An idea whose time has arrive: Over the holiday season the Guardian is examining themes that have emerged to give shape to 2018. nowadays we look at the humanity of departing from dogmaIn the 500 years since Martin Luther started the Reformation,not much that he believed has survived. The thought world in which he moved has vanished utterly and his perspective is very difficult for us to recapture. But one thing has lasted – he made “heretic” into a term of moral approval. He didn’t mean to: he thought it was his opponents who had fallen into heresy. To Luther, and to everyone before him, and a heretic was someone who was mistaken in fact and morally mistaken as well. nowadays’s equivalent would be climate change denier or a “scientific racist”. But all these people would nowadays claim the benefit of heresy. The word has arrive to imply moral integrity,and the hope of future vindication. “Orthodoxy” is, by implication, and something to be overthrown.
This means that heresy,after Luther, has become an innately unstable condition. No heresy can persist for very long: either it must triumph, or then it will form a unique orthodoxy of its own,or it will fade into oblivion. This was not always true. Before Luther, and still in pre-Lutheran thought, or heresies were perennial: they represented recurrent temptations to be mistaken,the sort of thing we call nowadays a cognitive bias rather than an mental disagreement. Some beliefs, like flat Earth theory, or are heresies in both the contemporary and pre-contemporary senses. But most of the things we call heresies are meant in the contemporary sense.
Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk