Sunday, October 03, 2010

Christianity's new evangelists

This seems to be empirical support for the claim made by Calhoun and many others, such as Wolterstorff and Habermas, that people who are religious cannot separate out their religious reasons and their secular reasons—or, more subtly, that they cannot translate between the two. They have no choice but to use religious reasons.
Not quite. … However, if they were asked to give reasons for their reasons, then the respondents thought that eventually their religious reasons would have to be brought into the conversation, because those are “behind” everything. …
Famously, Richard Rorty claimed that religious reasons are a conversation-stopper, because they are unintelligible to those who do not share one’s religious beliefs. So, if Rorty is correct, Habermas’s translation proposal will never work.]

Secularist professors who have found it profitable to favor the religious turn are now the new Christian evangelists. For, whenever they talk about religion they mean Christianity. [TNM] 

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