Hi, Khazeh, At 09:43 AM 4/3/2004, you quoted: >>"Thus an early Christian was an atheist because he or she refused to be part of a >>complex system in which political and religious loyalties were inseparably bound up. >>‘Atheism’ was a decision to place certain loyalties above those owed to the >>sacralised power of the state."<<
This argument is similar to the position taken by early twentieth-century sociologist, Emile Durkheim. According to Durkheim, the object of religious worship is society itself. In effect, tributes paid to God, Zeus, or Gerald Gardner's Wiccan "binity" of the Green Man and Diana are apostrophes to society. Therefore, to Durkheim, all religion becomes civil religion. >>But, moving across the world of faiths, Buddhists are sometimes described as >>atheists by puzzled observers, aware of the fact that Buddhist philosophy has no >>place for a divine agent and that Buddhist practice concentrates exclusively upon >>the mind purifying itself from self-absorption and craving; here, ‘atheism' is a >>strategy to discipline the mind’s temptation to distraction by speculative thought. >>Whether or not there is a transcendent creator is irrelevant to the mind’s work; >>preoccupation with this is a self-indulgent diversion at best, and at worst a search >>for some agency that can do the work only we can do.<< That is where I think the distinction lies between exegesis and eisegesis. An exegetical hermeneutics should, as objectively as possible, describe, through textual and source criticism, the intentionalities of the writer(s) of a particular religious scripture. A purely eisegetical hermeneutics, on the other hand, imposes the perspective of the interpreter, inspired or not, on the text. In this case, the object of interpreter is to understand what the text itself means (perhaps in the Mind of God), irrespective of any thinking in the minds of the writers. The Kitab-i-Iqan and Some Answered Questions would contain examples of eisegetical hermeneutics, as would, on an obviously lower level, what is generally referred to as Baha'i deepening. Of course, in practice, it may often be impossible for the **textual critic** to separate these two forms of hermeneutics. Most scholarly criticism, especially by believers, contains elements of both exegesis and eisegesis. Mark A. Foster * http://markfoster.net "Sacred cows make the best hamburger" -- Mark Twain and Abbie Hoffman __________________________________________________ You are subscribed to Baha'i Studies as: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Baha'i Studies is available through the following: Mail - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Web - http://list.jccc.edu/read/?forum=bahai-st News - news://list.jccc.edu/bahai-st Public - http://www.escribe.com/religion/bahaist Old Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED] New Public - http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
