"Orthogonal" still works... ;)
Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
One of the characteristics of true religion.
Nonsense. They still do it in Africa and they never heard of Jesus. Some people just need burning.
Some practice, like Ghandi, practice passive resistance. Others accept whatever degree of force is necessary for self defence. The common ground is that self defence should be creative and proactive -- that is one should never wait until attacked to defuse conflict.
Personally, I do not believe that violence is caused by ideas and ideologies. I believe that people with violent and aggressive temperaments gravitate to ideologies that support violence. They can, of course, grab control of nations and lead the nation into war.
In my opinion, the greatest weapon the West has against radical Islam is ridicule. Certainly we need guns and bombs to defeat people who are using guns and bombs against us. But in the long run we must make these people into objects of ridicule.
The primary "reason" for the witch burnings in Europe was economic -- the judges who condemned the witches inherited their property. In those countries and regions where this practice was not allowed, witchcraft was mysteriously rare.
Most of the people killed as witches were landholders accused of things so preposterous that Weekly World News wouldn't print it. It was all about greed.
To the point of this article, the Word teaches us to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, strength and understanding and to love one another, including our enemies. The Word cannot be reconciled to other teachings, in particular, Islamic fundamentalism.
Likewise, non-believers might say that my description illustrates why Christianity cannot be reconciled to "reason." But that fails (as you have observed) because in my illustration based on personal experience - the Word goes beyond the ability to explain it. It is a divine revelation available to all who believe and are willing to listen by the spirit instead of by the mind.
Very well said, general_re. I really like your observation about faith and reason being "orthogonal to one another."
But there are, of course, limits to reason - reason cannot guide us in an exploration of the fundamentally non-material, which the spiritual is, practically by definition. Reason can neither confirm nor deny the basic existence of God, for example - for that, we have no choice but to believe or disbelieve as an act of pure faith. And people who claim that reason must lead in one direction or another are simply claiming the imprimatur of reason without really understanding those limits.
By the same token, faith skates past its own limitations when it tries to make pronouncements about how the material world actually is. Faith alone has proven, inductively, to be less useful for understanding the material world than reason has - we can try to rationally explore the causes and the nature of lightning, and thus try to expand our knowledge of the universe around us, and perhaps mitigate its effects, or we can see lightning as an expression of God's will, and take it as simply an article of faith. But settling for lightning as an aspect of God's mysterious will does nothing to advance the human condition, to make our lives better or more prosperous - understanding lightning is, for practical reasons, best left to explorations via reason and rationality.
That's all about how discussions of how the world is - when we move into the hypothetical, and begin discussing how the world should be - i.e., what we wish to make of it - then I think it is entirely appropriate to discuss it in terms of both faith and reason. Faith can give us some basic principles that we may take as axiomatic - freedom is better than slavery, life is better than death, material wealth is better than poverty, et cetera - and we may the exercise the gift of reason to explore how best to realize those principles. It requires a belief in a rather more perverse God than I am prepared to accept to think that God would give us the gift of reason, and then demand that we abandon it entirely in favor of faith.
Or maybe the legend of Prometheus has some grain of truth to it - maybe reason is really a curse, and not a blessing. I tend to think not, but who knows? ;)
I have a slightly different slant on it (so to speak). My personal analogy is to regard one as carpentry and the other as plumbing (don't try reading anything into the selection of trades, I just picked two I could spell). When you do carpentry, you need a carpenter's tools. Similarly for plumbing. The two trades are not in conflict. They do different things, and they use different tools. Together, they can get a house built.
People openly advertised themselves as witches. They sold their services whether it was wart removal or evil eye removal. My wife's aunt talks about witches in the Appalachian hills long before Wicca. They were tolerated until something bad happened and they became the scapegoat.
The communist terror groups certainly were.
"Orthogonal" still works... ;)
Reason is defined by Ayn Rand as “the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”
The Philosophy of Objectivism: A Brief Summary.
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