On May 10, 1:48 am, Steve Hayes
hotmail.com> wrote:>
> As someone once put it in a blog post:
>
> THAT FOOL DAWKINS
>
> Rational debate about the existence/ non-existence of God, and the ethical
> implications thereof, is good. It belongs to human dignity to seek to discern
> what is true.
>
> There is an academic discipline which studies questions such as what
> constitutes a warranted belief, what religious language 'means', whether it
> has a possible reference and what it means for our conceptions of the good
> life. That discipline is philosophy.
It may be philosophy or it may be sociology, it can even be psychology
but so far as that rare case where a true discipline of rigid
objectivity *is* to be found, there can be no analysis that proceeds
from a premise that defines faith as a "warranted belief" for this can
only be lost in fatal ignorance of that which it would study from the
outset . . .
http://jesusexegesis.blogspot.com/2008_04_01_archive.html
>There is also an academic discipline
> whose remit of study includes the atrocities committed in the name of
> religion. That discipline is history.
That is not a discipline, and it is not history, but strictly a skewed
perspective on history and on religion, attempting to abscond with the
study under a sham of discipline, to a parochial and bigoted misuse
and abuse of both.
The objective study of History will no sooner turn up (in the non-
Islamic case) atrocity as the most notably characteristic historical
feature of religion, than might be the more sooner observed as arising
from the study of History itself, as say for example in the way
Marxists and Nazis have "studied" let us say, the "history" of
"religion."
Indeed it may just as easily be said that the Study of History is a
history of atrocity, as the bloody hands of the historian could not be
the more atrociously evident. Who can be so blind as not to see as
from the academic discipline of History, its production of fanatic
theories about social change and revolution from Robespierre through
Mussolini to Mao? Indeed! far more than religion being in the main a
study with a view to vast fields of bleached skulls and smoking
corpses--we have the Study of History, itself to thank for every major
repression, tyranny and atrocity, and this goes, for History, so far
beyond the pale of what might be observed from time to time with
regard to Religion, that it does itself pale by the comparison.
A true discipline of study for the History of Religion, far more than
being a myopic and astigmatized view of a very real record of
atrocities committed in the name of religion, strictly by those who
are ignorant of or transgressors to their own religion (but for the
case of Islam) but then again, as might be noted (as even with Islam)
the study of religion, in order to be anything worthy of the term
"academic discipline" must also involve a record of the civilizing
influences of religion upon the history of the world.
So leave us not ever again forget all those anti-religious "historical
studies" that stand at the bloodiest foundation of atrocity known to
the history of mankind from Marat to Pol Pot, when religion and
atrocity are discussed in a context of the "academic discipline of the
study of history."
