There are a few points I found I disagreed with, but not enough to feel like getting into a debate with you about 😉.
I also think highly of the Gnostic tradition - and having studied comparative religion extensively as part of a larger degree, I'd like to offer that all the major religious traditions have what I would call a 'gnostic stream' within them.
That is, there have always been thinkers and believers within each religion that came up with similar, gnostic ideas. The criticism of the organised religion, of the ruling class... all common amongst them all.
What this suggests to me is that humans - irrespective of their culture, creed, religion - can smell a rat when its around.
I think this is present in the 'religion of atheism' and the 'religion of scientism' (as I call them). There are those who enslave themselves dogmatically to ideas, and then there are those who are violently opposed, there are those anywhere on a spectrum between, and then there are those who have the capacity to 'chunk up' and see the commonalities and differences between all belief systems.
Great article, I really enjoyed it.
Sincerely appreciate your thoughtful response, Peter. By all means extrapolate, if you will, your thoughts on the whole bloody mess, I'd be very much interested in your perspective, and that goes for meno, too.
I do disagree, though, with assessing science as a religion but I think I know what you mean. I'm no particular fan of scientism or reductionism but I think we have to be very careful in defining what we mean and clearly delineate contexts.
Yeah, I want to make the distinction between science and scientism.
Anyone I know who actually works in science - and by work, I mean actively earn a living from conducting scientific research, etc - will also denounce scientism as a dogmatic belief in the infallibility of science. They are the first people who will say that science cannot explain everything, and that in fact the more we discover and find out, the more we realise how little about the universe we actually know.
Scientism is an uncritical belief system, and sometimes I see stuff around the place - written by these dogmatists - which I think borders on some pretty nasty, totalitarianistic thinking... you can see how their next logical step is eugenics or the sort.
And that belief in pure rationalism leaves aside any notion of natural chaos, disruption, uncertainty, spontaneity, and so on. The stuff that makes life actually interesting. That makes us uniquely human, after all.
I'm finding I agree with you in sentiment but I find the use of words troublesome. I don't see using words like religion and dogmatism useful in this context. I think they are best left describing traditional religionists.
Here are the words I would use to describe reductionist materialists who end up in the scientism camp:
-arrogant
-hubris
-close minded
I'll give you my rationale. Atheist's simply have no belief in God's or God so they really are not asserting anything so can hardly be dogmatic. Saying they are practicing religion when their scientific worldview eschews spirituality isn't accurate either because, again, they are really not asserting anything positive-- just lack of belief in any hidden teleology or agents/actors driving teleology. Again, that to me is simply a dismissal of possibilities and I find no religion in that per se.
Now here is where it gets interesting for me: atheists and materialist scientists are practicing religion and they have, IMO, been duped by a cabal of Jews and Christians who ushered in the modern finance machine. I call it the God KA$H ( I linked the symbolism earlier in this post) who's machinations are embedded with Judean/Christian symbolism. MONEY is monoKA$Hism. Everything now serves this God. As TJ Kirk points out-- it's able to convert every thought and action to its desire. No one can escape it! But what TJ Kirk won't concede and neither will any other atheist is that they are practicing religion! Yes, the Darwinism impulse of religiosity has simply gone from Pixies, to Angels, to Money...And some of the money masters throw E.T. into the mix of modernity. Who would have thunk TJ was a theist, eh?
These are just my views and there is no particular need for you to agree with them. Just putting it out for consideration.
Yeah, I think we're both using the word religion in slightly different contexts.
For me, spirituality is something way different than religion. Religion does not have to be spiritual, and spirituality does not have to be religious.
I'm using the word religion in its original sense, involving ritual and a sense of orthodoxy.
Sure, I think what I'm getting at overall here as far as this posts topic is that material metaphysics(scientism) has just as crappy an ethic as pre-modern myths; perhaps even more so if we are being herded into a materialist dystopian technocracy.