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Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher's "On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers" (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches.
Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn't give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a necessary to fully enter into life, to be a whole and fulfilled person. Yes, he's of the "romantic" school, but his approach can still be seen today in liberal Protestant churches.
Featuring guest podcaster and blog contributor Daniel Horne.
Read the text online or buy the book.
End song: "Remembrance" by Fingers. Read about it.
Hi everyone,
I just listened to the Podcast Schliermacher Defends Religion. I thought it was one of the better ones as the talk was well-focused and easy to follow and the jokes were pretty good too. This was probably in part due to the fact that the author wasn’t delving in an in-depth way into metaphysics and consequently I didn’t have to hold seven or eight concepts about the underlying nature of the universe. (I like doing the difficult stuff sometimes too I must confess).
But anyway, just a couple of thoughts that were touched on in the talk. First, I liked the idea of forgetting all the Christian myths about virgin births and resurrections and was surprised a theologian would say that that far back in time. The traditional myths and miracles in the bible were always something that made me reject the standard version of Christianity that people tried to indoctrinate me with as a child. Even then my bullshit detector was pretty well-honed in on all this obvious nonsense.
Anyway, 1st thought was that if we accept Schliermacher’s thinking on the matter then it doesn’t really matter if we believe or not in God or Jesus or any of it because we are all going to head back into the unity after death anyway. No personal god and no immortality as promised by standard church teachings means that it doesn;t really matter what we do in this life ultimately. i accept we might get some benefit on this plane of existence by having spiritual connection and satisifying that human need to find some meaning in life, but no hell and retribution essentially makes it superfluous. If we consider the real nature of immortality.- once we die that is it – our personality evaporates and we’ll be lucky to be remembered by anybody 100 years after we die.
And that brings me to the second point – in the talk you mentioned the idea of heaven and the elysian fields as being something that is not promised in Schliermacher’s paradigm, but did he talk about hell? This is a major aspect of traditional religious teaching, particularly the Catholic church, which emphasizes the absolute reality of the existence of hell and is a major source of controlling the actions of believers in this life. I would assume that Schliermacher doesn’t accept hell either, but I noticed it wasn’t really talked about in the podcast. How does he treat the existence of evil in the world? Where is Satan in all of this? If there is no stick in religion then it loses all its power over the masses. I think people also actually like a good story and thats why the Unitarian churches are less popular than traditional churches.
Anyway, just a few thoughts. Thanks for all the effort that goes into making these podcasts.Always enjoyable.
Simon