I think I've said a variation of this on all of our religious threads but: these kids of debates will always founder if there's a failure to distinguish the different kinds of values or "language games" at work in religious narratives vs other "explanatory" frameworks. Robert Bellah's extraordinary "Religion in Human Evolution" draws on Merlin Donald's distinction between "theoretical culture" (which Bellah identifies with the post axial religions) and "narrative culture" (pre-axial). I haven't read Donald yet but that seems like a useful distinction to me--in particular because it raises the questions of social function, value, and the non-negotiable relationship between theory and narrative. It's almost as if raising the question of the "existence" of god is a kind of confusion of categories, a holdover of the failed medieval attempt to unite theory and narrative.
― ryan, Tuesday, 25 July 2017 14:56 (six years ago) link