferring to social theories that are just second-hand theology and declare itself, once again, the queen of the sciences. The book led, in time, to a movement called "Radical Orthodoxy." IDEAS producer David Cayley profiles John Milbank. 

Tuesday, October 30
THE MYTH OF THE SECULAR, Part 7
IDEAS producer David Cayley concludes his series with three thinkers who believe that division of the world into the secular and the religious both oversimplifies and impoverishes political and religious life. Political philosopher William Connolly argues for a richer and more inclusive public sphere; historian of religion Mark Taylor calls for a new philosophy of religion; and Fred Dallmayr presents the case for a deeper and more thorough-going pluralism.

Tune in!

Rosenberg och Jackelén om den politiska religionen

 

Konferenstips ...

Telos har just presenterat temat för nästa års konferens, Religion and Politics in a Post-Secular World:

The 21st century has been marked by both events and reflections that have explicitly challenged the long-standing liberal project of maintaining a separation between religion and politics. Not only have political conflicts become inseparable from theological and metaphysical considerations, but standard liberal claims of value-neutrality have been undermined by insights into the theological presuppositions of secular institutions. The goal of the 2013 Telos Conference will be to investigate the changing relationship between religion and politics. Possible topics include secularization and the "post-secular" turn; the theological foundations of political systems such as liberalism, socialism, and fascism; political theology; religion and the public sphere; separation of church and state; new civil forms of religious practice; the politics of religious pluralism; myth and sovereignty; theology and modernity; religion and political values; theocracy and religious law.

Ses vi New York i februari?

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

DN och illusionen om det opolitiska

Jag läser att DN inför en policy om att ordet "hen" inte får användas i nyhets- eller reportagetexter. DN lär motivera beslutet med att "hen" kan uppfattas som ett "queerpolitiskt ställningstagande".

Man kan naturligtvis ha olika åsikter om både hen som begrepp och om queer-teori, men att motivera ett begreppsförbud med att ordet i sig skulle vara politiskt säger något om DN:s självuppfattning och världsbild. Tydligen skall "oberoende liberal" inte uppfattas som en politisk positionering utan kanske snarare som en epistemologisk etikett som anger att man skriver från en ideologiskt neutral position varifrån man kan bedöma världen. Att DN:s påbud skulle kunna riskera att uppfattas som ett "hetropolitiskt ställningstagande" verkar inte förespegla dem.

Företällningen om att det skulle finnas ett opolitiskt språk är ett maktspel som bara gynnar dem som säger sig prata det universella språket.

Hauerwas on private faith

Milbank on Radical Orthodoxy

Konferenstips!

"Since most people assume, against naturalism, the reality of things like free will, intentionality and love, it might well be that religion, rather than scientism, will soon be generally perceived as more aligned with common sense. For if mind and soul are not readily derivable from below, must they not rather be derivable from above?"

Ses vi i Oxford nästa år?

Om den falska motsättningen mellan tro och rationalitet

One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in a pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both. (...) 

But more important in some ways, it seems to me, is to stress how great an element of faith is present in the operations of even the most disinterested rationality. All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit. A Christian and a confirmed materialist may both believe that there really is a rationally ordered world out there that is susceptible of empirical analysis; but why they should believe this to be the case is determined by their distinctive visions of the world, by their personal experiences of reality, and by patterns of intellectual allegiance that are, properly speaking, primordial to their thinking, and that lead toward radically different ultimate conclusions (though the more proximate conclusions reached through their research may be identical). 

What distinguishes modernity from the age of Christendom is not that the former is more devoted to rationality than was the latter but that its rationality serves different primary commitments (some of which—“blood and soil,” the “master race,” the “socialist Utopia”—produce prodigies of evil precisely to the degree that they are “rationally” pursued). We may, obviously, as modern men and women, find certain of the fundamental convictions that our ancestors harbored curious and irrational; but this is not because we are somehow more advanced in our thinking than they were, even if we are aware of a greater number of scientific facts. We have simply adopted different conventions of thought and absorbed different prejudices, and so we interpret our experiences according to another set of basic beliefs—beliefs that may, for all we know, blind us to entire dimensions of reality.

David Bentley Hart. Atheist Delusions, Yale University Press, 2009. s. 101-102

Regnig midsommar?

Vad skall man kolla på när sista avsnitten av Mad Men och Game of Thrones sänts? Här kommer några förslag:

- Föreläsningar av bland andra Graham Ward, Sarah Coakley, Miroslav Volf, Mark Noll, Werner Jeanrond, mfl.  från konferensen Flourishing of Universities.

- Intervjuer med den lilla skara som både hållit The Gifford Lectures och belönats med The Tempelton Prize, som till exempel Charles Taylor.

- Några kortare föreläsningar av Mark Noll, Rachel Fulton Brown, och Brad Gregory som diskuterar Gregorys bok, The Unintended Reformation.

The end of "religious diversity" as a problem

"Most of us take for granted some variation of the following: religion involves heart-felt convictions and deep commitments, and therefore invokes impassioned disagreement, "exclusivist" and "intolerant" behaviour, and even violence. It is thus in dire need - given today's social "problem" of "religious diversity" - of being (take your pick):

• eradicated by means of education;

• ignored until it withers away on its own; or

• "updated" in order to become a good ally to the "progress" of the modern world.

The questions posed by philosophers of religion suggest that they believe that religion needs philosophy's help in order to come to rational, peaceful resolutions to social conflicts inflamed or caused by religion. 

I would suggest that it is imperative for us to see that the questions posed in this way (and therefore the answers that they imply) are a relic of a past. Recall for a moment that the central task to which the Enlightenment "project" self-consciously set itself - glorious and youthful, if also utterly naive - was to discern and possess the rational conditions by which the truth of things could be accessed, and thereby to dictate to every field of human inquiry the rational scope of its enterprise, the conditions by which it could properly proceed to secure knowledge of its particular object."
[...]
" Philosophy could hardly hope to make a contribution to the problem of religious diversity unless it were to gain from religious faith the paths of reasoning that overcome the "end of metaphysics" and transcend the utterly un-compelling flattening out of reason reduced to some artificial thought-out-in-advance conditions for what is possibly true."

The problem of religious diversity and the dead-end of reason - Chris Hackett

Stuff you could get away with `85 ...

"Says Tina who chants regularly at her own Buddhist altar 'in this faith you decide what's right and wrong'." - LIFE Magazine, Aug 85'

Cunningham om liv och död inom biologin

"Indeed, as one Nobel prize winning biologist argues: ‘Biologists no longer study life today [because] biology has demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity behind the word life.’ Everything remains unseen and, in this sense, unsaid; for what difference is there, biologically speaking, between an organism that is biologically now in one way and now in another? The system of explanatory description will offer only nominal or diacritical difference because its immanent identity relies on this inability. As Doyle argues, such discourse is predicated on the ability to say ‘that is all there is’."

