[FRA:] Telos loves the Pope

[matthew piscioneri]

Although not wanting to be an apologist for Pabst, first it is possible that his article was designed to be provocative. Second, some of what he writes stikes a chord with me:
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http://www.telospress.com/main/index.php?main_page=news_article&article_id=170 
Adrian Pabst
 
2. 
Thus, in the garb of freedom and tolerance, secular liberals argue that religion needs once again to be contained...[snip] Nowadays, liberalism seeks to monopolise politics, with disastrous consequences. [snip] At the same time, secular rationality is absolute and arbitrary because it is the measure of all things and posits positivism as the only valid philosophy. As Benedict argued in his widely misunderstood lecture on September 12, 2006, at the University of Regensburg, having thus reduced rationality to the empirically falsifiable, liberalism excludes the divine from the universality of reason and elevates itself into the sole arbiter of what is true and what is ethical. In this sense, liberalism constitutes a secular variant of fundamentalism. 
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I find aspects of this intelligible and intelligent. One of the things a dogmatic liberalism or dogmatic marxism overlooks is the apparently widespread "need" people have for some sort of spiritual-cum-religious dimension in their lives...a little bit of opium goes a long way. It's a bit like celebrity worship....as nauseating as *I* find it, it appears to have been part n parcel of human existence for a very long time...probably an ineradicable part. 
 
I'd like a little more open discussion of these parts of human life as "ineradicable" and a little less attachment to hopelessly hopeful notions of the perfectibility of humankind. Believe it or not, in CT circles some people still hold onto such quaint notions. Believe it or not, it's a quasi-religious understanding/aspiration. Yet, again, Habermas's notion that the tension between the real and the ideal is productive of progressive social discourse is worth keeping in mind. 
 
To some degree or another we have to understand both religious and secular programmes of social enlightenment as fanciful idealizations, as fairytales. We have to understand these fairytales as necessary, useful AND dangerous and come to a shared understanding of why this is so...let's face it, the critical analysis of the role of myth and dogma was in Plato et al 2500 years ago and Durkheim revisited it very comprehensively 100 years ago.
 
So, what sort of animal are we that we need to make up funny cosmoethical and/or secular fairytales? Indeed, why is the universe so enabling of all those behaviours we terms oppressive, hateful and evil? It would seem the two questions share a common thread.
 
best,
 
mattP
 
 
 
 
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