[FoRK] Practicing Science: Secular vs. Religious Ideology

[Russell Turpin]

Lion Kimbro asks:
> The idea that "history," as Marxists see it, is something of a
> "God," makes sense to me. I am something of a Hegelian, I believe
> that human history, from conversations to decades, is a sort of
> evolution, where people realize of each other, "Oh, that's what
> they were talking about." (Synthesis.) It's complex & subtle, but
> this is all I have floor-time to say.
>
> So I can see how this "smells something like" "God." -- It's
> teleological, it involves groups of people, it's personal, it
> realtes the individual to the Universe, and so on.
>
> And so my question is: "Is this something atheists are, or should
> be, against?"

Hmmm...

Without commenting on your own take on Hegelian synthesis, let me 
two objections to Marx's. First, he thought he understood the 
economic dialectic that was driving political history well enough 
to predict its stages, and to paint future stages that did not yet
and still do not exist. There, I think he was factually in error. 
Second, he attached a particular ethic to his view of how History 
would unfold. One was either on the side of History, or against it. 
For all his claim to "science," there was a horrible entanglement 
of the positive and the normative in Marx's views that belies that. 
 
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