Raising the sanity waterline is not about imposing decrees to control what people think. It’s about encouraging people to understand that they are in control of their own rationality and they should work towards improving it.
… Yeah, I guess imposing “God doesn’t exist” by decree, no matter how strongly supported by the population, doesn’t make much sense.
And yes, the guys were very clumsy about it, but that’s pioneering for you. But I’m really really curious as to what those people’s rites consisted of.
I have come to understand that religion is not about belief or dogma at all: those are chosen, picked, and altered, emphasized or forgotten, by the correligionaries, at their own convenience as a society. Religion is about links, about ties, about a community: that’s what the word actually means, religation. And those religations, those group-creeds, were imposed by the group on its members. A common reference, a sign of identity, a law they all obey. There was never a law of God, only of men.
If you go at it from that perspective, and see the Cult Of Reason as a purely societal phenomenon with only the trappings of a religion (including the practice of imposing by decree what members of the group should think), then the idea becomes more understandable. The French had slain the King: all is a lie, everything is permitted, so why not kill God too? (it’d take them until the Fifties to actually achieve that task, in their collective minds, but now most Frenchmen are atheists, and aggressively secular to the point of intolerance, and they didn’t try to replace it with any new “sacred” thing).
Raising the sanity waterline is not about imposing decrees to control what people think. It’s about encouraging people to understand that they are in control of their own rationality and they should work towards improving it.
… Yeah, I guess imposing “God doesn’t exist” by decree, no matter how strongly supported by the population, doesn’t make much sense.
And yes, the guys were very clumsy about it, but that’s pioneering for you. But I’m really really curious as to what those people’s rites consisted of.
I have come to understand that religion is not about belief or dogma at all: those are chosen, picked, and altered, emphasized or forgotten, by the correligionaries, at their own convenience as a society. Religion is about links, about ties, about a community: that’s what the word actually means, religation. And those religations, those group-creeds, were imposed by the group on its members. A common reference, a sign of identity, a law they all obey. There was never a law of God, only of men.
If you go at it from that perspective, and see the Cult Of Reason as a purely societal phenomenon with only the trappings of a religion (including the practice of imposing by decree what members of the group should think), then the idea becomes more understandable. The French had slain the King: all is a lie, everything is permitted, so why not kill God too? (it’d take them until the Fifties to actually achieve that task, in their collective minds, but now most Frenchmen are atheists, and aggressively secular to the point of intolerance, and they didn’t try to replace it with any new “sacred” thing).