Islam’s gift: an economy of spiritual development
from Asad Zaman
My article with the title above is due to be published in the next issue of the American Journal of Economics and Sociology (2019). This was written at the invitation of the editor Clifford Cobb, as an introduction to Islamic Economics for a secular audience. The Paper explains how modern economics is deeply flawed because it ignores the heart and soul of man, and assumes that the best behavior for humans is aligned with short-sighted greed. Islam provides a radically different view, showing how generosity, cooperation, and overcoming the pursuit of desires leads to spiritual progress. Islam seeks to create a society where individuals can make spiritual progress and develop the unique and extraordinary capabilities and potentials which every human being is born with. Pre-print – to appear in American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2019 – is available for view/download at the bottom of this post.
As an excerpt, I am posting Section 2 of the paper, entitled
The Flawed Foundations of Modern Economics
The defeat of Christianity in a battle with science led to an extraordinary respect and reverence for scientific knowledge, sometimes called the “Deification of Science,” in Europe (Olson 1990; Zaman 2015a). This had fatal consequences. Even though all scientific knowledge is inherently uncertain, a concerted effort was made to prove the opposite—that scientific knowledge is not only certain, but it is the only source of certain knowledge. Because of distortions necessary to prove something which was not true, the methodology of science was dramatically misunderstood by the logical positivists. read more
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I read your original paper. The good news is that the Pope is (first time event) in the UAE.
So, let us hope that they can strike a deal to save the Muslims in Yemen (biggest humanitarian disaster in recent history) and in fact in the vast majority of MENA (mostly Muslim) from abject poverty and starvation. After all, as far as I am aware, despite differences, there is only ONE god?
Personally, I would rather stick to the one that is humane enough not to kill anyone, and godly enough to embrace death whenever it’s time to do so.
I am a child of the Enlightenment, so all of this is hocus pocus to me, but perhaps we can meet up on the road to the alleviation of human suffering. My wife I might add is no friend of religion, which she thinks is the source of all evil; my son, who was a theologian, believed there could be no moral order without religion. Wife and son met on the grounds of practicality. Good luck.
Asad, your battling on is much appreciated, but you need to be careful with Western history.
I take it the point of Helen’s comment is that Muslim UAE is not yet a good example of “Islam [seeking] to create a society where individuals can make spiritual progress and develop the unique and extraordinary capabilities and potentials which every human being is born with”. Likewise Robert and his wife, as children of the Enlightenment, have only a Humean version of what religion is, while Asad’s history is anachronistic: the Catholic church accepting that Galileo was right was hardly a defeat, but a sign of honesty and willingness to understake a great deal of rethinking (the intention of its humorously named Devil’s Advocacy being the equivalent of today’s peer review). Later, it was Hume’s epistemological reinterpretation of Bacon’s scientific method that misled the twentieth century Logical Positivists.
‘Religion’ means literally ‘re-tie’, and was a code-word for binding oneself to Christ in gratitude for his having redeemed us from [economic as well as psychological] bondage. The problem is not with this, it is with ‘catholic’ (for everyone) religion being open to evil as well as good people. I recommend Robert and his wife to go back as near as possible to primary religious sources. In the early pages of the Old Testament they will find the story of Cain and Abel, with the one – ungrateful for what he had – killing the other, disputing his duty to be his brother’s keeper. That’s not religion, with its morality based on love. That’s absolute power over others corrupting absolutely. Today’s Pope Francis is virtually powerless. The two themes of Good Pope John, who inspired me, were the love of God and the reciprocity of rights and duties.
On the flawed foundations of modern economics, I would like Robert to read and comment on Soddy’s analysis of the absolute power of our fraudulent money system, downloadable from
https://archive.org/details/roleofmoney032861mbp/page/n4
I found in it what I have largely worked out for myself, although 84 years on, the information age has arrived, offering new [more ‘spiritual’] evidence and a different solution.
Dave, my wife was born in Anapha, a small town in the Crimean, from a Polish refugee mother whose family fled the Germans in 1939, and a Russian father, who was Orthodox Christian and studied in the seminary, and spent 20 years in the Gulag under Stalin, before released in 1944. The cruelty of the Bolsheviks and the Whites, from both of which he and his family suffered personally, made him highly skeptical about anything good coming from a secular religion like Bolshevism, Polish Catholicism or Russian Orthodoxy. Actions speak louder than words in this case, and what Vera sees happening before her eyes in current Polish society would not convince her to take up the faith, despite what texts you give her to read. When the priests came to her door when she lived in Poland, she threw them out.
About the Enlightenment. Most US college students didn’t read much Hume, or Adam Smith, but people on the continent.
