Friday, July 13, 2007

Dogmatism

In his book, A Common Faith, John Dewey made a distinction between religion and the religious.  Specifically, Dewey noted this.

To be somewhat more explicit, a religion (and as I have just said there is no such thing as religion in general) always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization, loose or tight.  In contrast, the adjective “religious” denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs.

John Dewey, A Common Faith, I. Religion Versus the Religious, pg. 9

I thought of this notion of Dewey’s after reading the following.

THE Vatican has described the Protestant and Orthodox faiths as “not proper churches” in a document issued with the full authority of the Pope...The document said the Orthodox Church suffered from a “wound” because it did not recognise the primacy of the Pope. The wound was “still more profound” in Protestant denominations, it added.

It was “difficult to see how the title of ‘Church’ could possibly be attributed to them”, said the statement from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Roman Catholicism was “the one true Church of Christ”.

I think that Pope Benedict XVI’s assertion, here, deserves to be criticized, even denounced, as vehemently as the cult of death Islamists are denounced who desire to bring their “one true faith” to the world via terrorism.

It’s not the religious we need concern ourselves with, it is religion, especially when a religion desires to claim itself as the one true faith or church.

Vatican calls Roman Catholic religion ‘one true faith’

Posted by John Venlet on 07/13 at 06:24 AM
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