Thursday, December 13, 2007

Habermas on religion

In LC, religion -> increased demand for discursive redemption of validity claims compared with myth
In TCA -> archaic mode of social integration

Approach of “methodological atheism.”
But “indispensable potentials for meaning are preserved in religious language.”
As a reflection on faith, theology must not renounce its basis in religious experience and ritual.
Philosophers must satisfy themselves with the “transcendence from within” given with the context-transcending force of claims to truth and moral rightness.

Duties of believing citizens to translate their religiously based claims into secular, publicly accessible reasons. Burdens of citizenship.

Audi: believers must support only laws for which they have sufficient public reason
Rawls: believers may introduce reasons for any comprehensive doctrine into debates about constitutional essentials, providing they are eventually translated
Habermas: the demand for translation, rather, pertains only to politicians and public officials with institutional power to make, apply, and execute the law.

Weithmann and Wolterstorff undo the neutrality principle that undergirds modern constitutional democracy, with its separation of church and state: the idea that “all enforceable political decisions must be formulated in a language that is equally accessible to all citizens, and it must be possible to justify them in this language as well”.

W/o background framework --> factionalism?

Dialogic translation: believers seeking publicly-accessible reasons, non-believers approaching religion as a potential source of meaning.

Followers