Conor Cunningham. Genealogy of Nihilism. (Routledge, 2002), s.176

Ben Myers on Psalms for all seasons

If your congregation sings only Hillsong choruses, then their emotional repertoire will be limited to about two different feelings (God-you-make-me-happy, and God-I’m-infatuated-with-you) – considerably less even than the emotional range of a normal adult person. It is why entire congregations sometimes seem strangely adolescent, or even infantile: they lack a proper emotional range, as well as a suitable adult vocabulary. But in the psalter one finds the entire range of human emotion and experience – a range that is vastly wider than the emotional capacity of any single human life.

Ben Myers on Psalms for all seasons

Graham Ward om ondska

Let’s talk about evil in a Christian context. After all, it’s part of the Lord’s Prayer: “Deliver us from evil.” Most liturgies begin with an act of contrition, an act of confession. There is a sense in which confession actually aligns us with the will of God, which is the will of the good. And in that sense, confession turns us away from all those things that have a tendency toward what is evil. 

From a classical theological context—and here I’m going back to Aquinas and Augustine—there is no substantive thing called evil. Evil doesn’t have any ontological weight at all. God gives existence to all things and all things in the existence that God has given are good. And so evil is not any thing at all. But when we turn away from that which sustains us and maintains us in our being, we are moving toward that which is the negation of what we were created for. And so what we see as turning toward evil is a turning toward nonexistence, toward that which is denigrating to our creaturely status as creations of God, who is Good. Within that context, then, prayer is a confession of reorientation toward that which is good. It is a confession that we have been involved in acts that are counter to the honoring and worship of God and a recognition that we are created beings who are dependent on God. 

And so prayer is a reorientation toward the Good. And that’s what we mean in the Christian tradition when we speak of sanctification. Our reorientation toward God brings about a change, a transformation, a metanoia, that in fact turns us away from the disobedient misuse of those goods God has given us. It’s not that there is a substance called “evil.” When we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Deliver us from evil,” we’re not asking God to deliver us from some substantial, evil thing that is out there, because that would make us dualists rather than monotheists, that would suggest a divine good fighting a divine bad. There’s no good fighting the bad in the Christian tradition because the bad just doesn’t exist in that way. There is only God’s goodness, and God’s goodness will win out in the end.

Graham Ward intervjuad i The Other Journal

Taylor om likheten mellan fundamentalisters och materialisters världsbild

The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature voids all this mystery. This split generates the modern concept of the “miracle”; a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from outside, that is, from the transcendent. Whatever is higher must thus come about through the holes pierced in the regular, natural order, within whose normal operation there is no mystery. This is curiously enough, a view of things shared between materialists and Christian Fundamentalists. Only for these, it provides proof of “miracles”, because certain things are unexplained by the normal course of natural causation. For the materialist, it is a proof that anything transcendent is excluded by “science”.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, s. 547

Tertullianus om nationaldagsfirande

This is the reason, then, why Christians are counted public enemies: that they pay no vain, nor false, nor foolish honours to the emperor; that, as men believing in the true religion, they prefer to celebrate their festal days with a good conscience, instead of with the common wantonness.

Tertullianus, Apology kap. XXXV

Om moral i allmänhet

The Atlantic publicerade nyligen en gallup-undersökning angående amerikaners ståndpunkter i vissa "moralfrågor". Artikeln fick rubriken Americans' Attitudes About Sin. Detta trots att frågorna, så vitt jag förstår, inte gavs någon religös inramning utan endast handlade om huruvida olika handlingar var moraliskt acceptabla eller inte. Visst kan det kristna kulturarvets prägel fortfarande skönjas i både frågorna och svaren, men tiden då kristendomen präglade människors moraluppfattning genom att tillhandahålla en någorlunda sammanhängande moralsyn är sedan länge förbi. Det är givetvis fortsatt intressant att fundera över svaren såväl som vilka frågor som bedömts som etiskt laddade, men jag fastnade i en annan tanke.

Även om rubriksättningen talar om amerikaners förhållande till synd, så  misstänker jag att det är allt färre som kopplar moraliska ställningstaganden till en kristen förståelse av synd. Vad som intresserar mig är istället hur majoriteten av de som inte bekänner sig till en "religiös" tradition resonerar inför Gallups frågeställning. Hur uppfattas frågan om att något är "moraliskt acceptabelt" respektive "moraliskt fel"? Om en kristen förståelse av moraliskt handlande vanligen utgått från en kristocentrisk läsning av Bibeln samt den kristna traditionens förståelse av vad det innebär att vara människa i i termer av antropologi, teleologi, strävande efter kristuslikhet, etc., uppstår frågan om vilken berättelse som ligger till grund för den sekulariserade människans förståelse av moraliskt handlande. Vilken norm har man för vad som utgör ett moraliskt handlande? Plikten? Förnuftet? Nyttan? Känslan? Sannolikt en kombination, men jag misstänker att den egna känslan väger tungt.

Någon kan säkert uppfatta det som att jag här lite lagom gubbsurt och självrättfärdigt pekar finger åt dem som inte har en bestämd etik att stödja sig på, eller att jag slår in öppna dörrar när jag påpekar att "moral" inte finns i allmänhet. Det är inte min avsikt, och inte heller min poäng. Alla moralsystem, berättelser och traditioner har sina "sprickor", problem och inkonsekvenser.

Det som intresserar mig handlar om möjligheten till meningsfull diskussion i moralfrågor. Problemet med om allt fler utgår från den egna känslan för sina moraliska överväganden är  inte enbart det faktum att vi i stor utsträckning "känner olika", utan att vi i det närmaste helt saknar ett språk för att föra ett rationellt kring frågor om etik och politik. Om gapet mellan gårdagens socialister och liberaler uppfattades som oöverstigligt på grund av vitt skilda antaganden om det goda samhället, så går det ändå inte att jämföra med de klyftor som idag kan skilja enskilda individer åt. I en sådan tid (någon har kallat den "agonistisk hyperpluralism") blir ett konstruktivt politiskt samtal om det goda samhället omöjligt. Detta då det saknas resurser för att kommunicera skiljaktigheter på ett meningsfullt sätt. Vi ser redan hur politik i allt mindre utsträckning handlar om konkret debatt som appellerar till förnuftet, och i allt större utsträckning handlar om att "manipulera massorna" genom reklamkampanjer.
Metafysiskt förankrad etik har under senmoderniteten kritiserats hårt för dess benägenhet att betona identitet på bekostnad av skillnad och därigenom skapa förtryckande hierarkier. Men baksidan av en etik som bara betonar skillnad blir att moral lätt blir en fråga om makt. Om man inte tillstår att det finns rätt och fel bortom vår egen känsla och vårt eget tyckande, då kommer den med makt att definiera vad som är moraliskt acceptabelt. Djungelns lag är också en hierarki.

