Religion

Voegelin’s Gnosis, Part 3: Anismism

The point at which the insight or observation of or insistence upon an “anism” or anti-gnosis converts into just another gnosis would be the central problem of anismism, the problem of anismism to itself, already foretold in the paradox of its name and the temptation to start tacking additional “isms” onto it: Anismismism would be very bad anismism as well as a bad joke, the false idol of the return to anism or the image of that return or the discourse of images of that return, and so on, rather than as the actual return to the anismic real.

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Islamic Statism and Historical Necessity

Shadi Hamid begins his essay on “The Roots of the Islamic State’s Appeal” by noting first the tendency of political scientists, including himself, to see “religion, ideology, and identity” as “products of a given set of material factors.” In the

Posted in History, notes, On Liberal Democracy in Relation to Islamism, Religion, War Tagged with: , , ,

preliminary to a consideration of “agapasticism” and “logicality”

Says Vikram Bath: Moral rights exist to give the intellectual proletariat a way to participate in debates. Thought through carefully, the above statement, which is I think intended to deflate, provides a basis for understanding what we (cannot help but)

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ultranatural (2)

“God” would be in addition to whatever else or not a name that returns us to that never fully displaced, or as-only-displaced, “my” in its universal quasi-adjacency to any all and all particularity or “the any”: the pure or originary natural, the natural itself or ultranatural.

Posted in Anismism, Philology, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Untimely Tagged with: , , , ,

The Egyptian Exception and the Other Islamic State

The alternative resolution or the other Islamic state, the one that avoids the tyrant’s despair – or, put more politically-philosophically, allows for a liberal-Islamic assimilation that would also be integrative or unitary rather than irrecuperably conflictual – would appear to rely on modes of idealization of religion that would evolve simultaneously and bi-conditionally, or, as Fadel or Fadel’s Khaldun puts it, “organically.” Their current impermissibility is a reflection of the same problem.

Posted in Anismism, Featured, Liberalism v Islamism as a Syncretic Problem, On Liberal Democracy in Relation to Islamism, Political Philosophy, Religion, The Exception Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,

David Bentley Hart as Atheist (On Creative Principle and Creator Principal)

Simply to assert, as Hart very much seems to, that the truth of a religious tradition is utterly severable from every particular element of that tradition, that it is essentially irrelevant to the inquiry into religion what the mass of believers believe or say they believe or are asked to believe, is, for the atheist, bad faith: a mere changing of the subject if not a deception.

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The Hebraic Heidegger (Another Discussion Not To Be Held)

As for Heidegger, Schmitt, their defenders, and all those suspected of actual or parallel “sympathies,” they will, of course, be denied the protection we extend to the last great and very German, very Jewish philosopher-theologians of the pre-Zionist or Diasporetic Age. The thought of identifying oneself with the Nazis and fellow travelers will be the thought of leaving normal life in liberal-democratic societies behind. We remain defined morally – to ourselves, concretely – by the justice of the physical and ideological destruction of the perverted culture-state that Heidegger and Schmitt literally stood up for in public, and that privately they supported more in spirit than post-war apologetic exercises led some to hope.

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Twice more into the breach: Hume, Kahn, Schmitt; faith <-> violence (un/reason)

1. Intro by way of a response to Mr. Halasz at the Crooked Timber thread: @239: The Wikipedia entry on Kahn is a good capsule summary. I often wonder why, given that he’s a distinguished professor at Yale (not some

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again as to the irrational underestimation by rationalists of the rationality of irrationalism

“The Temporary Name” points (( 226 The Temporary Name 03.22.14 at 3:26 pm In any case, any form of government seems to attract and empower the very sort of people it is supposed to suppress, and employing the pathological to

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Theologically Anti-Theological (a/theology 2)

“…the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.”

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