I learned about the Enlightenment through Voltaire (The Age of Louis XIV), Spirit of the Law’s Montesquieu, Rousseau, Emmanuel Kant, the Encylopaedists (Denis Diderot) Just as I believe today, the great British thought was not, as important as thought on the Continent.
When I spent a week in 1982, eating evenings at table with A.J. Ayer on the USS Bremen, he told me that there was no philosophy being taught on the European continent, just a few Scandinavians, otherwise only in the English speaking world. That surprised me since I had just spent a year in Germany where Habermas and the Frankfurter School was being much discussed. So I answered, what about Habermas?, he answered “Who.?” I thought, how singular that this great man was stuck in a small world, even after having studied the Logical=Positivists in Vienna. So it had to be continentals that warped my mind, not Hume.
Robert, I totally agree actions speak louder than words. Our area was among the first to take action against a paedophile priest. The point I was trying to make is that one shouldn’t judge a group of people by its worst members, though experience of the worst is probably good enough reason for steering clear of the group. Love in the end is a decision.
On the ‘Enlightenment’, I think that derogatory term must have come into Britain via Hume, who spent time with Voltaire. I was introduced to him as an ‘English’ Empiricist reacting to Hobbes, Locke and Berkeley, followed by Bentham, Mill and via Moore, Russell and thence the Logical Positivists. Bacon, the Father of modern science who conceived the Encyclopedia even if he didn’t call it that, was not then even mentioned. I’d come across Kant’s reaction to Hume, which played back into the Continental philosophy I became aware of largely through Australian John Passmore’s “A Hundred Years of Philosophy”, picking up what I could of it in translation. I’m guessing that we are both right: you learned from continentals but they had been influenced by Hume.
The problem, Dave, is that there is more to the Enlightenment than economics, and you seem to avoid that truth. I did not read and appreciate Voltaire because he met Hume, but because he believed in freedom, and opposed the “infamous thing,” the Church, through their Parlements, condeming men to death for their beliefs (the Calas Affair), or cutting out their tongues because they had been blasphemous. Or, perhaps more importantly, historically, for the Church being involved intricately in the injustices of the society we call the Old Regime. You are thinking anachronistically, projecting your present days concerns about finance capitalist into the 17th-18th century. We need to judge people in terms of there own times. When we do, we find out about all sorts of incongruities, e. g. why men who are bankers and railroad builders in 19th century France could believe in devine Right Monarchy. That fact sent me on a ten year investigation-reflection to explain why.
Robert, you are doubtless right about why you read Voltaire, but what I said was not that Voltaire had met Hume. Hume had met Voltaire, and I saw the outcome: he threw the baby out with the bathwater. If you had looked at what Christ taught you would see that the viciousness you complain about in the Church of the time was not Christianity but absolute power corrupting absolutely, with self-serving politicians blaming the Church to normalise their own brutality. In Christian teaching the Divine Right of Kings was for them to be given the means to do their job. As the tax-payers of our Charles I’st time interpreted that, it was an objection to their paying for whatever the King wanted to do, since they no longer recognised the restraints of the Christian ethic. I accept that the leaders of the Catholic church have made a lot of bad mistakes, but it is only fair to point out that they accepted that, and our Council of Trent was all about their trying to put things right. You don’t very often get politicians admitting they have made mistakes!
To get back to Asad’s theme, Islam didn’t make the mistake of compromising with usury, but I wonder whether he could enlighten us on whether Islam has found it necessary to get together to try and sort out their own problems and differences?
Dave, I have taken a serious look at Soddy’s piece on the Role of Money. I understand why, as a scientist you are stimulated by it, since it lucidly examines a scientific explanation for the creation of money based on the energy of nature.
What strikes me from the reading is the extent to which ideas DO NOT drive historical developments. As a scientist, Soddy clearly believed that his should be clear to intelligent people and that we should move on to reform our money system along the lines he examines. But the piece is also an exercise in frustration, in that the implementation of his reforms are frustrated by greed, ignorance, self-interest, and a host of other obstacles that opposed his reforms.
I got the idea in the piece that he thought in the early 1930s his time had come, that in the world crisis people would finally recognize and implement the scientific ideas he outlined.
Were he alive, I think he would be astonished that we are eighty+ years after he wrote, still clinging to the old economics in places of learning and power, without much hope of change along the lines he advocated.
I can readily understand his frustration and yours for the way your science based views have been received. But as an historian, I also understand that ideas do not drive history, although we think that sometimes they do. In emergencies, or when big events occur, scientists can have their way in public policy. That happened during and after WWII when science was applied to the management of public and private affairs, unfortunately its triumph in the postWWII era did not set us free. Now we are hoping in the current crisis that the shock will give Soddy’s view an operational chance. But the greedy and ignorant don’t give up easily.