I avsaknad av traditioner och gemenskaper ("religiösa" eller ej) med någorlunda koherenta föreställningar om vad som är gott och ont, eftersträvansvärt och förkastligt, etc., uppstår frågan om vem eller vad som då styr våra uppfattningar i "moralfrågor"? Själv tippar jag på marknaden. Den individualiserade människan är ett lätt byte för kapitalismens logik.

"The Unintended Reformation" Brad Gregory, University of Notre Dame

via @sebasti_an

Obama´s theological resources for counterterrorism

Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.

Missa inte artikeln i NY Times om Obamas "kill list".

Om förutsättningarna för ett post-sekulärt samtal ...

If the social scientist understands "religion" as an  irrational response to fear, and if the religionist understands "social science" as premised on an arbitrary set of presuppositions, then little dialogue is possible. By contrast, if the social scientist understands religion as a rational interpretation of telos and cosmos, and the religionist understands social science as a search for the best society, then the two can walk hand in hand.

Philip S. Gorski, et al. The Post-Secular in Question. New York University Press, p.11

Om vetenskapens gränser

Science by definition can provide, in principle at least, complete nomological explanations for those items that lie within its domain. But most things that require explanation lie outside the competency of science, including axiological explanations, such as why the First World War happened, why rape is wrong, why I think this painting is beautiful and you don’t, and why the economy is in such a mess. Nor will science ever explain why something exists rather than nothing, because its scope is to investigate “somethings” once they exist, be they quantum fluctuations, mathematical relationships, laws of nature, or elementary particles. The ability to provide explanations regarding things that exist is not the same as explaining why anything exists rather than nothing. 

There is nothing that science should not try to explain, provided that it seems reasonable to suppose that what needs explaining lies within the domain of science. Unfortunately, not all scientists have made that distinction, leading to a waste of time and public money, in addition bringing embarrassment to the scientific community. Care should also be taken in distinguishing between science and scientism, the idea that the scientific explanation is the only one that counts. In practice, complex systems require explanations at many different levels, only some of which count as scientific explanations. A scientific explanation of the workings of my brain cannot provide, in principle, an exhaustive explanation. The “I” language of personal agency is complementary to the “it” language of the neuroscientist, providing its own explanations for things based on qualia and conscious experience. It is the explanatory, non-science “I” language of our personal biographies that we care most deeply about.

- Denis Alexander in The New Statesman (via I Think I Believe)

William Connolly om sekularismen och metafysiken

By eschewing reference to controversial metaphysical assumptions in their own forays into public life, secularists hope to discourage a variety of enthusiastic Christians from doing so in turn. Sometimes, indeed, such an agnostic stance folds the admirable virtue of forbearance into public debate. But the cost of elevating this disposition to restraint into the cardinal virtue of metaphysical denial is also high. First, such a stance makes it difficult for its partisans to engage a variety of issues of the day, such as the legitimate variety of sexual orientations, the organization of gender, the question of doctor-assisted death, the practice of abortion, and the extent to which a uniform set of public virtues is needed. It is difficult because most participants in these discussions explicitly draw metaphysical and religious perspectives into them, and because the claim to take a position on these issues without invoking controversial metaphysical ideas is soon seen to be a facade by others. Academic secularists are almost the only partisans today who consistently purport to leave their religious and metaphysical baggage at home. So the claim to being postmetaphysical opens you to charges of hypocrisy or false consciousness: "You secularists quietly bring a lot of your own metaphysical baggage into public discourse even as you tell the rest of us to leave ours in the closet".

William Connolly. Why I am not a secularist. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.  s.37

Blond on secular knowledge

Anyone who wishes to hold on to a finite account of cognition, in short anyone who would hold to a secular epistemology, will recognise, to use the Hegel of Glauben und Wissen, ‘something higher above itself from which it is self-excluded’. This situation (whether acknowledged or not) has produced in all subsequent secular thought a relationship with the higher which can perhaps only be described as sublime.

Philip Blond, Post-secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. Routledge,  s.8

Zizek on tolerance and struggle

The conflict about multiculturalism already is one about Leitkultur: it is not a conflict between cultures, but between different visions of how different cultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practices these cultures have to share if they are to co-exist. 

One should thus avoid getting caught in the liberal game of "how much tolerance can we afford": should we tolerate it if they prevent their children going to state schools? If they force their women to dress in a certain way? If they arrange marriages or brutalise gay people? At this level, of course, we are never tolerant enough, or we are already too tolerant, neglecting the rights of women, gay people etc. 

The only way to break out of this deadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants. Struggles where "there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks" are many, from ecology to the economy.

Slavoj Zizek - Europe must move beyond mere tolerance

'The Avoidance Cycle'

Terry Eagleton on having faith and an i-pod

Missa inte Terry Eagleton´s föreläsning Jesus and Tragedy där han bland annat avhandlar radikaliteten i kristen tro, samt pekar på det besynnerliga i att beteckna kristna som "troende".

The tortured, mutilated body of a political criminal who was done to death because he spoke out for love and justice, that this is what it all comes down to, this is it and no mistake. This is the single stark signifier of human history; all the rest is delusion, idolatry, false idealism, cheap sentimentalism. Those who can see this are commonly known as “having faith,” a terrible way of talking. It sounds like ‘having an i-pod.’

Hauerwas on American preaching

Preaching does not aspire to truthful proclamation in America. Preaching becomes an edifying narration of examples, a ready recital of the preachers own religious experience, which are not of course assigned any positive binding character. I always say, any time you hear a methodist minister say "... as I just learned from my twelve year old", you can be sure you up for some bullshit.

Burke Lecture - Stanley Hauerwas

Desmond om det gränslösas terror

“Imagine there’s no heaven, the song sings, imagine there is no religion, imagine no countries, no boundaries. And then the singing stops, the screaming begins and, mirabile dictu, death is loosed in the boundless whole, and on it. Politics is the necessary art of intermediary boundaries in the porosity. Without this art, and the moderation of an ethical discipline, and the finesse of religion, the porosity can be turned to a formlessness of chaos, where the idiotic sources of human selving release a madness – not a divine but a murderous madness."

William Desmond. “Neither Servility nor Sovereignty: Between Metaphysics and Politics.” Theology and the Political. Ed. Davis, Milbank & Zizek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005, p. 180.

The curse of proficiency

There are some things that are corrupted by proficiency. The expert lover, the slick preacher, the professional childcare provider – these are not honest things, because good honest preaching and childrearing and lovemaking require some element of awkwardness and ineptitude and surprise, something tenderly human that resists the cold logic of technical mastery. 

Ben Myers bloggar om sin kärlek till cykleln samt sitt förakt för tävlingscyklister. 

Derrida om påstridiga amerikaner

Sluta försvara religion!

Margo Ingvardsson, tidigare riksdagsledamot för vänsterpartiet, skrev nyligen en debattartikel i DN där hon argumenterade för att "barn upp till tolv års ålder bör ´fridlysas´ från religiös utövning". Stefan Swärd är en av de som reagerat mot stolligheterna i Ingvardssons förslag och även debatterat mot henne i radio.

