Post by johnbc on Oct 5, 2020 20:33:52 GMT
The detractors of religion use and abuse this argument that they found in Humboldt (not the explorer and naturalist Alexander, but his philologist brother Wilhelm): Human morality, even the highest and most substantial, is in no way dependent on religion, or necessarily linked to it.
All civilizations were born from original religious outbreaks. There has never been a “secular civilization”. A long time since the foundation of civilizations, nothing prevents some values and symbols from being separated abstractly from their origins and, in practice, becoming relatively independent educational forces.
I say “relatively” because, whatever the case may be, its prestige and ultimately its meaning will remain indebted to the religious tradition and will not survive long when it disappears from the surrounding society.
All “secular morals” are just an excerpt from previous religious moral codes
This cut can be effective for certain groups within a civilization that, in the end, remains religious, but, if this fund is suppressed, the cut is meaningless. The secular Europe’s inability to defend itself against Muslim cultural occupation is the most obvious example.
The present state of affairs in countries that have detached more fully from their Judeo-Christian roots is demonstrating with the utmost evidence that the so-called “lay civilization” never existed and cannot exist.
It lasted only a few decades, it never succeeded in completely eradicating the religion from public life, despite all the repressive devices it used against it, and in the end, its brief existence was only an interface between two religious civilizations: dying Christian Europe and nascent Islamic Europe.
Humboldt’s opinion is based on a double error, or rather, on a convergence of errors that give the impression of confirming themselves as truths. On the one hand, he makes a logical deduction from the general meanings of the terms and, seeing that the generic concept of morality does not imply any reference to God, he applies to the world of facts the conclusion that one thing does not depend on the other.
This is an addiction to abstractism: inferring facts from reasoning instead of reasoning based on facts. On the other hand, however, he observes that around him there are atheistic individuals “of high and substantial morality”, and believes that with this he obtained empirical proof of his deduction.
What he doesn’t even realize is that their morality is only good because their conduct schematically — and externally — coincides with what the principles of religion demand, that is, that the very possibility of good lay conduct was created and sedimented by a long religious tradition whose moral rules, once absorbed in the body of society, began to function more or less automatically.
In short, only the abstract man — or the heir more or less unaware of religious traditions — can have a moral without God. The first is a logical fiction, the second is an appearance that covers the reality of its own origins.
Taking them as realities, and even more so as universal and unconditioned realities, is a primary philosophical error, which shows little ability to analyze the experience.
All civilizations were born from original religious outbreaks. There has never been a “secular civilization”. A long time since the foundation of civilizations, nothing prevents some values and symbols from being separated abstractly from their origins and, in practice, becoming relatively independent educational forces.
I say “relatively” because, whatever the case may be, its prestige and ultimately its meaning will remain indebted to the religious tradition and will not survive long when it disappears from the surrounding society.
All “secular morals” are just an excerpt from previous religious moral codes
This cut can be effective for certain groups within a civilization that, in the end, remains religious, but, if this fund is suppressed, the cut is meaningless. The secular Europe’s inability to defend itself against Muslim cultural occupation is the most obvious example.
The present state of affairs in countries that have detached more fully from their Judeo-Christian roots is demonstrating with the utmost evidence that the so-called “lay civilization” never existed and cannot exist.
It lasted only a few decades, it never succeeded in completely eradicating the religion from public life, despite all the repressive devices it used against it, and in the end, its brief existence was only an interface between two religious civilizations: dying Christian Europe and nascent Islamic Europe.
Humboldt’s opinion is based on a double error, or rather, on a convergence of errors that give the impression of confirming themselves as truths. On the one hand, he makes a logical deduction from the general meanings of the terms and, seeing that the generic concept of morality does not imply any reference to God, he applies to the world of facts the conclusion that one thing does not depend on the other.
This is an addiction to abstractism: inferring facts from reasoning instead of reasoning based on facts. On the other hand, however, he observes that around him there are atheistic individuals “of high and substantial morality”, and believes that with this he obtained empirical proof of his deduction.
What he doesn’t even realize is that their morality is only good because their conduct schematically — and externally — coincides with what the principles of religion demand, that is, that the very possibility of good lay conduct was created and sedimented by a long religious tradition whose moral rules, once absorbed in the body of society, began to function more or less automatically.
In short, only the abstract man — or the heir more or less unaware of religious traditions — can have a moral without God. The first is a logical fiction, the second is an appearance that covers the reality of its own origins.
Taking them as realities, and even more so as universal and unconditioned realities, is a primary philosophical error, which shows little ability to analyze the experience.
