Dec 3, 2014 05:52 AM
http://www.the-american-interest.com/201...l-capital/
EXCERPT: [...] I suppose what I should have asked is this: Given the accelerating power of pluralization to upset and cast into doubt most traditional forms of religious belief, how will different forms of disbelief, emanating from different cultural contexts, differ (and not) from the forms of disbelief we in the West know best—that of atheism arising out of Christian and Jewish religion? So what I should have asked is broader—not just about belief or the lack thereof in an Abrahamic creator God, but about belief or lack thereof in any system of religious ideas. And the question flows from the assumption that any given form of rejected belief will take much of its shape from what it is rejecting. George Williams once noted that you should “be cautious when you choose your enemy for you will grow to be more like him”; I think one can apply this basic idea orthogonally to the question at hand in the sense that a former belief system becomes the enemy, so that what results from rejecting it may be closer in form to it than what the denier may suppose or hope....
EXCERPT: [...] I suppose what I should have asked is this: Given the accelerating power of pluralization to upset and cast into doubt most traditional forms of religious belief, how will different forms of disbelief, emanating from different cultural contexts, differ (and not) from the forms of disbelief we in the West know best—that of atheism arising out of Christian and Jewish religion? So what I should have asked is broader—not just about belief or the lack thereof in an Abrahamic creator God, but about belief or lack thereof in any system of religious ideas. And the question flows from the assumption that any given form of rejected belief will take much of its shape from what it is rejecting. George Williams once noted that you should “be cautious when you choose your enemy for you will grow to be more like him”; I think one can apply this basic idea orthogonally to the question at hand in the sense that a former belief system becomes the enemy, so that what results from rejecting it may be closer in form to it than what the denier may suppose or hope....