Jag menar dock att Swärds sätt att bemöta Ingvarssons förslag ytterst sätt gynnar den sekularism som Ingvarsson företräder. Problemet med Swärds resonemang är nämligen att han oproblematiskt tycks köpa religionsbegreppet, och därmed föreställningen om att "religion" skulle vara ett avgränsat fenomen urskiljbart från andra kulturella yttringar såsom exempelvis politik. Att hävda religionsfrihet som stöd mot Ingvardssons kritik blir problematiskt då det skriver under på distinktionen mellan "religiöst" och "sekulärt". Att denna uppdelning inte håller för en närmare granskning kan väl sägas utgöra kärnan i talet om det postsekulära samhället (för kort into till detta begrepp läs Göran Rosenbergs färska artikel i SvD: Religion och politik lika med sant). 

William Cavanaugh är en av många som pekat på religionsbegreppets problem:

The first conclusion is that there is no transhistorical or transcultural concept of religion. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefor, helps to separate loyalty to God from one´s public loyalty to the nation-state. The idea that religion has a tendency to cause violence - and is therefore to be removed from public power - is one type of this essentialist construction of religion." (The Myth of Religious Violence, s.59)

Problemet är alltså inte bara att "religion" är en konstruktion som inte återfinns i verkligheten, utan även att det går att ana en politisk agenda bakom begreppet. Med Stanley Hauerwas ord:

Religion is the designation created to privatize strong convictions in order to render them harmless so that the alleged democracies can continue to have the illusion that they flourish on difference. (The State of the University, s.60)

Min önskan är att de som debatterar med sekularister som angriper religion i allmänhet, istället för att gömma sig bakom talet om religionsfrihet, först skulle be dem definiera vad de menar med religion. Jag tror att en mer fruktbar debatt skulle bli följden av detta; förhoppningsvis ett samtal som visar på att även föreställningen om ett neutralt sekulärt förnuft är en trosföreställning. 

Rowan Williams om samhällets kommersialisering

We are the first civilisation to treat monetary accumulation as an absolute goal, and it has obscured the whole of our discourse about shared well-being, or the "common good." Politics is trapped in discussion about efficiency and the maximising of choice; the west, at least, is dominated by the assumption that the state exists to protect choice and to do so by protecting financial competitiveness in every sphere.

Rowan Williams - Trading in the souls of men: The commodification of life

Rosenberg om det postsekulära samhället

Jag tror att Taylor här rör vid själva kärnan i det som vi kan kalla det postsekulära tillståndet. Här är det inte längre bara religiösa övertygelser och opinioner som kan sägas emanera ur ”irrationella” trosföreställningar. Också det sekulära förnuftet tvingas här rannsaka och begrunda de trosbaserade (utompolitiska) fundamenten för sin egen ”rationalitet”. I det postsekulära samhället är det offentliga förnuftet produkten av en fortlöpande kommunikation mellan såväl ”religiösa” som ”sekulära” trosuppfattningar. 

I varje fall har det blivit allt mera uppenbart att ett samhälles politiska och moraliska grundprinciper inte kan härledas ur politiken själv, än mindre ur vetenskapen eller logiken. Lika lite som de två kanske mest inflytelserika icke-religiösa moralsystemen i västerlandet, kantianismen (pliktmoralen) och utilitarismen (nyttomoralen) nödvändigtvis förmår övertyga också fullt sansade och klartänkande människor om sin inneboende ”rationalitet”. 

Vad både Habermas och Taylor i sista hand söker svaret på är hur de moraliska grundvalarna för demokratin och politiken ska kunna skapas och upprätthållas i ett samhälle präglat av såväl religiös som sekulär mångfald. Vad som skiljer de två filosoferna åt är gränsdragningen mellan Religion och Politik. Vad som förenar dem är övertygelsen om den potentiella fruktbarheten i mötet mellan de båda.

Göran Rosenberg ger i dagens SvD en liten grundkurs i begreppet "det postsekulära samhället". För en fortsättningskurs rekommenderas oblygt denna uppsats.

Zizek vs. Horowitz

Zizek och David Horowitz debatterar civilisationens framtid under Julian Assanges ledning. Det som slår mig är hur både Zizek och Horowitz tycks dela föreställningen om att tillvarons grundtillstånd utgörs av våld; ett sorts Hobbeskt ursprungstillstånd där våld är nödvändigt för att tvinga fram ett önskvärt samhälle. Med denna världsbild blir det svårt att skilja makt från rätt.

För ett mer konstruktivt samtal om hur vi skapar ett gott samhälle, lyssna på denna debatt mellan John Milbank, Phillip Blond, Adrian Pabst (tipstack till @sebasti_an). De är alla tänkare som menar att det goda samhället inte kan byggas utan en transcendent föreställning om det goda.

Cavanaugh om tortyr och modernitet

Both attitudes toward torture - that we don't and that we must - stem from what is commonly called "American Exceptionalism" - the idea that the United States has a messianic role to play in assuring that history moves forward against the enemies of progress, liberty and reason.
In important ways, the United States has not really secularized at all. What has happened instead, to borrow a phrase from historian John Bossy, is that in the modern era the holy has migrated from the church to the state. By this I do not mean that Christian evangelicals had an inordinate influence on the Bush Administration. I mean that faith in the United States and in "secular" Western values can take on the status of a religious conviction, for the propagation of which the United States has assembled the largest military in history.

William Cavanaugh - Torture then and now: How should the Catholic Church do penance for the Inquisition?

Tro i praktiken

The idea that “belief” is at the center of those institutions and cultural practices we typically identify as “religious” is highly problematic. It’s an ongoing struggle to disrupt this common (Protestant) assumption in the classroom.

ur Craig Martins senaste bloggpost på Religion Bulletin om religion förstådd som praktik.

John Gray om vetenskapstro

The belief that the political conflicts of the day can be resolved by applying evolutionary psychology is no more wellfounded than the claims of earlier versions of scientism that invoked phrenology or dialectical materialism. No doubt human knowledge has increased since the days when those pseudo-sciences were in the ascendant. Certainly we know a good deal more about human origins, and about the workings of the human brain, than we did then. But we are no better equipped to deal with moral and political conflict. Intellectually, we may be less well prepared than previous generations, if only because we know less of our own history.

John Gray recenserar The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
av Jonathan Haidt i The New Republic.

Cunningham om nihilismens logik

For example, because thought and being are not the same, accidents happen, tragedy arises. But the danger is that if one simply renames life as tragic, tragedy disappears, for its now ‘metaphysical’ status – its reality – leaves it without the requisite space for tragedy to occur. To put it another way, to say that the world is full of suffering and so is meaningless, is to dilute the very suffering that initially motivated the negative judgement: there is suffering in life, therefore life is meaningless, therefore there is no suffering. Absurdity and nihilism operate in a similar fashion, for they are names that settle into the gap between being and thought, reforging a novel chain. This is the ‘Devil of the Gaps’, who is a bridge to the void, after which it lusts.

