{"id":10293,"date":"2011-10-06T14:04:17","date_gmt":"2011-10-06T14:04:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/06\/five-attitudes-toward-the-christian-dogmas\/"},"modified":"2011-10-06T14:04:17","modified_gmt":"2011-10-06T14:04:17","slug":"five-attitudes-toward-the-christian-dogmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/10\/06\/five-attitudes-toward-the-christian-dogmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Attitudes Toward the Christian Dogmas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas.  There are others as well.  Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas.  <\/span><\/p>\n

1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction.  When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented<\/a> (6 January 2005):<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

The blogosphere is an amazing place. Over at Maverick Philosopher<\/a> there has been an extensive discussion going on about the doctrine of the holy Trinity! Generally sympathetic to Christianity though I am, I cannot see that particular doctrine as anything but the most awful load of codswallop. It is a self-contradictory formulation that arose out of the controversy among early Christians about whether Christ was God or not. [. . .] It is conventional to describe the doctrine as a mystery but it is no such thing. It is just a theological compromise that sacrifices logic for the sake of keeping all parties to the debate happy. How anybody can take it seriously is beyond me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And then there is that other Australian, the neo-positivist David Stove, who thinks that something has gone dreadfully and fatally wrong with the thoughts of anyone who takes Trinitarian speculation seriously, in particular the debate over the filioque<\/em> clause<\/a>.  See The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies<\/em>, Basil Backwell, 1991, p. 179.<\/span><\/p>\n

2. They are false and\/or incoherent, but worthy of study as concrete points of entry into various logical, metaphysical, and ethical questions that are salient for all, including atheists and materialists. What is identity?  Is it absolute or sortal-relative?  What is personhood?  Can guilt be inherited?  Scores of such questions arise when these dogmas are carefully thought through.<\/span><\/p>\n

3.  They are false and\/or incoherent but worth studying as part of the history of ideas, or the sociology of knowledge, or the psychology of belief.  Ideas have consequences, whether true or false, coherent or incoherent, sane or insane.<\/span><\/p>\n

4.  The are false and\/or incoherent in many of their formulations, but hide nuggets of truth that can excavated and refined and reformulated in ways that are rationally acceptable.  An example of this is Kant's project in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

5.   The dogmas are coherent and indeed true as formulated and promulgated by some particular church such as the Roman Catholic church or the Eastern Orthodox church.<\/span><\/p>\n

I reject the extremes of this spectrum of opinion.  Thus I reject #1 and #5.  My approach is closest to #4, though I feel no particular commitment to the Kantian variant.  Although the main reason to take seriously Original Sin, for example, is that it expresses something deep and true about the human predicament,  the reasons supplied in #2 and #3 are also good ones.  The notion that blacks are owed reparations for slavery, for example, is one that is closely related to the notion that guilt is transmissible from the perpetrator of a crime to his descendants.  This gives rise to the suspicion that the demand for reparations is a secularization of certain Christian dogmatic themes.  How then can the evaluation of the reparations demand proceed without any consideration of the theological doctrine?<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Original Sin, Trinity, and Incarnation are three Christian dogmas.  There are others as well.  Here is an off-the-cuff taxonomy of possible attitudes towards such dogmas.  1. They are just nonsense to be ignored or even a sign of deep mental dysfunction.  When I first started blogging about the Trinity, John Jay Ray commented (6 January … Continue reading “Five Attitudes Toward the Christian Dogmas”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-doctrine","category-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}