<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Another "perhaps" may lie in definitions of "religious." It being Veterans Day with all the typical ceremonial hoopla and transmogrification of the veteran flooding the airwaves--a national cult reminiscent of those Roman cults that invented Christmas and Empire worship in the first place--to what better "text" can we look for the slip on the banana peel fall into authoritarianism? Surely, this national cult of the kill involves religious motives, though not in everyday terminology. Is this conversation becoming trapped by its definitional terms, framed by an understanding of religion derived from the Western church rather than an anthropological understanding of the religious motive in socially constructed discourses?</div><div><br></div><div>--Jerry<br><br>Sent from my iPhone</div><div><br>On Nov 10, 2014, at 7:37 PM, Gregory Desilet <<a href="mailto:info@gregorydesilet.com">info@gregorydesilet.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=windows-1252">
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<!--StartFragment--><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Stan—wow! Thanks for your response. I see how
you have been reading me much better now when you say the following: <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">“I guess I just had the feeling that the tone
of your argument hoped to dismiss everyone on the ‘religious’ side of the
divide by equating them all with those who held authoritarian interpretations
of scripture. I thought I saw in your tone an attempt to delegitimize
sacred texts and move them all into a category that could only be interpreted
as literature (open to unlimited interpretations).</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">So, yes, what you say above is not what I’m suggesting.
However, I do think you put your finger on the weakest link in my line of
thinking when you say, for example, this:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">“I agree . . .with Ed that those who see a God
element in the texts are still religious. I just wanted to make internal
distinctions among those who interpret the Bible as a divinely inspired text,
rather than have everyone in that category painted with a broad brush.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">I can see how you have concerns here based on
part of what I said in a previous post in response to Lee, which is as follows:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">“I don’t believe such
texts [sacred texts] are the sole source or perhaps even the primary source of
motivation for authoritarianism. But I do believe that as soon as a group of
people believes a text to be the word of God it amounts to stepping on a banana
peel and initiates a skid straight into authoritarianism. And there may also be
a bundle of motivations involved in believing a text to be divinely inspired,
but one clear consequence is authoritarianism—even where the text in question
may claim to be, as you [Lee] claim for the New Testament, anti-authoritarian.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Here, I’m clearly lumping into one category
those who believe a text to be divinely inspired—and I’m claiming this belief leads
to authoritarianism. Stan suspects I might have gone too far here and he could
be right. Frankly, (I’m ‘fessing up here) there is a side of me that wants to
place all texts even remotely considered to be “God communication” into one
category and consider them all to be on the road to fascism. Another side of me
wants to acknowledge that every time we step on a banana peel we don’t
necessarily do a complete pratfall into 1984. Sometimes we may skid a little
and then catch ourselves and maintain balance.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">So it occurs to me there may be groups of
religious folks who believe their religious text to be divinely inspired but
who also do NOT consider its message or messages to be sufficiently univocal
and clear to permit unquestioned interpretation and obedience and who allow for
multiple readings and inquiry into the text. This seems to be what Stan is
getting at and, if so, I admit the point is debatable. A side of me wants to
foreclose this possibility but this may be nothing more than my manifestation
of what Nietzsche calls the “mendacity of a systematizer.” I see this category
as an unstable category and I want to push it into some kind of stability—by
either naming such religious folks as essentially secularists and thereby
“philosophers” or as deceivers or self-deceivers who are at bottom deceptively
authoritarian. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">But maybe I need to allow for the possibility of an unstable
category of “non-authoritarian believers in divinely inspired texts.” Granting
as much, I do continue to feel a strong inclination to think of such folks as
really philosophers who believe in what Ed calls the “Great Potential” rather
than “religious” folks, but I need to pull back and ponder it for a while. Perhaps it will lead to a better understanding of what it means to be religious.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Thanks to all for, as Wayne Brockriede used to
say, helping me conduct my education in public.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 14pt;">Greg</span></p>
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