Conor Cunningham, A Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (Routledge, 2002), 258.

Rasmusson om vetenskap som ersatz religion

Christian theology may thus contribute to the desacralisation of Science, critiquing the myth of Science for the sake of both society and of the sciences themselves. As Conor Cunningham remarks, “Scientism is a massive intellectual pathology” that is destructive for a society’s moral and political thinking and practice as well as for the immensely important work of ordinary science. It is not only a matter of Lakoff and Pinker failing to deliver what they promise; for theologians, the problematic nature of their work demonstrates the need for theological critique of the uses of science and for more fruitful, albeit humble, uses of scientific work in moral and political discourse.

Arne Rasmusson, nytillträdd professor i Tro- och livsåskådningsvetenskap vid Göteborgs Universitet (dessförinnan Umeå),  skriver i senaste numret av Modern Theology om bland andra Steven Pinkers vetenskapstro och vikten av en teologisk kritik av en naiv vetenskapssyn.

Caputo on the "theological turn"

"When Nietzsche says “God is dead,” he’s saying that there is no center, no single, overarching principle that explains things. There’s just a multiplicity of fictions or interpretations. Well, if there’s no single overarching principle, that means science is also one more interpretation, and it doesn’t have an exclusive right to absolute truth. But, if that’s true, then non-scientific ways of thinking about the world, including religious ways, resurface."

- Caputo and Vattimo, After the Death of God, p. 133.

Zizek om The Master-Signifier

"Suffice it to recall how a community functions: the Master-Signifier which guarantees the community's consistency is a signifier whose signified is an enigma for the members themselves - nobody really knows what it means, but each of them somehow presupposes that others know, that it has to mean 'the real thing', so they use it all the time.... This logic is at work not only in politico-ideological links (with different terms for the cosa nostra: our nation, revolution ...), but even in some Lacanian communities where the group recognizes itself through common use of some jargonized expressions whose meaning is not clear to anyone, be it 'symbolic castration' or 'divided subject' - everyone refers to them, and what binds the group together is ultimately their very shared ignorance." 

Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute. Verso, 2000. s. 114

Milbank om den västerländska teologins dragning åt öst

"By nature we are orientated to the beatific vision, to the receiving of grace even though we can´t demand something that has to be a gift, so you reach the paradox that we can only reach our natural end if we receive something beyond our nature as gift. We can only be ourselves if we receive something that doesn't belong to us. It seems to me that is the paradox that lies at the very heart of Christianity and goes along with the fact that first of all nature is a gift, it´s creation. It goes along with the fact the the only fully human being who ever lived was a divine person in two natures. It  goes along with a strongly seraline, and in no way Nestorian, Christology." - John Milbank

Stanley Fish upptäcker Anselm

... if evidence is never independent and is only evidence within the precincts of a particular theory, “adherents of rival theories,” Kelly explains, “will irremediably differ as to the appropriate description of the data itself,” and agreement between them cannot be brought about by simply pointing to the data. 

Indeed, the phrase “data itself” — data independent of any theory currently in place — will be without a sense. Nor can any sense be given to the claim that because scientific conclusions must “stand up to scrutiny” (Jan), they enjoy a superior status. Scrutiny, like evidence, is something that occurs within a theory and will have a theory-specific shape. Scrutiny is not a practice that escapes or corrects the boundaries of perspective; it is a feature of a perspective it cannot transcend. 

- Ur Stanley Fish krönika Evidence in Science and Religion, Part Two

Fides quaerens intellectum.

Kurt Wallander och Hegel

Upptäckte just att Zizek, i sitt kommande mastodontverk om Hegel, använder sig av Kurt Wallanders målande far för att illustrera skilnaden mellan Hegels och Deleuzes syn på "difference":

In Henning Mankel´s police procedural series, Inspector Kurt Wallander has a father whose means of survival is painting - he paints all the time, making hundreds of copies of the same painting, a forest landscape over which the sun never sets (therein resides the "message" of the painting: it is possible to hold the sun captive, to prevent it from setting, to freeze a magical moment, extracting its pure appearance from nature´s eternal circular movement of generation and degeneration). There is, however, a "minimal difference" in these otherwise identical paintings: in some, there is a small grouse in the landscape, while others are without the grouse, as if eternity itself, frozen time, has to be sustained by a minimal variation, a kind of stand-in for what really distinguishes each painting, it´s unique, purely virtual intensity.

Deleuze´s most radical anti-Hgelian argument concerns this pure difference: Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of identity or contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as contradiction which is then, through its dialectical resolution, again subsumed under identity. 

Slavoj Zizek - Less Than Nothing

Få saker skulle just nu roa (eller oroa) mig mer än en redogörelse för vad Zizek konsumerar i form av text och film under en genomsnittlig vecka.
...
Uppdatering: Tydligen är det inte första gången Zizek refererar till Henning Mankells skrivande. Om detta har @Ludviger bloggat här!

Zizek om hipsters

"It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1‘s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth." 

It should by now be obvious that the utterance “hipster” finds its analogue in the sobbing flight of the debutante who arrives at the dance only to discover that another girl is wearing an identical dress. The debutante’s double calls into question her own sense of self. In order to avoid Girardian annihilation and rejoin her self she must flee from the sight of her double. But what would it mean if the debutante had planned the entire social disaster, including the existence of her own double and her ridiculous exit, in advance? The utterance “hipster” presents us with just such a scenario. 

The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body. 

- Slavoj Zizek - L’etat d’hipster (översatt) via Generation Bubble

Kristus är uppstånden!

”Christ's resurrection has direct implications for contemporary politics. Today, western societies have witnessed the emergence of a new tribalism, fueled by the logic of capitalism with its proliferation of niche identities and by the politics of multiculturalism with its advocacy of mere "difference," while lacking the language to articulate any vision of a common good. Such multicultural pluralism is a mirror image of the postmodern ethics of difference, where each person is assumed to be absolutely "other."
[...]
"This amounts to a crisis in our social imagination: we find ourselves unable to imagine what it might really mean to live together. Margaret Thatcher's prophecy has come true: there is no such thing (anymore) as society."
--
Benjamin Myers - ”Rowan Williams and the Politics of the Empty Tomb”

The greater the gods, the freer the humans

"One could almost devise a law to apply to this situation, a law of human emancipation through divine affirmation. It could be summed up as follows: the greater the gods, the freer the humans are. The degree of human obligation towards the law given to them from outside is, contrary to appearances, inversely related to the degree of concentration of,  and separation from, the divine. And if we assume that such a law exists, the sudden appearance of transcendence supplies the unique occasion for its application. The entire signification of religious history may be condensed into this moment. There is a strong temptation to see this in this unifying removal of the divine a rise in the external determination of the human order, as compared with the immediate and abundant presence of the previous polytheistic Supernatural. Nothing could be further from the truth. Immanence presupposes severance from the foundation, while transcendence brings it nearer and makes it accessible."

