[MD] Theocracy, Secularism, and Democracy

[Steven Peterson]

Hi DMB, Matt, Mary, all,

On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 3:39 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Steve began his essay:
> I'd like us to try to explore the political implications of Pirsig's anti-theism.
>
>
> dmb says:
> I think the MOQ is anti-theistic for moral reasons and the political implications are pretty well covered under the notion that an intellectually guided society is better than a society dominated by social values. I guess that goes for people too. You can see how all the basic distinctions within the MOQ bear on the issue. I mean, it's not just about the distinction between social and intellectual, it's also about the distinction between static and Dynamic and it's consistent with the pragmatic theory of truth and with philosophical mysticism.



Steve:
Is anti-theism really consistent with the pragmatic theory of truth?
Pragmatists follow James in thinking that rationality is more
permissive than the positivists would have us believe. We also think
that rationality is a context-sensitive affair where what one person
is justified in believing based on his history is frequently different
from what someone else may be justified in believing based on a
different set of past experiences. We are not inclined to follow Bill
Maher in declaring ourselves distinct from the believers under the
label of "Rationalists" since we don't see reason as the something
that can't be employed with respect to religious beliefs just as it
can to any other sort of belief. Like James, we think that many people
are rationally entitled to their religious beliefs even while we are
convinced that they are wrong about what they believe. If we didn't
think that the religious were rational, we would have good reason
ourselves to end our participation in the practice of exchanging
reasons, in other words, of giving up on democracy.




Pirsig:
> "Phaedrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of DQ, a sign-post which allows socially pattern-dominated people to see DQ. The problem has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the DQ they were originally intended to preserve." (Pirisg in Lila, near the end of chapter 30)
>
> Some relevant comments from the Copleston annotations:
> 180 "The MOQ supports religion but does not support many Christian traditions."


Steve:
These quotes are not anti-theistic and are evidence against any
Pirsigian militant secularism. But then you quote...

Pirsig:
> 208 "The MOQ would add a fourth stage where the term "God" is completely dropped as a relic of an evil social suppression of intellectual and Dynamic freedom. The MOQ is not just atheistic in this regard. It is anti-theistic."

Steve:
Why does he need to go all _anti_theistic here? Why does the word
"God" need to be dropped from everyone's vocabularies? Is every
possible conception of God necessarily evil? Rather than simply not
believing in God and arguing against specific ways of being religious
or specific conceptions of God, is Pirsig saying that _everyone_ ought
not believe in God? Any kind of God???

After hundreds of years of the various religious sects trying to woo
others toward their particular brands of religion, broad diversity of
religious belief persists in the West especially in the US where
religion especially flourishes, and it doesn't look like this
plurality of religious ideas will be going away any time soon.
Meanwhile, the post-Englightenment expectations of many secularists
haven't been met. Though widely available, the arguments that we find
so convincing against religious beliefs and for denying the existence
of traditionally conceived theistic conception of God over the past
few centuries haven't succeeded in convincing most others as
secularist theorists expected they would.. Noting also the
unavailability of any knock-down argument to settle the matter of
God's existence here and now in addition to the unlikelihood that such
an argument will present itself in the foreseeable future, we ought to
recognize that religious voices will be around for a long time to
come. The question is, what do we do about them?

Both the religious traditionalists who hope to unite all under the
banner of one religion and see democracy as inadequate to sustain
moral values without religious constraints as well those secularists
who would like to eliminate the impact of religion on politics are in
a quandary. The democratic process of exchanging ideas is not going to
either rid the populace of all religion or unite us under one
religion. Conversation alone is not going to work to achieve the goals
of either. For either group to achieve their ends, it will become
necessary to achieve political dominance of one over the other and
enforce their views through the coercion of government The choice is
between militancy and giving up on democracy or finding reason to
doubt the notion that the opposition needs to be eliminated for
democracy to survive.

