The rule of law and religion

By -
"The rule of law, understood as rules that are binding even on the most politically powerful actors in a given society, has its origins in religion. It is only religious authority that was capable of creating rules that warriors needed to respect." -- Fukuyama, p. 11

It is interesting, in view of the massive amount of historical evidence showing the positive role that religion has played in ordering social life, how little heed the New Atheists pay to this data. Honest scholars who are nonbelievers, such as Fukuyama, Eco, or Hayek, have not had this blind spot.

Comments

  1. Ken B10:06 AM

    Some new atheists. I agree Dawkins and Hitchens only ever see the costs. Not so true of Harris, and certainly not true of Dennett.

    Not just new atheists, old fashioned ones too. I have seen old style leftists deny that for instance William Wilberforce's religion had anything to do with his views on slavery. Utterly daft.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lorenzo3:19 PM

    Up to a point. If your civilisation adopted the idea that it should be ruled by divine law (Sharia, Laws of Manu) that turned out to have seriously negative effects in the longer run. Christendom and Japan were both advantaged in that they had secular laws which were much more adaptable to circumstances.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Samson Corwell5:43 PM

    Eco?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:52 PM

      ECO Eco eco...

      http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

      Delete
    2. Ken B7:39 PM

      Narcissus Eco, a well known Italian gardner who has named several roses.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more