A website to which I have been recently introduced is hosting a discussion forum on conservative thought, on February 27th, in Brooklyn. They will be considering conservative thought in several social and cultural areas, including religion (dear to my own heart). One of the readings they offer is a 1982 review article by George Scialabba, considering works by Kolakowski, MacIntyre, and Rorty.
In the article, Scialabba makes the typical modernist argument, not the least of whose highlights is the repeated assertion that with the arrival of the modernist project - the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the various 20th century responses to these movements - the intellectual assent to religious propositions, and therefore religious "belief" considered as intellectual assent to a set of such propositions, is now untenable. This may or may not be the case; while the French philosophes certainly were not concerned with upholding religious belief, many of the great Enlightenment thinkers (with the possible exception of Hume) certainly included religion within their sphere of interest. Locke, Hobbes, Kant, Hegel - all wrote extensively on "religion", which for them meant Christianity. Of course, Hegel considered other religions, although he thought of Christianity as the highest form of religious belief (in this vein, the Romanticist theologian Schleiermacher did as well; while they politely detested one another, they shared this at least).
Yet, few social movements have failed to die as easily as religion should have.
My question is quite simple - if religious belief should have ended when the intellectual superstructure underlying it became untenable, why didn't it? Could it be, perhaps, that, like Christmas Day for the Who's in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, religious belief is something a little bit more than the ex post facto intellectual justifications for it?