We have already seen that the response of many of the religious
traditionalists to this quandary has been to become theocrats, to give
up on democracy and try to impose their religion using the power of
government rather than convince the rest of us to agree with them. At
the same time, perhaps many secularists have responded by becoming the
militant variety where their secularism is not understood merely in
terms of religious freedom but rather as seeking to expunge religion
all together from political reason-giving. They may see _all_
religious influenced reason-giving as inappropriate and theocratic.
Religious voices in political discourse are perhaps thought to need to
be silenced for the sake of democracy.

But why not just regard religious reason-giving and argue that such
religious reason-giving is unconvincing instead of work towards a
state of affairs where such reasons ought never be aired in public?
Isn't it enough that a particular religious conception is just one
voice among many given equal consideration of all other voices, or
must all views that cite religious justification be ruled out of the
conversation, period? If so, how should that ruling-out be done? If
militant secularism can only be furthered through the undemocratic
means, of coercion, it is as much a threat to democracy as is
theocracy (if not to the same degree since militant secularists have
never had the sort of power to justify anyone's fears about them).

When Harris says that we no longer have a right to our myths, what
does that mean in practice? I don't think he actually intended to
propose any coercion (though he erred in leaving himself too open to
being misunderstood in that way). I think he is trying to exhort us to
hold people's religious beliefs up to the same conversational
pressures that our other beliefs face. I agree that we should, but
what is the point then of condemning _all_ religious beliefs as
irrational _en masse_ and  _in advance_, the same beliefs that
supposedly have not already been held to such pressures?

While Harris who wrote an article called “Science must destroy
religion” and his fellow "horsemen" have condemned all religion as
irrational, he has also (in his controversial speech "The Problem With
Atheism") argued that atheism is "too blunt an instrument" at certain
times. He doesn't want us to self-identify as atheists in a blanket
attack on all religion. His concern is not that we throw the baby out
with the bath water, but that we don't treat all religion as equally
evil when some religious practice are far more problematic than
others. But isn't it also possible that some religious practices can
be not merely less evil or innocuous but actually good? We atheists
tend to think of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell when we think about
religious influence on politics, but some liberal believers first
think of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu. Unfortunately
there seem to be a lot more Jerry Falwells than MLKs, but such
examples should make us wary of condemning religion _en masse_ as
something we need to eliminate in order to protect democracy.

Given the history of attempts to expunge religion all together, even
if we see nothing at all redeemable about any religious practice, we
should still note that stamping out all religion is an unachievable
goal; therefore, opposing religion as such rather than targeting
specific ways of being religion is an impractical goal. For pragmatic
and philosophical reasons, I for one am satisfied with promoting
religious freedom and the need for _better_ religion instead of
working for a Godless world. I have no idea whether _everyone_ would
be better or worse off if there were no such thing as religion, and
even the religious could not possibly disagree with my desire for
better religion (that is, until we get into discussion of what we
think would make some of our current religious practices better.)

I also don't want to prevent anyone from making arguments in religious
terms. In fact, if those are the reasons that motivated taking the
stand in question, I welcome it. Though religious traditionalists
lament being hamstrung by having to phrase their concerns in secular
terms, I think (and Harris would agree) that it would be better if we
could confront the actual reasons that convinced religious people to
take their view in the first place instead of arguing against the
secularized arguments that the religious have fabricated in an attempt
to  taylor their discourse to for a wider audience. For example, if
someone starts arguing that we ought to disallow homosexual marriages
because statistics indicate that...better parents...blah, blah, blah,
when the actual reason that convinces them that we ought to forbid it
is some verse in Leviticus, we waste our time arguing against their
dubious statistics, and we never get to hold the real justification up
to scrutiny and present a case against such reasoning. We don't get to
point out that Leviticus also requires us to murder people for all
sorts of other acts that none of us any longer even regard as crimes.
We are likely to gain allies even among the religious in opposing poor
religious reasoning if such reasons are permitted to be aired. And
since the vast majority of the population is religious in some sense,
we certainly can't afford to refuse their support for our criticisms
by promoting an agenda of militant secularism rather than seeking
religious freedom and better religion.

After all I've said, I know I'm still two posts behind in responding,
DMB, but I'll try to get back to you tomorrow.

Best,
Steve