Atheism as Faith
10/6/11 10:23![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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talkpoliticsBack in the day, a guy named Plutarch wrote an essay comparing atheism with superstition. In his estimation, superstition is worse than atheism because it puts divinity in a negative light. Of course, the school of thought to which Plutarch belonged did not view jealousy as a divine attribute. The jealous gods were not part of the higher pantheon. This perception of divinity is shared with Buddhism which depicts the jealous gods at a level below the higher gods.
One of my favorite ways to challenge the ignorant is to ask them where they got the idea that there is only one deity. They often point to a biblical passage that fails to support their assertion. That passage does not assert the non-existence of other gods, but instead affirms their existence. The jealous deity seeks to enslave people into his cult at the expense of a higher order understanding.
Which individual has greater faith: the one who is suckered into a cult of jealousy or the one who refuses to pledge allegiance to any of the gods? From where Plutarch sits, the atheist seems the more judicious of the two and hence the one closer to a sublime life path. Those who fail to become seduced into the luxury of ignorance are more likely to follow the path less traveled. The atheist is freer to bond with the eternal than is the religious bigot who has become immersed in a quagmire of primitive precepts.
What does this have to do with public policy? It promotes secularism as a spiritual enabler rather than as a negation of faith. It contradicts the crippling dogma of those who seek to put superstitious supplications back into public schools.
One of my favorite ways to challenge the ignorant is to ask them where they got the idea that there is only one deity. They often point to a biblical passage that fails to support their assertion. That passage does not assert the non-existence of other gods, but instead affirms their existence. The jealous deity seeks to enslave people into his cult at the expense of a higher order understanding.
Which individual has greater faith: the one who is suckered into a cult of jealousy or the one who refuses to pledge allegiance to any of the gods? From where Plutarch sits, the atheist seems the more judicious of the two and hence the one closer to a sublime life path. Those who fail to become seduced into the luxury of ignorance are more likely to follow the path less traveled. The atheist is freer to bond with the eternal than is the religious bigot who has become immersed in a quagmire of primitive precepts.
What does this have to do with public policy? It promotes secularism as a spiritual enabler rather than as a negation of faith. It contradicts the crippling dogma of those who seek to put superstitious supplications back into public schools.
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 10/6/11 21:47 (UTC)(That, or telepathy is real).
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 10/6/11 22:06 (UTC)I love Sagan's theory of why the Library was destroyed.
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 10/6/11 22:31 (UTC)Sagan's thesis about the relation between politics and philosophy in that period is similarly interesting, but untenable. Political, social, and ethical matters had always been essential to philosophical work, and the particular character of Roman philosophy during this period is unusually and often exhaustively social and ethical in character. The death of Hypatia is only a few decades after the attempt by Julian to restructure the entire social and political system of the empire on a Neoplatonic basis, so to say that the later has, in principle, no political relevance can naturally not be sustained on the basis of the facts.
The (more complex and perhaps troubling) reason we don't find an indictment of slavery from pagan philosophy in this period is not because they gave no reflection to sociopolitical matters (they did) but rather because they didn't see slavery as objectionable.
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 10/6/11 22:45 (UTC)There are historical accounts that do mention specifically the destruction to this time, but again, it apparently happened in several phases (the first apparently being Julius Caesar).
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 10/6/11 23:23 (UTC)On this theory that the varying accounts of its destruction are descriptions of different stages of a continuous process: (i) the process of destroying the library was stretched out over seven centuries, which is rather slow work even for a bureaucracy, and (ii) the agents of this process included at least two invading armies, one natural disaster, and ravaging factions of Christians, Muslims, and pagans, which would be a rather diverse enactment of the policy. And this would contradict Pagan's association of the event with Hypatia's death and a Christian mob. Besides, the competing historical accounts are mutually exclusive on their details, rather than indicating a process.
"And Sagan wasn't writing or producing a TV special on the history of philosophy in classical times, but offered a very general theory why the science of the period had no personal impact on the day to day lives of Alexandria's citizens."
He's mistaken. He says,
"Here are clearly the seeds of our modern world. But why didn't they take root and flourish? Why instead did the west slumber through a thousand years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer, but I do know this: there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not."
This is not correct. Sagan's own representative of this era, Hypatia, taught in the school of philosophy that just decades earlier had been the basis of an entire reconstruction of Roman life at exactly the political, economic, and religious levels.
The "fact" needing explanation here isn't even correct: Alexandrians of the period were notoriously invested in the competing philosophies of their city, which was almost continually overrun by mobs of different sects of Christians, Jews, and pagans vying for the social dominance of their particular movements (hence indeed the tragedy with Hypatia).
Or from the other side of the issue: it's completely inaccurate to characterize the Scientific Revolution as a "rediscovery" of this antique scholarship. To the contrary, the Revolution is indebted to a systematic criticism of the classical understanding of nature and of knowledge which people like Hypatia or the librarians would have considered the fruits of their labour. When early modern scientists looks back on this period, they celebrate people like Philoponus, for his Christian criticism of classical metaphysics, not the champions of this metaphysics.
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 03:29 (UTC)tl;dr - Carl Sagan and the movie Agora are full of shit.
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 06:32 (UTC)???
Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 06:34 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 14:48 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 16:46 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 22:47 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 06:33 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 14:44 (UTC)Re: The Roman Senate house
Date: 11/6/11 19:20 (UTC)Sad, since it actually is interesting and important.