[MD] False Messiah

[Scott Roberts]

Ant,

Ant said (to Marsha):
I would tend to agree with this if only because modern religious training
has so much static intellectual and social baggage already with it even
before you start.  Maybe Sam can throw more light on this subject?

Scott:
Since Sam has left, I'll take a shot. The answer depends, of course, on 
which religious training you mean. Most has this problematic baggage, but 
then one can say the same about contemporary non-religious training as well. 
The question, I think, is whether religious training has the potential for 
discarding this baggage. Within, say, Catholic training, the answer is yes, 
since it is the official doctrine of the Catholic Church that not only does 
reason require faith, but also faith requires reason, that is, the critical 
thinking we all call for. Another source for improvement is that all 
theologians, other than fundamentalists, recognize that God-talk is 
necessarily metaphorical. Only fundamentalists and anti-theists take it 
literally, and their problem is to privilege the literal over the 
metaphorical. In this regard, religious thinking is ahead of, say, the 
scientific materialists, in questioning the value of "being literal".

There is, of course, a huge difference between theory and practice in this 
regard. But things are changing. Even among evangelical Christians, there is 
movement, as a search on "emergent Christianity" will tell you. Also see the 
Sea of Faith stuff (www.sofn.org.uk). Among intellectuals, there are various 
post-modern or post-secular thinkers of interest, such as Gianni Vattimo and 
John Caputo ("The Prayers and Tears of Jacque Derrida: Religion without 
Religion"). There is a book called Religion After Metaphysics, which 
contains essays by these two and others, which might be of interest. Whether 
such ideas ever get into the mainstream is, to be sure, not foreseeable --  
not soon, at any rate.

In short, there is much of the Dynamic going on in religion, or at least in 
Christianity in developed countries.

- Scott