Doug wrote:
>Ok, when I criticize Christianity, I'll be sure to leave the snake
>handlers out. And just remember the mainstream who believe that some
>divine guy from long ago was born of a virgin and was resurrected
>from the dead.
"Who then will condemn Christians for being unable to give rational
grounds for their belief, professing as they do a religion for which
they cannot give rational grounds?" Pascal said this in the
seventeenth century, and he did not say it to mock Christianity -- on
the contrary, he turned the table and made the very inability to give
rational grounds a hallmark of Christian faith. "They [Christians]
declare that it is a folly, _stultitiam_, in expounding it to the
world, and then you complain that they do not prove it. If they did
prove it they would not be keeping their word. It is being without
proof that they show they are not without sense." Standing near the
beginning of modernity, thinking persons couldn't swallow the dogma
of the church as it was. Pascal (who was a man of science and
brilliant mathematician) had to defend the indefensible, as it were,
so he made a bold move: he exposed that nothing stood behind dogma &
orthodoxy -- there was no guarantee -- and turned faith into a
question of existential choice: "Let us then examine this point, and
let us say, 'Either God is or he is not.' But to which view shall we
be inclined? Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos
separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is
being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager?"
With a stroke of an anti-foundational genius, so to speak, Pascal
saved Christianity and Its Dogma from feudal stagnation & succeeded
in making them appear (to a large number of intellectuals-to-come for
whom Christianity as it had existed wouldn't do) as if they were a
matter of intellectual daring, exciting adventure in the realm of
heterodox paradoxes. That is the way dogma has survived -- passing
for heterodoxy.
Yoshie
P.S. Nowadays, no thinking person in academia and think tanks can
afford to seem less than "heterodox," since to be "heterodox" has
come to mean the same thing as to be "bravely on the cutting edge"
and thus become a good marketing pitch. Even conservatives have to
have a magazine named _Heterodoxy_, as you all know.
