Status Updates From Postmodernism, Reason and R...

"But relativism is simply not viable as a social or political attitude. For one thing, it offends against the very cultures whose equality it wishes to establish by ‘hermeneutics’: they are eager to acquire the technological power, and, for another thing, some of them at least (those prone to ‘fundamentalism’) would vehemently, and rightly, repudiate any attempt to reinterpret their own convictions...

"[Americans are] inclined to absolutize their own culture, and to equate it with the human condition as such, and hence... treat other cultures as perversions of the rightful human condition. Individualism, egalitarianism, freedom, sustained innovation— these traits are, in the comparative context of world history, unusual... but to Americans they are part of the air they breathe..."

"Things may yet change in the future. But on the evidence available so far, the world of Islam demonstrates that it is possible to run a modern, or at any rate modernizing, economy, reasonably permeated by the appropriate technological, educational, organization principles, and combine it with a strong, pervasive, powerfully internalized Muslim conviction and identification."

"it also means that a certain kind of separation of powers was built into Muslim society from the very start, or very nearly from the start... It subordinates the executive to the (divine) legislature and, in actual practice, turns the theologians/lawyers into the monitors of political rectitude whether or not they always have the power to enforce their verdicts."

"But there is one very real, dramatic and conspicuous exception to all this: Islam. To say that secularization prevails in Islam is not contentious. It is simply false. Islam is as strong now as it was a century ago. In some ways, it is probably much stronger."

"The cosmogony of a given faith, in such softened modernist re-interpretations, is in effect treated not as literal truth, but merely as some kind of parable, conveying ‘symbolic’ truths, something not to be taken at face value, and hence no longer liable to be in any kind of conflict with scientific pronouncements about what would, on the surface, seem to be the same topic.."

"One major source of this tradition is the famous nineteenth century Danish theologian and writer Søren Kierkegaard. He is associated with the idea that religion is of its essence not persuasion of the truth of a doctrine, but commitment to a position which is inherently absurd, which, to use his own term, gives offence. We attain our identity, he says, by believing something that deeply offends our mind...

"Fundamentalism is best understood in terms of what it repudiates. It rejects the widespread modern idea that religion, though endowed with some kind of nebulously specified validity of its own, really doesn’t mean what it actually says, and least of all what ordinary people had in the past naturally taken it to mean."