Hi Derek,

Well I think that the new atheists would ‘want’ to believe that an atheistic world governed by those guided by science and scientific rationalism would be a world without violence and war. Whether or not this is the case there is certainly something kind of Pollyanna in this sort of thinking and they way they twist themselves around to avoid acknowledging that a great deal of totalitarian violence was also secular violence is bizarre. Okay, at best they say this violence was the product of irrational ideology more than science, but so was My Lai in an abstract way as was the slaughter on the road to Basra. Two things to say straight off the bat about the orientations of the new atheism: its millenarian in its outlook (heaven on earth is a scientific utopia); its anti-pluralistic they want to eliminate those who think differently or at least remove them from any position of authority or influence, this is not just limited to religion, people like Dennett also seem to want to purge the humanities. There’s a feature of the analytic/continental divide!

In regard to Aztec belief, as a general orientation on the world, and contextualized as it must be, there does not seem to be anything irrational about that mode of relation to the world. Indeed if one recognizes that religion changes and reconfigures itself in history one wonders how that tradition would have transfigured in time if it was allowed to remain vital. Aztec religion is often cited as the paradigm of irrationality – here the descriptions always rest with the most striking aspects (human sacrifice, strange deities…). There is little attempt to draw out, as you were attempting to do, the general orientation of the tradition and the underlying rationality of it. To my mind this is far more important. If we are going to consider individual religions then we need to start by understanding the way it orientates people on the world. The stories of the Aboriginal dream time can look really strange – a snake created this geographical formation! If you leave it at that you can just see the whole tradition as irrational but the narratives that Aboriginal people tell about the land are a key to understanding that the land, for Aboriginal people, has axiological priority – it’s a geocentric tradition. The narratives are interesting and beautify. But set that aside temporarily (if only so as to avoid having the narratives laughed at as bizarre and irrational beliefs) the geocentric orientation is not at all irrational, how does a geocentric tradition measure up to the theocentric orientation of say Christianity or the anthropocentric orientation of scientific rationalism? It’s an interesting question.

I agree that there is some value in comparing religions, so long as one is very careful not to speak for other religions and other people and so long as you avoid trying to map another religion back onto the tradition you are most familiar with. We cannot presume that all religions have the same shape as our own (as Michael Pye warns us). That relates to the second point you make, if your religion constitutes the paradigm of rationality you might be tempted to try to mash every religion you encounter into a structure you abstracted from it. So, you might seek out the Chinese equivalent to our heaven, or an Aboriginal salvation discourse….

Philip