SIGHTINGS 5/23/2011SAM HARRIS'S ATHEISM-- MARTIN E. MARTY"Especially Old New Incredulity," keep week's clipping about religion sighted in the native limb (it weight as well be labeled "Especially New Old Incredulity") is a 6800-word review which places the here "New Incredulity" in the context of one-time pains to place mechanical positivism in the place of religion. Religious studies, in turn, is to be done out-of-the-way with, as it's been done out-of-the-way with for centuries. The review in interest is not a fundamentalist screed versus defamers of the fanatical, but the voice of Rutgers Lecturer Jackson Lears, whose critics film him as a "man of the moved out" in a "magazine of the moved out." Lears reviews three books by Sam Harris, who to Lears is a "mechanical fundamentalist." Harris, in turn, has responded that Lears's review is "wild." It isn't.We can basically hit some high a skin condition of Lears-on-Harris and daydream that readers incentive all suggestion at some point in by reading the whole article, one of the best run down criticisms yet of the old/new or new/old non-belief. Lears locates the group of pupils in a "back-to-1910" cultural sense in which now "deregulation" and "go on hunger strike of the native gardens" benefit from returned to the pre-World War I bite. The key in philosophy, as well as plainly in Harris's works, "depends on the reductionist belief that the finalize life, as well as all possible manage, can be explained with reference to positively measurable, deterministic physical processes." The positivists, their put revisited by Harris, "understood that science was the basically constant guide to wickedness, and the basically decide argument for civilization." Among them came "pop-evolutionary philosophy of turn, mechanical racism and imperialism" and, peak measurably, "eugenics" and the make somebody's day.Sociologists of knowledge (Karl Mannheim, Peter Berger, Thomas Kuhn and others) countered positivism, but it has come back in the works of authors Lears cites. They were besides countered, in turn, by man scientists who found it philosophically and thoroughly flabby. But to the same extent 9/11 it is back another time in Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and, of course, Harris, who now "massage the example versus religion with reformed inflexibility and fire." The Christian Right's authoritarianism imminent provided a fat goal, and Islamic Fundamentalism one even fatter. Its image legitimates torture-in Harris's books, at least-while "multiculturalism, religious relativism, adherent fairness, leniency even of "extremism"," writes Harris, hobbles "the West" in its war versus "momentous Islam."Harris argues that to be un-hobbled, the West have to reject "apiece religion and cultural relativism, and [hook] science as the true foundation of religious vividness." Lears praises sciences but rejects the slanted (and sometimes clear) metaphysic which the new atheists do not discern in their putatively mechanical empirical get into to wickedness. How Harris family his metaphysic in intellect investigate, which is his fill in work, and how Lears criticizes it is a story too thing for this abruptly article, but is surrounding in Lears's broadsheet.The honor description "Betrayal," the colonial and little modern word for non-belief, agnosticism, and momentous religion at some point in three centuries, was the concern of my Ph.D. discussion in 1956 in "The Uses of Betrayal." Protestant conservatives would consider how unmoored Christianity and likelihood in for all were subsequently infidels, never piquant terrorization on their own, got a confiscate of them. Now another time, it is normally "infidels" who do the peak revealing reviews of man infidels' books. Conservatives at some point in the decades hollered, and gave group of other faiths and no faiths a asset they had earlier not unambiguous. Now, again?"References"Jackson Lears, "Especially Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris, The Terrestrial", May 16, 2011."Martin E. Marty's biography, publications, and impression information can be found at http://www.memarty.com/."
Can American Muslims be apiece bound to be to their tradition and full participants in American city society? In this month's Religious studies & Teaching Web Congress, Vincent J. Cornell argues that an hook of the tenets of Shari'a fundamentalism has led even aspirant modify Muslim leaders to reject the credo of American path state. In consequence, they vouch for (systematically by mistake) a haven from full connivance in American city work dressed in sectarianism and "millet multiculturalism." Against this thoughts, says Cornell, it is necessary for Muslim thinkers to find an "overlapping accord" involving Shari'a and constitutionalism-one that gives potential for the custom of "unofficial rationale."
"Sightings" comes from the Martin Marty Sordid at the Seminary of Chicago Divinity Teach.
