Secularization

Christians of all hue agree that the figure of Christ is central to the religion that Christianity is. This figure is “the promised one”, the “messiah”, the “anointed one”, and so on. Kindly note that there is a difference between the Christ as a figure and Jesus of Nazareth. The Jews also believe in the Christ figure, but they figure that he has not yet come, and they are awaiting his arrival. …

About the state, state action and the issue of public interest. There are multiple problems here, which I am only slowly beginning to recognize. I will share two such problems with you without, however, being able to concretely spell out the alternatives. (a) Consider the belief that the state ‘ought’ to act in the public interest. This belief makes sense if we assume that it is possible to speak …

Larry Laudan’s “How Reasonable is ‘Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt’?” (published in the journal Legal Theory), shows how the principle of proof beyond a reasonable doubt is utterly unreasonable when one analyzes it in terms of epistemological standards. Laudan’s argument is convincing. The problem is it makes all these judges and lawyers look like fools. Balu was not satisfied by Laudan’s …

One of these so-called secular accounts that are in fact Christian is the belief that all cultures have a religion. It is simply a secularization of the Christian belief that the biblical God gave religion to humankind, which was transformed into the assumption that religion is a cultural universal during the Enlightenment. This pre-theoretical assumption precedes all empirical research and …

Assuming that the distinction I proposed between civic tolerance and religious tolerance is acceptable, let us proceed further to analyze the notion of civic tolerance more closely. (I am simply assuming that it is desirable and that, from now on, we are talking about religious matters.) It is (logically) possible that there could be religious intolerance and yet the believers in such religions …

The question appears to be: need one accept certain premises of Christianity (whether Protestant or Catholic varieties) in order that the dominant understanding of, say, the secular state and the caste to make sense? That those to whom such accounts make sense do not explicitly subscribe to the premises of a specific religious appears to throw doubt on our claims. Consider the very distinction …

The general pattern that has come to the fore is that Wendy and her children (including Jeffrey Kripal) systematically portray the Indian traditions in an unfavorable light, even when compared to how religions like Christianity, Islam and Judaism are portrayed. This claim is made in several articles, independent of whether these religions and the Indian traditions are true or false, whether they …

I want to raise three issues: (a) how to analyze what Rajiv portrays about Wendy and her children in the field of religious studies; (b) depending on that, what an adequate response consists of. Before we do either (this is one of the things I have discovered through my own research during the last two decades), we need to be clear about (c) how we should not analyze this situation. Given that all …