From: Robert Owen (rowen@technologist.com)
Date: Sun Jan 23 2000 - 01:38:20 MST
Spike Jones wrote:
> > Spike Jones wrote: To the left of left would be the
> > > agnostic. What is to the right of right? I propose it should
> > > be the dogmatic atheist.
> > Robert Owen wrote:
> > I really like your sociogram, Spike. I only spot one difficulty -- as
> > you suggest, extremes tend to meet because they are really the
> > two opposing faces of one thing, "Agnostic::Dogmatic Atheist"
> > doesn't seem to work very well. Here's what I suggest, even
> > though it's a bit more complicated:
> >
> > Positivist-Humanist-Liberal-Orthodox-Fundamentalist-Atheist-Nihilist
>
> I like it. Max More will likely weigh in on this, as this I think is his
> area of expertise. The problem I see with your spectrum above is
> it places the similar humanist and atheist too far apart, nearly opposite.
[1] I see very little similarity between "humanism" and "atheism"; I regard
Humanism as the transformation of Christianity into a secular Ethos, but
atheism as the negation of Christianity. [2] I visualize this continuum
as in fact a spectrum from an extreme affirmation of the secular through
the "white" sacred to the "black" sacred (or demonic) to an extreme denial
of the secular. [3] To illustrate my intention, substitute "Fascist" for
"Atheist"; then we can place "agnosticism" within the range of "Humanist"
which is where I think it belongs (c.f. Schweitzer's "The Quest for the
Historical Jesus") and atheism between Fascist and Nihilist. This has a
historical justification -- although the word "Nihilism" originated in the
fiction of Turgenev around l855, it later became closely associated with
the Ideology of Radical Revolution developed by Marx, Lenin and Trotsky.
[4] Finally, we must be able to bend our linear continuum into a circle
to that the "ideological distance" between elements is relative to one's
theory of "dynamic opposition" and the geometry chosen.
Bob
=======================
Robert M. Owen
Director
The Orion Institute
57 W. Morgan Street
Brevard, NC 28712-3659 USA
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