Robert Tulip wrote:Apathy towards religion seems more aligned with the fox attitude of variety than with the single-mindedness of the hedgehog, although I think the religious attitude can incorporate both.
Yes, this seems to me to be true, IMO unfortunately. Religious studies researchers should study the tendencies within religion to drift toward literal claims of supernatural forces, and the tendencies within religion to insist on exclusive claims to truth, even moral truth. Something to do with lack of empirical grounding, I suspect, but also something to do with the forces at work in politics.
Robert Tulip wrote:The problem always rests in the foundational assumptions, the attitudes about what is real. For example, Christian systematic theology builds vast edifices of thought, but if its axiomatic beliefs about God, Jesus and the miraculous are wrong, then the entire framework is built on sand.
It probably won't surprise you to hear that I disagree. Since I see the talk of supernatural things as a language for deeper matters, I think a framework of broken myth, in which one can think about spiritual matters through the imagery of myth but without the literalist insistence on the supernatural as a more real reality, can lead us to function very effectively in social interaction.
To give a non-Christian example, it seems that mythology gave us a gift in the form of the term "narcissism" which came to label the obsession with markers for self-esteem, and the compulsion to attack others and degrade others as a path to shoring up self-esteem. That remarkable insight that might not have happened as early or as effectively without the imagery from the story of Narcissus.
Robert Tulip wrote:Speaking of Sam Harris, he argued in The Moral Landscape that neuroscience provides a basis to integrate facts and values in a systematic ontology. I did not find that a coherent argument. My own view is that a better basis to ground values in facts emerges from cosmology, not from biology, interpreting cosmology at terrestrial scale to analyse how human existence connects to the universe.
I suspect it is futile to argue moral principles from requirements of survival or from cosmological analogies, but I am okay with being proven wrong. I think moral imperatives are recognizable from the requirements for people to be able to get along with each other.
Obviously survival is a requirement for people to get along with each other, but I am suspicious of basing a system of deducing moral imperatives from some method of extrapolating the requirements of survival. It sounds to me like a cart of survival requirements being put ahead of horse of moral inquiry, rather than resting the deduction of the importance of survival on the primacy of moral issues.
Robert Tulip wrote: “The measuring sticks we use for self-esteem” are mainly about success in the world, in money, relationships, career and public and personal achievements. Against that hyper-individualised mentality, the big religious questions of what is intrinsically good for the world are matters of distracting indifference.
I think I object not so much to their individualized mentality, which is certainly an accurate observation, as to their glorification of competition and conflict. A kind of (pagan) sacred status is given to being better than someone else, and the intrinsic zero-sum nature of such comparisons is elevated to the position of imperative rather than being seen as something a person has a choice about.
Just to pull out one strand of that for examination, I am told Aristotle's conception of virtue was fundamentally about what helps the whole polis, rather than what exalts one person above others.
Robert Tulip wrote:Hence the paradox known in theology as kenosis, that divine action involves emptying of the self, a rejection of the values of the world. The apathy of Alfred E Neuman, candidate patron saint of apatheism, fastidiously avoids any such higher commitments.
I really like your contrast with "higher commitments" here. Although I struggle with them in reality, in my view of meaning it is clear that higher commitments are the basis of a meaningful life. The two concepts are almost synonymous. So if apatheism means mere apathy, mere avoidance of those commitments which lack an instrumental and fundamentally reciprocal basis, then I would definitely oppose apatheism.
Robert Tulip wrote: setting tolerance as the highest value only works while everyone is tolerant. The problem with fanaticism arises when a fanatical belief is demonstrably wrong, including beliefs that are violent, dangerous and harmful, and yet its expansion is tolerated due to liberal apathy.
Well, I don't think a typical liberal account of matters makes tolerance the highest value. Tolerance is a means, not an end in itself, and it is a means to the goal of a society in which one may think for oneself, and values are more chosen than enforced.
In a liberal framework, one may disapprove of choices or opinions of others, such as unwed motherhood, polyamory, flat-earthism and racism, without taking violent means in hand to suppress them. Only those paths which insist on themselves taking up violent means are to be restrained (that's a bit of an exaggeration, but that's the typical formulation of the core logic of tolerance).