Ideas Do drive history. It’s just that those ideas are so thoroughly stuck in obsessive dualistic contention and are of lesser integrative nature and import than the natural philosophical concept of grace. And of course unconsciousness of same plays a role in history, which is why history is mostly the tremendously interesting and occasionally enlightening….chronicling of Man’s unconsciousness of the concept of grace.
Wisdom is the integrative process including the integration of the practical and the ideal which is just another definition of wisdom and shows that real wisdom NEVER misses or fails to consider all relevant factors. Hence wisdom and grace its pinnacle concept and self actualized experience CANNOT be either unreal or unscientific.
Contemplate grace in all of its aspects and you can’t go wrong.
The term religio predates Christ and the eventual evolution of Christianity. Dave is loose with the truth and intellectually sloppy with regards to Western history, yet presumes to warn Asad to be careful. What Dave is doing is pushing a sectarian, ahistorical, narrow, view of religion only shared by a narrow sect of undelighted Christians who neither know their own history let alone the history of religion.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the introduction to his The Meaning and End of Religion writes:
The history of religion shows that no faith tradition is immune from the evils of institutional religion, sectarian fanaticism, or imperial conquest, depending upon what period in history one is looking at. There are saints and sinners in every world tradition. Christianity has just as much blood upon its hands as Islam for those who know their history. So too, Islam and Christianity have revelations of truth, goodness, and beauty in the lives and teachings of their saints. Dave would conveniently overlook this simple truth in his use of RWER as place to proselytize his narrow brand of Christian theology. Not all Christians are so anti-intellectual in their theology and would not stoop ot using RWER for sectarian apologetics as Dave does regularly.
The term religio predates Christ and the eventual evolution of Christianity. Dave is loose with the truth and intellectually sloppy with regards to Western history, yet presumes to warn Asad to be careful. What Dave is doing is pushing a sectarian, ahistorical, narrow, view of religion only shared by a narrow sect of undelighted Christians, of an even more narrow conservative Catholic dogmatic view, who neither know their own history let alone the history of religion.
Wilfred Cantwell Smith in the introduction to his The Meaning and End of Religion writes:
The history of religion shows that no faith tradition is immune from the evils of institutional religion, sectarian fanaticism, or imperial conquest, depending upon what period in history one is looking at. There are saints and sinners in every world tradition. Christianity has just as much blood upon its hands as Islam for those who know their history. So too, Islam and Christianity have revelations of truth, goodness, and beauty in the lives and teachings of their saints. Dave would conveniently overlook this simple truth in his use of RWER as place to proselytize his narrow brand of Christian theology. Not all Christians are so anti-intellectual in their theology and would not stoop to using RWER for sectarian apologetics as Dave does regularly.
As a follower of the life and teachings of Jesus I take great offense to ahistorical ignorant polemics on a site dedicated to science and knowledge. Truth is truth and Dave seem to not know the truth regarding the origin or history of the word religion let alone the history of his own Christian tradition.
This is a repeat of Rob’s previous letter. My apologies for not answering it. I was in hospital at the time.
First, I refute Rob’s initial assertions:
“The term religio predates Christ and the eventual evolution of Christianity. Dave is loose with the truth and intellectually sloppy with regards to Western history, yet presumes to warn Asad to be careful. What Dave is doing is pushing a sectarian, ahistorical, narrow, view of religion only shared by a narrow sect of undelighted Christians, of an even more narrow conservative Catholic dogmatic view, who neither know their own history let alone the history of religion.”
In answer to the first point, Rob quotes just one “authority” (and another quoting that) who no-where gives evidence of pre-Christian use of the Latin ‘religio’. I accept that I am inferring from the significance of the term and my own experience of having been involved in the creation of symbols for new inventions and seeing the conditions in which Christians lived during the Roman persecutions that it was they that invented this word, as they invented symbols like the fish now often disslayed by Christians on their cars.
