An odd assertion, boxgum. But perhaps you intended it to be ambiguous.

>>"responsibility, autonomy, and justification; or history and remembering, new beginning, innovation, and return; or emancipation and fulfillment; or expropriation, internalization, and embodiment, individuality and fellowship". All of these are informed with religious thinking<<

The ambiguity arises because you can read the list in two ways. That these characteristics are informed *only* with religious thinking. Or that these are simply some characteristics that can, on occasions, be influenced by religious thinking.

It would be impossible to justify the first reading, of course. All of those characteristics exist independently of any religious thinking. The concept, for example, of individual responsibility existing solely in a religious context is particularly insulting.

Possibly, of course, intentionally so. But nonsense, nonetheless.

But if the intention was to describe areas in which religious thinking had its own type of impact, which is undeniable, then one has to wonder how it can in any way be considered an answer to bushbasher's question.

Whatever, it was a pretty succinct summary of why Christians need faith to sustain them, boxgum, for which, thanks. As a narrative, it is all pretty far-fetched, especially when you see it all crammed into a single paragraph.

What happened to the "secular age" by the way?

When is it likely to come about?

Pericles, with Relda's endorsement: “Science, and scientific disciplines, do not rely upon dogma of any kind”.
Not quite true; scientific disciplines are parasitic, at present they rely on positivist and Enlightenment dogmas, as well as capitalism for funding and a ready market. Modern science amounts to aimless technocracy. What after all is the object of positivistic science? What are its aspirations and inhibitions? What is its hippocratic oath? To what end does science prosecute its mania for understanding and utilising the natural wonders of the universe? This is a real problem. The drive for scientific discovery is uninhibited and indifferent. It's like capitalism; it doesn't question its modus operandi; endless growth and endless innovation respectively. That's what they do. That's all they do. This symbiotic juggernaut is out of control; we are kidding ourselves if we think we're running the experiment. This is why Habermas was in favour of extending Enlightenment values--the philosophes successfuly threw off the aristos' yoke; that was their objective, and age of reason, but without a God or a set of ethics to guide them, we are the logical outcome--a hopeless race of misfits--Smith was of the same ilk, only he tapped unwittingly into a natural law that would not fail--human decadence. Habermas's late religious turn was born of frustration, I think, that we seem incapable of theorising a set of transcendental ethics; humanity needs a guide! The Habermasian backflip has been repeated ad nauseam: Wilde, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Eagleton just to name a few. Post-secular is the dialectical obverse of post-religion--sorry for holding out, Boxgum. We need a synthesis.
The advocates of reason here are sounding rather sanctimonious. So what's it founded on?

Pericles

An understanding of Aristotle by Averroes (Latin name for Ibn Rushd 1126-1198) proposed that there is a single human intellect and it is shared by each person and united with them only in its operation, namely, thinking.. St Thomas Aquinas (1225..1274) saw the limitation of such thought in that it excluded personal identity here and into the next life. Aquinas's attaching the existence of individual intellect along with the personal soul was foundational in the development of personal responsibility, and indeed the understanding of each of us being made in the Image of God.

The notion of individual romantic love flowered through the music and deeds of the troubadours in the courts of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages.

Guess what Pericles and Bushbasher et al. A lot did happen in the human project between the times of Ancient Greece and the Renaissance leading to the Enlightenment.

Mitchell - In Avatar the scientists and their direct workers are the good, "white hat" humans - a nice little embedded message for the masses.

Well I'm disappointed you blokes don't want to go "there". Clearly what you know, or think you know, is sufficient. But I'm afraid our reality is a bit like the Mandelbrot set--endless contingency. Not only is rationalism paltry and inadequate, it's actually a modern pathology--the ersatz objective that precludes the ersatz subjective. Not that I say for a moment that religion is the path to health.

But perhaps another time.

And Sells, for heaven's sake, if you're going to instigate these in-depth discussions that people engage with at great expense in terms of time, please have the courtesy to defend your positions, and not remain aloof like a pompous git!

Mitchel,
Hmm, Pompous git! I own being a git but not being pompous. I have been writing these articles since 2001 and have grown weary of defending my position against contributers who will not properly engage and simply defend their simplistic solutions. When I read your first post I recognised a real contender and your second did not disappoint me.

Science should be free of idealism, that it is patently not is evidence that we do live between the times in which all is not right with us. By the way I like your conclusion that rationalism has become the modern pathology. We still have not gotten over the enlightenment missunderstanding that rationality is not enough.

Peter Sellick

Sells: "Science should be free of idealism, that it is patently not is evidence that we do live between the times in which all is not right with us."
Well I don't know what to make of this. Why should "science be free of idealism", whatever that means? I think I was complaining that science "is" ostensibly free of idealism, but that its adherents are a little naive in their worship of all things putatively objective. And "all" has never "been right with us" btw Sells, certainly not under Christianity. All these systems, including rationalsim/scientism, are ways of dealing with the "absurd" human condition (absurd to us). If rationalism is to be heralded as the consumatum est, then what are its credentials? Where is it taking us? And since it proceeds independently of our native "irrationalism", are we, condemned to corporeality as we are, of any moment in this technological drive.
On the subject of corporeality; does not the objective drive divorce us little by little from the conditions of our own existence? Can we ever transcend what it means to be human? We are "thinking meat" (as Pinker has it). To what do we aspire with the aid of technology? Conversely, what does religion offer? Is its primitivism more "organic"? Is the universe fundamentally spiritual or rational, or neither? One would have to expect that it's indifferent to all our language games. If we believe it's amenable to scientific method, doesn't that imply an anthropocentrism tantamount to religious belief? It still implies some foundational place for humanity.
I doubt rationality is enough, as a scalpel. Whether or not it's enough, existentially, shouldn't influence us. I'm not interested in comfort believing.