Marcel Gauchet. The Disenchantment of the World. New French Thought, 1999. s. 51

Hokus pokus i nattvarden

Philip Goodchild on theology and money

Zizek on art and sex

"Take today’s deadlock of sexuality or art: is there anything more dull, opportunistic, and sterile than to succumb to the superego injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and provocations (the performance artist masturbating on stage, or masochistically cutting himself; the sculptor displaying decaying animal corpses or human excrement), or to the parallel injunction to engage in more and more “daring” forms of sexuality?
[...]
And what if, in our postmodern world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of date, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if, today, straight marriage is “the most dark and daring of all transgressions”?

Slavoj Zizek. The Puppet and the Dwarf. MIT Press, 2003. p. 35-36

Heidegger on the flight from the world

"Into the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching office of the Church steps the authority of conscience, obtrudes the authority of reason. Against these the social instinct rises up. The flight from the world into the suprasensory is replaced by historical progress. The otherworldly goal of everlasting bliss is transformed into the earthly happiness of the greatest number. The careful maintenance of the cult of religion is relaxed through enthusiasm for the creating of a culture or the spreading of civilization. Creativity, previously the unique property of the biblical god, becomes the distinctive mark of human activity. Human creativity finally passes over into business enterprise."
--
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (Garland Pub., 1977), 64.

Westphal om ontoteologi

"Onto-theology is thus a bit like Baskin-Robbins or Heinz. It comes in thirty-one flavors or fifty-seven varieties or who knows how many different versions. In discussing Nietzsche on the death of God, Heidegger lists the following as God surrogates in secular modernity: conscience, reason, historical progress, the earthly happiness of the greatest number, and even business enterprise. No ‘‘flight from the world into the suprasensory’’ is necessary to find that particular being whose task will be to give unity and intelligibility to the whole. 

But all forms of onto-theology have a common purpose. Each puts its God, whether it be the Unmoved Mover, or Nature, or Spirit, or the Market to work as the keystone of a metaphysical theory designed to render the whole of reality intelligible to philosophical reflection. Thus, for example, those writers who identify freedom with free enterprise and make this the immanent telos of human history are onto-theologians in an era of the death of God."
---
Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-transcendence: On God and the Soul (Indiana University Press, 2004), 18

Förnuftet känner inga gränser

"For reason, there is nothing beyond, as there is in a mere opposition of the understanding, because in speaking of a beyond reason is already encompassing this beyond, which is within reason and not beyond it. In this Hegel was right, for in thinking of anything as beyond something else, even if this something be the whole of what is finite, one is already thinking of two sides and of either side as caught up with its opposite through some infinite that is neither this side nor that side, neither here nor beyond, but simply all-encompassing. There is no going beyond this true infinite, since going beyond it is always still only reinventing it. Reason, in its own infinite movement, is always already beyond any attempt to set any limits beyond which it cannot go. [...]

There is no way of setting a limit, because reason is always already beyond that limit in its encompassing movement. What we have demonstrated, however, at the end of metaphysics, is the existence of, or rather the necessity of affirming, a Being that totally transcends anything reason can encompass in its grasp."

Oliva Blanchette, Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics (CUA Press, 2003), 526

Dualismernas dilemma

Nature/grace. Sacred/profane. Natural/supernatural. All such dualisms are fruits of our fallen logics, despite our best and most honorable intentions. This fallen logic ends only in ruin, the ruin of the "spiritual". For the logic is in the end, "atheist,"not to mention the very destruction of the secular, or the natural. For all that is left in the wake of this logic is dust, with only ever momentary, arbitrary (that is, accidental) shapes and identities.
[...]
A similar sin is equally present in the religious. As the theologian John Milbank strikingly claims, "once there was no secular." One could add a corollary this: once there was no religion - or, better put, once nothing was sacred. This idea should be no cause for Dawkins to lick his lips in excitement, desperately seeking a time machine to travel back to any such secular idyll. No, if Dawkins wishes to be an atheist, in a sense he would be wise to join his local church. This is not to say that the church per se (which for Christians is the body of Christ) is illegitimate, much less that we should take up some sort of New Age position and abandon formal worship, liturgy, and so on. No, quite the contrary. Any form of apartheid between the profane and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural, always produces disastrous results, results that are the opposite of those motives that first set up any such division. 

Conor Cunningham. Darwins Pious Idea - Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong. Eerdmans, 2010. s, 408 

--
Kan varmt rekommendera Cunninghams bok, om vilken Slavoj Zizek skriver:

"Even those sympathetic to the recent wave of evolutionary attacks on religion cannot help feeling that something is missing there: Dawkins and company lack a minimum of understanding of what religion is about, of how it works. Cunningham's book is thus obligatory reading for all interested in this topic: while fully endorsing the scientific validity of Darwinism, it clearly brings to light its limitations in understanding not only religion but also our human predicament. A book like Cunningham's is needed like simple bread in our confused times."

Om Kant i Döda poeters sällskap

Via en serie tweets fick jag mig nyligen Upplysningens valspråk av Kant till livs:

"Upplysning är människans utträde ur hennes självförvållade omyndighet. Omyndighet är oförmågan att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning. Självförvållad är denna omyndighet om orsaken till densamma inte ligger i brist på förstånd, utan i brist på beslutsamhet och mod att göra bruk av det utan någon annans ledning. Sapere aude! Hav mod att göra bruk av ditt eget förstånd! lyder alltså upplysningens valspråk."*

Det där med "att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan någon annans ledning" har kanske en lite annan klangbotten idag än vad det hade 1784. Kant exemplifierade då omyndigheten med: "Har jag en bok som har förstånd i mitt ställe, har jag en själasörjare som har samvete i mitt ställe, har jag en läkare som bedömer dieten i mitt ställe osv, så behöver jag inte anstränga mig själv".
Idag väcker valspråket andra sorts frågor: Är mitt förstånd verkligen mitt? Är det möjligt att göra bruk av sitt förstånd utan påverkan och ledning? Har Upplysningen gjort oss till myndiga och mogna människor? Jag kom att tänka på en träffande text av Stanley Hauerwas som problematiserar en oreflekterad tilltro till det fria förnuftet:

"Both Kant and the utilitarians assumed that the task of the ethicist was to explicate the presuppositions everyone shares. Ethics is the attempt to systematize what we all perhaps only inchoately know or which we have perhaps failed to make sufficiently explicit. Such a view of ethics can appear quite anticonventional, but even the anticonventional stance gains its power by appeal to what anyone would think upon reflection. This can be nicely illustrated in terms of the recent movie, The Dead Poets Society. It is an entertaining, popular movie that appeals to our moral sensibilities. The movie depicts a young and creative teacher battling what appears to be the unthinking authoritarianism of the school as well as his students' (at first) uncomprehending resistance to his teaching method. The young teacher, whose subject is romantic poetry, which may or may not be all that important, takes as his primary pedagogical task helping his students think for themselves. We watch him slowly awaken one student after another to the possibility of their own talents and potential. At the end, even though he has been fired by the school, we are thrilled as his students find the ability to stand against authority, to think for themselves.

This movie seems to be a wonderful testimony to the independence of spirit that democracies putatively want to encourage. Yet I can think of no more conformist message in liberal societies than the idea that students should learn to think for themselves. What must be said is that most students in our society do not have minds well enough trained to think. A central pedagogical task is to tell students that their problem is that they do not have minds worth making up. That is why training is so important, because training involves the formation of the self through submission to authority that will provide people with the virtues necessary to make reasoned judgment." **

Själv funderar jag på om det kan vara så att Upplysningens upprop mot traditionsbaserat förnuft parat med dess negativa frihetssyn har gjort oss blinda för en annan sorts omyndighet. John Milbank sätter ord på något av detta:

"I can choose anything anywhere, but these choices will always be for the choices of others, selecting me. Since anything can now be mine, nothing will really be mine. Since I am offered absolute Kantian liberty without the guidance of education of my judgement, I will be perfectly manipulated: absolutely controlled in my important choices (for the exploitative outlet for sub-standard coffee for example, or the exploitative lifestyle website, that some poor individual imagines they have freely invented), and within this allowed a measure of predetermined indifferent laxity (a shot of this or that sickly flavour to disguise the third-rate coffee-blend, the sub-choice of lifestyle that gives me the illusion of interacting with the Internet . . .)"***

Om Kants upprop gällde frigörelse från blind auktoritetstro och självförvållad omyndighet, så är samtidens stora fråga var det finns resurser som kan att leda människan ut ur hennes självförvållade kommersialisering, ensamhet, och vilsenhet. Om Upplysningens valspråk på sin tid var ett stridsrop för frihet, är det idag snarast ett uttryck för konformism. Den viktiga politiska frågan idag är inte så mycket bristen på frihet, utan bristen på gemenskap. 

--
* Ur «Vad är upplysning» Immanuel Kant, Symposion, 1989
** Stanley Hauerwas - Discipleship as a Craft, Church as a Disciplined Community
*** John Milbank. Being Reconciled. Routledge, 2003. s.290

Michel Polanyi om materialism och moral

"Men may go on talking the language of positivism, pragmatism, and naturalism for many
years, yet continue to respect the principles of truth and morality which their vocabulary anxiously ignores." 

Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, 1998. s. 247

John Gray om det sekuläras kristna rötter

“Secular thinking is a legacy of Christianity and has no meaning except in a context of monotheism […] Post-Christian secular societies are formed by the beliefs they reject, whereas a society that had truly left Christianity behind would lack the concepts that shaped secular thought."
--
John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 268.

The dilemma of ultra-Darwinism

"A number of ultra-Darwinists have argued that teaching religion to children is a form of abuse (one thinks of both Dawkins and Dennett here), because religion is, for them, an illusion. But ethics is also an illusion for them, as is free will. What, then, do we tell our children? How do we accurately describe to them the world in which we they live - according to ultra-Darwinistsm? Surely, to be good enlightened parents, we must tell our children that there are no such things as ethics, and there is no real reason (ultra-Darwinian reason). Why should they be allowed to eat the chicken but not the dog? Indeed, why should the dog not be allowed to eat them? Should weteach our children that there are no such thing as free will, that mind is reducible to matter, that there is no such thing as rationality, that we do not love them, and, lastly, that they do not really exist? As Lennon might have sung it: imagine there are no pelple, ethics, love, humans, or rationality - it´s easy if you try."

Conor Cunningham. Darwin´s Pious Idea - Why the Ultra-Darwinists and the Creationists Both Get It Wrong. Eerdmans, 2010. s. 238

Sekularismen är religiös!

The anthropologist Brian Morris, in the introduction to his book Anthropological Studies of Religion (1987), says that "the rubric 'religion', to me, covers all phenomena that are seen as having a sacred or supra-empirical quality: totemism, myth, witchcraft, ritual, spirit beliefs, symbolism, and the rest".

Now it occurs to me that all values are supraempirical, and if we include as values the American Constitution, the rights of man, and the concept of the civil society, then religion in Morris's usage covers what defines secular western society. In point of fact Morris's usage tends to make 'religion' identical with ritual, thus including many institutions that others would like to label secular.

__
Timothy Fitzgerald. The Ideology of Religious Studies. Oxford University Pres, 2003. s. 12

Hegel om epistemologins dilemma

We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain. … But the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge. To examine this so-called instrument is the same as to know it. But to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim.

Gillian Rose. Hegel contra Sociology. Athlone, 1981. s. 43-44

Connolly raserar modernitetens murar ...

"The difference between philosophy and faith - which has formed the hallmark of secular thinking - is not recognized by either of us to be a distinction of type. It functions at best as a delineation of components within a religious/philosophical perspective. Every faith has a philosophical component. And every philosophy is invested with faith. The attempt to maintain a sharp line of distinction between the two is one of the things that has placed Catholic philosophy in limbo in academic life. And, I must add, it also encourages many philosophers and theologians to place a minority, non theistic faith in the West, advanced variously by Epicurius, Lucretius, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze, and Foucault, in the same position. Once you come to terms with the element of faith in utilitarianism, Kantianism and Hegelianism, and then re-encounter the philosophical components of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, the academic marginalization of both Catholicism and Nietzscheanism loses much of its intellectual grounding. The modern, secular line of distinction between philosophy and faith begins to blur. By faith in this context I mean a lived interpretation which so far has not been subjected to definitive demonstration, one that involves both refined reflection and a gut commitment below the threshold of complex intellectualization. The human condition that makes faith unavoidable, plural, and effective is the same condition that makes the key question of ethics less how to resolve issues within a shared moral creed and more how to negotiate relationships between constituencies, within and across state lines, inhabited by different operational faiths."

--
William Connolly ”Catholicism and Philosophy” in Ruth Abbey, Charles Taylor (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 171.

En annan sorts framgångsteologi ...

via John Stackhouse

Hauerwas om hälsa

When "health" is thought to name "total well being," as it often is in modernity, and medicine becomes the agent of health, this threatens to make medicine the institution of a secular salvation. I suspect that is why for many today medicine has become an alternative church.

Stanley Hauerwas - At peace with finitude: The body of medicine and the Christian body 

Williams vs. Dawkins

Ärkebiskopen of Canterbury debatterar livets uppkomst med Richard Dawkins.

Är politik utan transcendens möjlig?

"Is politics conceivable without religion? The answer is obviously affirmative as the evidence of various secular political theories testifies. But is politics practicable without religion? That is the question. And it is the question that Rousseau´s thinking politics faces. Can politics become effective as a way of shaping, motivating, and mobilizing a people or peoples without some sort of dimension -  if not foundation -  that is religious, without some sort of appeal to transcendence, to externality, to what we call above, with Charles Taylor, ´fullness,´ however substantive or otherwise that appeal might be? I do not think so."
[...]
The secularization that seems to define modern politics has to acknowledge a moment of what Emilio Gentile calls sacralization, the transformation of a political entity like a state, nation, class, or party into a sacred entity, which means that it becomes transcendent, unchallengeable, and intangible.

So, can a political collectivity maintain itself in existence, that is, maintain its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, without religion, rituals, and something that we can only call belief? Once again, I don not think so."

---
Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (Verso, 2012), 24.

Det transcendentas nya synlighet

"For a time it was fashionable in some revolutionary circles to suggest that liberation was to be found only beyond the confines of [transcendence]. If humanity was to overcome the afflictions of this present age, then a genuinely revolutionary politics must eschew, indeed escape, the constrictions of [transcendence]. Now . . . the dismissal of [transcendence] is being reconsidered. While totalizing discourse may be anathema and practice celebrated, it is recognized that liberation hinges upon a prior ontology that maps the trajectories of the constitutive power of life. [And] for a time it was also popular to espouse a militant atheism, to insist that liberation, if it is to be truly liberative, reject appeals to transcendence (and its handmaid, theology) in accord with the received prejudice that transcendence was but a species of opiate."

Creston Davis citerar Daniel Bell i The Monstrosity of Christ, s. 4

Žižek om utbildning

"You know who told me the best story? The British Marxist, Terry Eagleton. He told me that 20 or 30 years ago he saw a big British Marxist figure, Eric Hobsbawm, the historian, giving a talk to ordinary workers in a factory. Hobsbawm wanted to appear popular, not elitist, so he started by saying to the workers, “Listen, I’m not here to teach you. I am here to exchange experiences. I will probably learn more from you than you will from me.” Then he got the answer of a lifetime. One ordinary worker interrupted him and said, “Fuck off! You are privileged to study, to know. You are here to teach us! Yes, we should learn from you! Don’t give us this bullshit, ‘We all know the same.’ You are elite in the sense that you were privileged to learn and to know a lot. So of course we should learn from you. Don’t play this false egalitarianism.”

Again, I think there is a certain strategy today even more, and I speak so bitterly about it because in Europe they are approaching it. I think Europe is approaching some kind of intellectual suicide in the sense that higher education is becoming more and more streamlined. They are talking the same way communists were talking 40 years ago when they wanted to crush intellectual life. They claimed that intellectuals are too abstract in their ivory towers; they are not dealing with real problems; we need education so that it will help real people—real societies’ problems. And then, again, in a debate I had in France, some high politician made it clear what he thinks and he said...in that time in France there were those demonstrations in Paris, the car burnings. He said, “Look, cars are burning in the suburbs of Paris: We don’t need your abstract Marxist theories. We need psychologists to tell us how to control the mob. We need urban planners to tell us how to organize the suburbs to make demonstrations difficult.”

But this is a job for experts, and the whole point of being intellectual today is to be more than an expert. Experts are doing what? They are solving problems formulated by others. You know, if a politician comes to you, “Fuck it! Cars are burning! Tell me what’s the psychological mechanism, how do we dominate it?” No, an intellectual asks a totally different question: “What are the roots? Is the system guilty?” An intellectual, before answering a question, changes the question. He starts with, “But is this the right way to formulate the question?”"

- Slavoj Zizek, "intervjuad" i the Harward Crimson.

Dawkins dilemma

Den sekulära humanismens kanske främste profet, Richard Dawkins, har förutom sina böcker om darwinism och religionskritik, även gjort sig känd för sin aldrig sinande svada. Lite komiskt var det därför när Dawkins i en radiodebatt i BBC nyligen helt saknade svar på tal efter ha blivit verbalt tillintetgjord av en präst.

Dawkins hänvisade till en enkätundersökning där många som angett sig vara kristna inte kunde namnge den första boken i Nya Testamentet. Dawkins poäng var att dessa individer på grund av sin kunskapsbrist inte kvalificerade som "riktiga kristna". Dawkins fick då frågan om han kunde den fullständiga titeln på Darwins "The Origin Of Species".

Giles Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of 'The Origin Of Species', I'm sure you could tell me that. 

Richard Dawkins: Yes I could 

Giles Fraser: Go on then. 

Richard Dawkins: On The Origin Of Species.. Uh. With, Oh God. On The Origin Of Species. There is a sub title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. 

Giles Fraser: You're the high pope of Darwinism… If you asked people who believed in evolution that question and you came back and said 2% got it right, it would be terribly easy for me to go 'they don't believe it after all.' It's just not fair to ask people these questions. They self-identify as Christians and I think you should respect that.

Den brittiske överrabbinen Jonathan Sachs skriver om händelsen här, och Huffington Post bistår med ljudfilen.

Taylor om identitet

“My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand”
- Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self, 27

I ljuset av ovanstående blir talet om nationell identitet obegripligt!

TV4 Göteborg om frikyrkans kris

Den senaste veckan har frikyrkans framtid debatterats i tidningen Dagen. Debatten startade med en ganska uppgiven och sorglig artikel av Sigfrid Deminger, där han överger det skepp han varit med om att styra under lång tid. Även om det finns mycket som är problematiskt med Demingers artikel, till både form och innehåll, så pekar den på något djupt problematiskt vad avser hur underhållningskulturen tenderar att tränga undan djup och allvar i gudstjänsten.

Med anledning av debatten gjorde TV4 Göteborg ett inslag med Deminger från Fiskebäcks Missionskyrka.

Otydligt vara vs. vara otydlig

"There is an old philosophers’ joke that the analytical philosopher always accuses the continental one of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher accuses the analytical one of Being insufficiently."

via Ernst Blog

Kan religionen rädda politiken?

“… before we can begin to think about the normative or on-going relationship between religion and postsecular politics we need to re-create the possibility of a genuine politics. A key, if not the key catalyst for this is institutional religion. This is because religions, particularly those with formal institutional structures, are one of the few means of mobilizing people for common, public action; they present a contradiction to the attempt to over-come, move beyond or avid politics through either the market or management; they keep alive ultimate questions about what it means to be human and what the good life consists of in such a way as to re-open the need for political deliberation about what we value and why we value it; and finally, religions are the bearers of moral notions of the person and the good society and traditions of practice that enable resistance to process of commodification and instrumentalization. Religious groups thereby uphold the possibility of democratic citizenship which is itself premised on the idea that the state and the market have limits and that persons are not commodities but have infinite value."

---

Luke Bretherton. Religion and the Salvation of Urban Politics in Arie Molendijk, Justin Beaumont, and Christoph Jedan, Exploring the Postsecular: The Religious, the Political, and the Urban (Brill Academic Pub, 2010), 220.