I don’t know what Rob means by ‘loose with the truth’. As a mathematician rather than a historian I tend to speak more summmarily than he might like, but I do try to embrace the truth and not include misleading untruths. As for my nerve in warning Asad about Western history, I write openly as a Catholic who at school learned about pre-Refomation as well as post-Reformation history, and have come to appreciate the dictum that history is written by the victors, hence my warning. Rob’s ‘Smith, 1964’ reads like a scholar’s account rather than an imaginative reconstruction of the thoughts and motivations of the times. While my interpretation of the word ‘religion’ may even be just my own, Catholicism (as its name conveys but its human failings too often contradict) is not an narrow sect but the original “all-embracing” orthodoxy which (as Adam Smith so lucidly portrays) reformers split into sects fighting for livelihoods from “bums on seats”. What Rob is ignoring is that ‘all people’ includes all personality types, and we all start as children. “When I was a child”, says St Paul, “I used to talk like a child, and see things the way a child does, and think like a child; but now I have become an adult, I have finished with all childish ways”. As a scientist I began by being satisfied with most of what I was taught, but after sixty years of assessing why it was taught and demystifying its problems by resolving them in light of my own stock of examples, my faith is a well considered and grateful commitment, not something learned and taken for granted. Has Rob been reading ‘Catholicity for dummies’, one wonders? My serious point was that Muslims too have their split, as between Sunnis, Shias and sadly the current jihadists. As a broadly sympathetic outsider I would like to know more from an insider about the reasons for this.
Dave, you once complained that I provided to many citations and now you complain that I provide to few. Of course such disingenuous pleading is transparent. In reality it only requires one counterfactual to refute a falsehood. Wilfred Cantwell Smith is more than adequate to refute your willful ignorance regarding the history of the term “religion,” [1] but I will indulge your false logic and intellectual sophistry the sole purpose of which is to evade facing a simple fact and truth (an odd position for a religionist to be in no doubt) that words have both meanings and histories that are discoverable by those of sincere mind. You admit you are not a historian yet you arrogantly presume to warn others to be careful with history, and yet when faced with historical facts which refute your false claims persist in willful ignorance denying truth. That is hardly a Christ-like attitude toward reality, in my view. You make much ado about talking about the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of humankind, but you are blind to how you arrogantly presume to much and thereby play loose with the truth. It doesn’t take great effort to find the truth regarding the history of the term “religion” if one is not blinded by religious prejudice and hubris. Your behavior is living proof of Smith’s statement:
The simple truth is your are being willfully ignorant of the fact that the term “religion” has a history outside of your own narrow conservative Christian worldview and that you have much in common with your American Evangelical fellows in that you are exhibiting a certain anti-intellectual disdain for truth so you can engage in Christian polemical apologetics while paradoxically claiming to be a scientist and philosopher. The irony of course is that within the Catholic tradition there are religious scholars that have produced wonderful world-class interfaith literature over the many decades they have been engaged in interfaith dialogue with Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, and other faith traditions. Clearly a corpus Dave is wholly ignorant regarding the existence of. I have many of their works sitting in my library as write these words.[2]
Dave is a living example of dumbed down Catholicism (and Christianity for that matter) in his ignorance of his own faith traditions interfaith scholarship, let alone of the history of the term “religion.” One such scholar, Paul F. Knitter (1986) traces the history of how Christians have rationalized their interactions with men and women of other faith traditions in his book No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions. Dave is willfully ignorant parroting conservative Christian ideology more akin to the Conservative Evangelical Model (Knitter 1986, 84) than enlightened Catholic scholarship and is treating the word religion like many uninformed Westerners now treat the term “Hindu” without a shred of awareness of its historical origin as though it is thing rather than the cultural imposition of his own narrow ethnocentric blinders.[3] Dave is much like American fundamentalist Evangelicals in that they are willfully ignorant of the historical facts and truths pertaining to not only their own religion but the history of religion in general. That we are living in an age when early nineteenth-century religious studies (Religionswissenschaft) emerged indepent of Church control and gave rise to Biblical Criticism apparently eludes such anti-intellecual conservative religionists. That the Hebrew scribes borrowed from their Egyptian captors concepts of Deity that are now part of scripture is well known. Religious scholars now know that the Jewish scriptures contain many borrowed Egyptian and Mesopotamian concepts of God in the writings of the Psalms. The Torah bears witness to the fact that the early Hebrews borrowed from surrounding religious cultures in the worship of El Shaddai, the Egyptian concept of the God of heaven, which they learned about during their captivity in the land of the Nile.[4] That fact alone refutes Daves silly assertion that the term “religion” makes no sense outside of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The Torah also borrows from other ancient Mesopotamian sources for some of its laws, such as is seen in the trial by orderal divorce ritual as described in Numbers 5.12-30. Trial by the water ordeal was an Ancient Mesopotamian practice. It constituted the second item in Hamurabi’s codes of law, “If any one bring an accusation against a man, and the accused go to the river and leap into the river, if he sink in the river, his accuser shall take possession of his house. But if the river prove that the accused is not guilty, and he escape unhurt, then he who brought the accusation shall be put to death, while he who leaped into the river shall take possession of the house that had belonged to his accuser.” So, we learn, the Hebrews borrowed both the sublime concepts of Deity and less than sublime rules of ritual law that both exist within scripture to this day.
