{"id":2112,"date":"2010-09-29T13:20:36","date_gmt":"2010-09-29T18:20:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/?p=2112"},"modified":"2010-09-29T16:39:21","modified_gmt":"2010-09-29T21:39:21","slug":"the-good-the-god-and-the-demise-of-secular-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/2010\/09\/29\/morality\/the-good-the-god-and-the-demise-of-secular-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Good,” “The God,” and the Demise of Secular Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ideas are significant in defining human ingroups. Among intellectuals and academics, those ideas often relate to a common conception of \u201cthe good.\u201d \u201cThe good\u201d evolves and changes rather quickly, but, at any given time, it is perceived as an absolute. Such ideological constructs can be understood as secular religions. Traditional religions are characterized by belief in an imaginary god, and the secular religion is characterized by belief in an imaginary good. This good is perceived as a real thing, having an existence of its own transcending individual minds. See, for example, \u201cThe Moral Landscape<\/a>,\u201d by Sam Harris<\/a>, one of the secular religion\u2019s high priests. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s been interesting to watch the reactions of the secular true believers as the evidence for innate human behavior, including moral behavior, accumulated over the years until continued denial became untenable. At first, like the old behaviorists, they reacted with rage and fury, demonizing such ideas as heresies associated with racism, fascism, etc. When the intellectual dams finally began to break, acceptance of innate behavior was led by \u201cliberal\u201d clergymen of the secular religion, who assured the flock that it really didn\u2019t challenge their most cherished beliefs at all. Why, the whole idea had been \u201cinvented\u201d by E. O. Wilson <\/a>and, after all, he was one of them.<\/p>\n

Their rationalizations have been entirely similar to those of the liberal clergy of traditional religions, who have, for example, rationalized the contradiction between the Book of Genesis and scientific fact by claiming that the book is allegorical. According to their apologetics, the days in Genesis are really \u201ceons\u201d of time, the firmament is really the \u201csky,\u201d etc. Similarly, the secular clergy hold forth about the exemplary behavior of bonobos and assure the flock that belief in \u201cthe good\u201d isn\u2019t threatened at all by the fact that morality is a manifestation of traits that evolved in the distant past.<\/p>\n

In their way, the fundamentalist clergy are more rational than their liberal brethren. There can be no accommodation between scientific fact and religious faith. If there is a God, he would not have bamboozled his children with obscure allegories. If the Bible is not literally true and the inspired word of God, the basis for faith disappears. And in their way, the old behaviorists who fulminated against the original sin of innate morality were right, too. It is the iceberg against which the Titanic of secular religion has foundered. The academic apologists of the Steven Pinker school <\/a>are merely rearranging the deck chairs. Like Christianity and Islam, the secular religion will continue to be with us as a force for obscurantism into the indefinite future. However, it has become every bit as irrational to believe in \u201cthe good\u201d as it is to believe in \u201cthe god.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Ideas are significant in defining human ingroups. Among intellectuals and academics, those ideas often relate to a common conception of \u201cthe good.\u201d \u201cThe good\u201d evolves and changes rather quickly, but, at any given time, it is perceived as an absolute. Such ideological constructs can be understood as secular religions. Traditional religions are characterized by belief … Continue reading ““The Good,” “The God,” and the Demise of Secular Religion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[46,85,91,48,6,28,67,5,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-amity-enmity-complex","category-atheism","category-christianity","category-evolution","category-good-and-evil","category-human-nature","category-ideology","category-morality","category-philosophy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pwEq0-y4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2112"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2114,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112\/revisions\/2114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helian.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}