By David Martin
There are few extra contentious matters than the relation of religion to strength or the recommendation that faith is irrational in comparison with politics and notably at risk of violence. the previous declare is linked to Juergen Habermas and the latter with Richard Dawkins. during this e-book David Martin argues, opposed to Habermas, that faith and politics proportion a standard mythic foundation and that it really is deceptive to distinction the rationality of politics with the irrationality of faith. unlike Richard Dawkins (and New Atheists generally), Martin argues that the process taken is openly unscientific and that the proclivity to violence is a shared characteristic of faith, nationalism and political ideology alike rooted within the calls for of strength and social team spirit. The publication concludes by way of contemplating the altering ecology of religion and gear at either centre and outer edge in monuments, areas and areas.
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Extra info for Religion and Power: No Logos without Mythos
Example text
When people in the name of science ignore the norms of social science and fail to specify the proper occasions of violence, they further debase public debate. Public debate licenses the verbal violence of ‘scientific’ celebrities and encourages them to maraud at will beyond the sphere of their competence. My argument examines the rhetorical moves made by participants in public debate, in particular the ‘New Atheists’. With regard to the special character of the social sciences (understood as the pre-eminent site for any serious discussion of religion and violence) I argue that they include provinces of meaning that exhibit the distinctive truths of human and social existence.
The category of the ‘wars of religion’ that emerged at this time constitutes part of the founding myth of the innocent secular liberal state whereby Enlightened, rational and peaceful people confront violent, irrational religious others, particularly in the course of imperial and neo-colonial expansion. Enlightened Liberalism needs an unenlightened Other; and the myth of the special ability of religion to introduce irrationality and division lies behind our construction of the debate about the role of religion in contemporary society.
These packages are vehicles for the concentrated dissemination of the ‘most favoured’ ideological narrative and have little if anything to do with scientific discourse in either the natural or the social sciences. 36 Religion and Power The answer to my second question about the dominance and persistence of ideological narratives that lay much or even most of the onus for the violence of human history on ‘religion’ is more complicated and less easy to put across. These narratives – so useful, normative and emotionally satisfying to western elites, and so inimical to any sociological understanding of the relation of religion to violence – have themselves to be situated and contextualised in terms of historic struggles for dominance, above all in France.