Whether hubris be associated with mathematics or religious dogma it is blinding, limiting, and less than ideal. Both scientists and religionists can only be self-critical of their facts. The moment departure is made from the stage of facts, reason abdicates or else rapidly degenerates into a consort of false logic. Both need more humility and a greater awareness of the incompleteness of our evolutionary status. Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes to deny realities and to confer upon its devotees assumed knowledge. Faith is a traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity and belittles loyalty to supreme values and divine ideals. Faith never shuns the problem-solving duty of mortal living. Living faith does not foster bigotry, persecution, or intolerance. Faith does not shackle the creative imagination, neither does it maintain an unreasoning prejudice toward the discoveries of scientific investigation. Faith vitalizes religion and constrains the religionist heroically to live the golden rule. The zeal of faith is according to knowledge, and its strivings are the preludes to sublime peace.
~ ~ ~
[1] Wilfred Cantwell Smith’s Meaning and End of Religion is modern classic and a masterpiece; a seminal work that to this day is influential in academic fields as diverse as philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies. I could easily pull off my shelves books written by other scholars saying much the same, but many are building on top of intellectual and scholarly foundations that Cantwell Smith laid, many even citing him as primary sources, so I’ll stick with his scholarship for a bit longer to pique possible interest, should Dave awaken from his dogmatic stupor:
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[2] The inside Front Jacket of a couple such books read:
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[3] Smith traces the history of the usage of such terms as “faith,” “belief,” and even “Hindu” in his studies. He shows how words may start with one meaning and overtime, evolve different meanings, sometimes 180 degrees opposite of their original meaning. He documents how with the rise of the field of religious studes as an independent academic field “other” religions were labeled and sometimes reified. In his Faith and Belief he masterfully reveals how within the Christian tradition the early term credo (faith) evolved away from its original context and meaning (to give one’s loyality to, to bestow one’s love upon) into the modern meaning of mere belief (intellectual assent to a set of propositional beliefs, i.e, dogma and doctrine):
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[4] Biblical Criticism and the historical quest for Jesus has a long history. Religionswissenschaft long ago revealed the many ways that the Hebrews borrowed and adopted the religious practices and concepts of the surrounding peoples. For Dave to blindly claim that the term “religion” had no real meaning outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition is simply being deaf, dumb, and blind to the fact that the Hebrews borrowed from their neighbors religious concepts that to this day remain an integral part of their tradition. The fact is that within the surrounding cultures there existed a diversity of religions and cults that ranged from
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Whoops, should read, “The fact is that within the surrounding cultures there existed a diversity of religions and cults that ranged from polytheistic nature cult to sublime monotheistic concepts of a supreme Deity.”
Perhaps Dave thinks the Hebrews (or Jesus himself) invented Latin and hence, Smith’s historical study of the usage of the term religio in pre-Christian Roman religion and culture is not evidence. It cannot get any clearer than Smith does below (I include the section in its entirity since Dave’s imagination is straining to think there could actually be any pre-Christian religion period); we are talking about pre-Christian and non-Jewish origin and usage of the Latin term religio and its various derivations. Dave must think that Latin was invented by the Hebrews, or perhaps Jesus himself! Or that Cicero and Lucretius were contemporaries with Jesus ;-) Of course the real underlying gist of his silly argument is that the only true religion is Christianity and therefore to apply the word “religion” to those “pagans” just doesn’t make sense.
Dave complains Wilfred Cantwell Smith is “just one ‘authority’ (and another quoting that …” completely oblivious to the fact, ludicrously so I note and proof he is no scholar or interested in truth, for the weight of the argument rests not so much on ‘authority’ real or imagined, but the content and quality of the evidence. Dave offers up biased and prejudiced opinion masquerading as scholarly truth, when it is pure polemic BS.
One could easily produce volumes building upon the scholarly work if Cantwell Smith, but I’ll limit myself to one cogent comment from a fellow Catholic, and just go back to ignoring Dave as best I can:
BTW, I chose Cantwell Smith with clarity of foresight, for he (and those who follow his work and build on it’s like Knitter) most cogently disarticulate the exclusivist theology that Dave is proselytizing on RWER.
Whether one chooses Islam or Christianity or Buddhism as their vehicle, self actualizing grace as in love in action/policy is the first and last step in that process. All the more reason to awaken to the new paradigm of Abundantly Direct and Reciprocal Monetary Grace as in Gifting that will underlay and buoy us in that necessarily individual mental effort.
