Multiverse Minutiae

William James’s most direct and significant contributions to philosophy of religion come from his “The Will to Believe” and The Varieties of Religious Experience – the second of which having the greater influence on the development of religious pluralism during the twentieth century. The few speculations James offers about the nature of ultimate reality toward which religious experiences point suggest a relatively pluralist attitude toward the diversity of religions, according to which none could claim a monopoly on genuine experience of the divine nor be excluded from it. Together with his later writings on pragmatism and pluralistic metaphysics, James serves as important touchstone for later theories of religious pluralism. This religious pluralism is a form of religious anarchism.  Christianity began primarily as a pacifist and anarchist movement. Jesus introduces anarchism to the kingdom of God. Jesus is said, in this view, to have come to empower individuals and fr...

Marx and Burke: New Humanity  New Humanity is a utopian concept that involves the creation of a new ideal human being or citizen. The meaning of a New Humanity has widely varied and various alternatives have been suggested by a variety of religions and political ideologies, including Christianity, communism, and conservatism.  Marx and New Humanity  Marxism postulates the development of a New Humanity in a communist society following the values of a non-essential nature of the state and the importance of freely associated work for the affirmation of a person's humanity. Marxism does not see the New Humanity as a goal or prerequisite for achieving full communism, but rather as a product of the social conditions of pure communism which is a stateless classless society.  Marx wrote of a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ but his class analysis was truly bottom up in organization. In order to critique Marx we must question his strategy of destro...

Saint-Simon and Hayek: New Humanity New Humanity is an utopian concept that involves the creation of a new ideal human being or citizen replacing un-ideal human beings or citizens. The meaning of a New Humanity has widely varied and various alternatives have been suggested by a variety of religions and political ideologies, including Christianity, technocracy, and libertarianism. Saint-Simon and New Humanity In Henri de Saint-Simon there was always a double tendency: his positivist and scientific studies impelled him to found a purely practical and demonstrable moral code, while his sentimental and mystical tendencies led him to desire a religion. He believed that Christianity had greatly forwarded morality, but he declared that its reign was at an end. His religious tendency grew by degrees; he declared that the crisis was reached which had been predicted by the Old Testament, prepared for by the Biblical societies, and expected by the Jews fo...