Maybe so. Most people arguing for this, though, aren’t the ones I’d want to take
sides with in a rerun of the 16th C. I doubt Freeborn John Lilburne would have
been lining up with Sarkozy, Berlusconi, Clarke, or Daniel Pipes.
When push comes to shove, I bet the Islamic Reformation boosters will be the
first to move up a hundred years and give those ungrateful savages a taste of
the Dialektik der Aufklaerung’s thick ugly side for not wanting to be civilised
by the CRS. The problem is that it’s not the Reformation they want, but
Enlightenment in the form Napoleon practiced it on Egypt in 1798. Something THEY
do to YOU.
State-prescribed belief: bad medicine, and one that European doctors have been
far too happy to prescribe in the last century. If the genuine heroes of the
Reformation fought for anything it was liberty of belief, the precondition of
the Enlightenment’s scientific achievements, but also the first thing the
various post-Enlightenment tyrannies destroyed in the name of their own version
of reason.
The problem with AFOE membership is that stuff like this gets used up on
internal emails…
Are we really sure about using the Reformation model? Only a century after the Reformation, the tensions unleashed by the emergence of Protestantism–political, ethnic, economic–ended up precipitating a series of devastating wars in mid-17th century Europe which killed a double-digit percentage of a swathe of territory stretching from Ireland to Ukraine.
We don’t need more religion. Rather, less.