There is absolutely no conflict between science and the natural philosophical concept and self actualized experience of grace, and a culture of grace/graciousness has always been the goal and the light we’ve simply needed to stand in….until it’s many aspects are part of our very beingness.
My point was, remains and will be that religion is a system of beliefs, an ideology. Whether one is a Communist, a Buddhist, a Muslim or a Jew, there is no getting away from the fact that entrenched dogma/fascination (that is to say not seeing the bigger picture that is staring us in face, day after day on all really urgent matters that I shall refrain from repeating) is immoral by any measure.
Economics (as far as I know!) was never a religion. Turning any religion that tries to explain it, or justify it, or contextual it at this crucial point in human history, will only give this very imperfect social science greater importance than it ever deserved. All this is intended to derail progressive discourse.
Helen, your “one size fits all” attitude to religion doesn’t become you, and if your own dogma is that dogma is the enemy it follows that mainstream economics is an enemy. It is wise to recognise that fact and reasonable to debunk those who are dogmatists.
The problem is, the dogma may be as near right as you are going to get, or the person you may see as being dogmatic is actually accepting positions he has come to agree with through a life-time of experience and critical reflection on the available evidence. Indeed, dogmas have to start with someone articulating them. Progressive discourse has to start by pointing out what a dogma (or dogmatic denial) is concealing by omission, e.g. the purposes of religion and economics. If something has no purpose one has no measure by means of which you can say it is moral or immoral.
If on the other hand, the purposes of religion and economics are to thank God for life and to facilitate our service of each other, that is moral; if the unstated purpose of its teachers and adherents is to live comfortably at the expense of others, that is immoral. Debateably, thinking here of Craig and Frank, one needs to allow for innocent dogmatists comforting themselves instinctively with self-rightous belief in the truth of their dogma. It is not as if these two are living comfortably at our expense.
PS. You say: “Economics (as far as I know!) was never a religion”. I mentioned “dogmatic denial” with Hume’s atheism in mind, and Adam Smith being a colleague of Hume, so perhaps it was (and is) an anti-religion.
Incidentally, I have previously excused Hume to the extent that he was judging religion by the way the establishment clergy of his day were behaving, spelled out a little later by Cobbett, approaching Ryall near here on his Rural Rides, 25-27 September 1826.
Grace, which is simply love in individual action/systemic policy, is the fulfillment of the law. Contemplate grace so it becomes your own SELF ACTUALIZED reality….and you’ll “never put a foot wrong” as the British say.
Dear Dave, I honestly do not mind various sizes at all. What I do have a problem with is when sizes change so frequently that one forgets one’s own size!
Try ordering a size ten tea shirt or trousers from any reputable dealer, and you will be in for a big surprise. Our body sizes are manipulated as are our brain sizes. But our conscience? This is where I welcome authentic “fundamentalism”. Otherwise, we never believed in anything constant.
Economists are humans, so I would never attack them on a personal basis (even when I have been personally insulted on this blog – see the links for yourselves) But Economics ( and yes most mainstream Economists) do have a lot to answer for. They really need to change their positions and positioning.
As always I enjoy your comments Helen. I am new to the study of economics on more than mere superficial Econ 101 and 102 classes from business school. But over these last few years I have repeatedly ran across well known economists making the very claim that mainstream economics functions more akin to an ideological belief system than a science. More like a religion than a science. More like pseudo-science than science. And of course there is the every present point that economics was a moral and political philosophy before its age of mathematization under the progressive movements desire to rid economics of moral philosophy and turn into a science more like physics (P-Envy). Whether they be religious, atheitst, or agnostic it seems there is a rising choras of voices calling for a more human (ethical) working economy.
Nelson lays a cogent argument down that economics as religion is alive and well even today. Scientism (materialism) is a religion every bit as dogmatic as the most dogmatic/ideologically encrusted religion. Science too can become an ideologically driven enterprise when it departs from the facts and espouses unfounded beliefs, disproven empirical claims, etc. The great strength of science has been its self-correcting mechanism that sooner or later the old dogmatists die off and a younger generation replaces them that is unafraid to challenge the dead dogma of their predecessors and reexamine old (and new) evidence through a new set of tinted glasses.
References:
1. Illiberal Reformers
2. Economics as Religion
3. Economics of Good and Evil
Further to my answer to Rob dated May 19th, this too is perpetuating a category confusion. There is the word ‘religion’, an institution like the Catholic Church and a creed like that of the Catholic church. Of these, only the latter can be called an ideology. There is also an an assumption that an ideology is bad because it is an ideology, not because it is a false or misleading one. The fact is that in order for anything to get done people must have beliefs, but only if the beliefs are true is it preferable that they have the same ones. The reality is that we see the same realities from different points of view, so it is possible for different accounts of reality all being true so far as they go, but needing each other to cover all aspects of a problem. The problem we have in economics is that the accounts widely shared are demonstrably untrue, but the different points of view of dissidents again involve a category confusion, being views of the economy as it has become due to capitalist beliefs, in which the word ‘economy’ remains undefined but in practice has shifted from the original meaning of ‘household management’ to become what Aristotle two thousand odd years ago distinguished from it as ‘chrematism’.
Let it be quite clear that I am objecting to the mis-use of the term ‘religion’ in much the same way I object to the mis-use of the term ‘economics’. I am prepared to accept the first as an honorary term for faiths like those of islam, buddhism etc which (from a Catholic point of view) represent less all-inclusive points of view, and belief in economic efficiency as the creed of mainstream economists, this being unchallenged by other observers of the system as it is (as against a very few like Frederick Soddy (who defined his terms) and E F Schumacher (who taught what I came to understand from my work: that efficiency is next to useless without reliability)). So yes, economists are acting more like seminary priests than theologians, but as a theologian I could object to the mis-use of the word ‘priest’ for a representative of one. The one’s draining the life-blood out of the economy are not the economists but the financiers.
Once again Dave is engaging in fundamentalist Christian polemics. There is nothing “honorary” or “universal” in Dave’s polemics. In his presumptuous ignorance he defines terms to suit his own narrow religious beliefs. Unfortunately, we live in world where “other” religionists get to define their own terms and where religious scholars delve deep and wide in historical studies that shed light on the “cumulative” histories of religious traditions, including our own. There is no “category confusion here” (another arrogant use of the sophistry of shifting definitions for rhetorical purposes and false red herrings) for Dave presumes to be presenting the “Catholic point of view” when as the evidence shows above he is not speaking for intelligent and enlightened Catholics, certainly not the one’s engaged in interfaith dialogue. It is a gross fallacy to even claim there is a singular “Catholic point of view” when the evidence shows there exists a diversity of views within even the Catholic tradition itself let alone the wider Christian tradition. He speaks for no one but himself yet presumes to speak for all Catholicism, and therein lies the hubris.
Dave is simply wrong and digging a hole deeper and deeper in that the term “religio” or “religion” makes no sense outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition and now he dances around this fact with more fundamentalist sophistry. He makes false distinctions that have no meaning outside his own closed dogmatic conservative Catholic views. Dave has made clear in his many dogmatic statements that he is painfully ignorant of the history of Christianity, which is evident in Smith’s (an intelligent Christian scholar) cogent description of one aspect of
Correction, “Dave is simply wrong and digging a hole deeper and deeper in that he claims the term “religio” or “religion” makes no sense outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition and now he dances around this fact with more fundamentalist sophistry.”
Correction, “He speaks for no one but himself yet presumes to speak for all Catholicism, and therein lies the hubris.”
Actually, the real sin of hubris is that Dave presumes to speak not only for all of Catholicism but all of Christianity and even Christ himself. Therein lies the betrayal of the Spirit of Truth and that humility that the spirit imparts to those truly connected to the vine and bearing fruits.
If Catholic deserves capitalization so too then does Buddhism, Islam and any other religion Dave. The idea that Buddhism, or Islam, or any other major religious tradition of the world “represent[s] less all-inclusive points of view” is religious arrogance qua pseudo-intellectual sophistry.
The many world religions are all good to the extent that they bring man to God and bring the realization of the Father to man. It is a fallacy for any group of religionists to conceive of their creed as The Truth; such attitudes bespeak more of theological arrogance than of certainty of faith. There is not a religion that could not profitably study and assimilate the best of the truths contained in every other faith, for all contain truth.
Humans are homo religious and all these religions have arisen as a result of men’s and women’s variable intellectual response to his identical spiritual leading (despite what one may believe the origins of such leadings come form). They can never hope to attain a uniformity of creeds, dogmas, and rituals—these are intellectual; but they can, and some day will, realize a unity in true worship of the Father of all, for this is spiritual, and it is forever true, in the spirit all men are equal.
The spiritually blind individual who logically follows scientific dictation, social usage, and religious dogma stands in grave danger of sacrificing his moral freedom and losing his spiritual liberty. Such a soul is destined to become an intellectual parrot, a social automaton, and a slave to religious authority.
Dave is intellectually parroting outdated early eighteenth- nineteenth-century Christian (in this case Catholic) Christian polemic apologetics which is little more than blind intellectual ascent to a religion of authority rooted in dogmatic intellectual propositions that do not stand the test of time when confronted with real science, progressive religious scholarship, and modernity. Dave is trying to drag his fellows back into the middle ages when not even the core intellectuals in the Catholic church are so inclined or intellectually unaware of the world around the in terms of science, philosophy, and religion.
Rob’s trolling disappoints me. If readers can find my reasoned argument among his blather and repetition they will find I have answered such reasonable objection he has offered: why the word ‘religion’ has the form it has, the [not just his] lack of evidence for its use in pre-Christian latin, and the logical implications of the word ‘catholic’, which I’ve admitted have proved in practice an aspiration only – albeit an admirable one. We are all children of God intended to remain beloved, and – far more than in the middle ages – we Catholics now realise that includes those whose views or understanding is Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist etc. or even atheist. The best model I have come across is of a seventeenth century Jesuit South American mission community, surrounded by a fence but with an ever open door.
To get back to Asad’s point of Islam’s gift to economics, it is interesting to compare it with the aims of St Benedict’s rules, which were written shortly before the birth of Mahomet. I’m not point-scoring: I’m hoping to agree common ground.
You are the one who is trolling both Asad and myself Dave. You are clearly in the middle of a Freudian slip. As I said, there is nothing universal, reasonable, or Jesusonian about the exclusivist theology you troll Asad and this site with Dave. Asad as a Muslim draws on his religious heritage to point to universal human values, not to engage in apologetics and polemics, not to imply or infer others are less than or only deserving of an “honorary” (what BS!) status since they are “less all-inclusive” than your self-righteous theology, or as you say in your own words,
Paul F. Knitter (1985), a enlightened Catholic who really understands what it means to articulate a universal theology of religions fully aware of other’s faith traditions, with no need of surrounding himself with a “fence,” (a theological version of Trump’s “wall”), or arrogantly elevating oneself by labeling the “other” as only “honorary” and “less” than. Knitter exposes the intellectual, philosophical, moral, and spiritual failures of such an exclusivist theology.
Whether you are capable of realizing it or not you are in your own words above articulating a theologically exclusivist theology. Perhaps when it is put into your face so black-and-white you feel some shame? Perhaps not?
You clearly cannot deal with the facts or with truth or you would have the integrity to recognize them when they stare you in the face. Pride is one the seven deadly sins. You like to interlude your exclusivist polemics with banter about the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man, but your exclusivist theology belies another motive. The two are not compatible.
Great evils were perpetrated upon other nations, civilizations, and peoples under such an exclusivist theological worldview that seeps through your posts. Positivism alone is not the cause of modernity’s revolt against religion; theological arrogance of Christianity and its ecclesiastical totalitarian hold upon “freethinkers” was also part of the cause. But that is another story.
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One can read the original Latin of Lucretius and Cicero, who clearly are pre-Christian, and see for oneself how they use the term religio, religiones, etc. Or read Goossens (2005) Lucretius and Religion. work on Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. (Faculty of Philosophy. Ultrecht University.).
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Dave’s willful presumptive ignorance is spiritually repulsive and utterly recklessness with truth. Such an attitude that his creed has THE TRUTH bespeaks more theological arrogance than certainty of faith. If Dave sincerely cared about not believing and/or stating “misleading untruths” he would reconsider his claim that Christians invented the word religio (i.e., religion). I have given him more then enough evidence to see the error of his claim, but nevertheless he persists in departing from the stage of historical fact thereby turning reason into a consort of false logic. Faith has falsified its trust when it presumes to deny realities and to confer upon its devotees assumed knowledge. Faith is a traitor when it fosters betrayal of intellectual integrity to fact and truth. The acceptance of a teaching as true is not faith; that is mere belief. The pride of unspiritualized learning is a treacherous thing in human experience. The true teacher maintains his intellectual integrity by ever remaining a learner.
Keep in mind that Dave presumes to be schooling Asad (and myself) in history (something he now openly admits he is not well versed in) while asserting a historically false claim, and upon evidence to the contrary stiffening his neck and doubling down on arrogant assertions of misleading untruths (falsehood) interspersed with irrelevant misdirecting narrative. Falsehood is not a matter of narration technique but something premeditated as a perversion of truth. The shadow of a hair’s turning, premeditated for an untrue purpose, the slightest twisting or perversion of that which is principle—these constitute falseness. When Dave’s instructions (or dumbed-down Catholicism) are not heeded or worse, refuted, he resorts to ad hominem, such as “Has Rob been reading ‘Catholicity for dummies’, one wonders?” or simply calling people stupid:
A simply “I am mistaken” would be enough. But that takes real faith grounded in a love of truth ebodies humility, teachability, and true brotherly love.