Comm 395 Final Exam

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An associate of Hitchen’s (God is Not Great)
Rushdie wrote “The Satanic Verses”
Rushdie stated that the Koran is flawed and got death threats.
Because of this Hitchen’s was threatened because he is a good friend with Rushdie.
Considered guilty by association.
“People who are religious show no tolerance”
“Religion is a powerful public force and needs to be taken out of public life.”

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Salmon Rushdie

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New Atheist
“Keep religion out of society”

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Hitchens

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Carter Hitchens and Garver are all interested in Ethos

Why and how to listen are not questions of law. They are not “moral” issues of rights and duties. They are, instead, ethical questions about the sort of community we want to live in. they are ethical in the sense of involving character-the character of speakers, audience, and communication.

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Ethos (garver)

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(Garver- how can a liberal listen to a religious argument) Part of the difficulty of understanding alien voices—and my catholic students certaintly reguarding their bishops as an alien voice—comes from an ambiguity in the hermeneutic principle of “charity”. I have a duty to make the best I can of what you say. To understand you at all, even to disagree, even to come to the conclusion that you don’t know what you’re talking about, I have to assume that most of what you say is true and intelligible.

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Hermeneutic Principle of 'Charity'

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A particular branch of philosophy
What is the difference between fact and opinion?

(Steiner: the liability of enlightenment)
The fundamental problem of rhetoric in American Evangelical Christianity is modernistic epistemological assumptions in discourse.

Modernist epistemology assumes the plain and transparent natures of truth, wisdom, the workings of the universe, and the meaning of the Bible.
-it casts the authority and “truth-value” of the Bible strictly in empirical and propositional terms.

Problems with modernist epistemology:
1. Opinions and ethos of intellectual religious elites
Metaphor: “The Bible is seen in essence as a divinely inspired “third-grade answer book”
This can be problematic because people put their trust in the deciphering opinions of the Bible into intellectual and religious elites (can their opinions be trusted?) Goes into a matter of Ethos.

2. Naturalization problem
This is also problematic because America is built upon an assembly of foreign people who all carry di

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Modernist Epistemology

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Man is
The symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
Inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)
And rotten with perfection

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Burke's Definition of Man

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(Burke, The Definition of Man)
Aka “moved by a sense of order”
Incentives of organization and status
Hieratical because of the implication of “original sin”
Creates a definition of is/is not a sin and definition for what you should/should not do to sin.
Divisions of labor are created in society because of the definitions and differentiations and allocations of property protected by the negativities of the law.

Negative (creates community)- propositional [‘is/is not’] and hortatory [‘shall/should not’].

Symbol making, using, manipulating human beings. Idea of the negative- the ability to think of something by what it isn’t→ you can do this with language.

Language is Heirarchical→ Thinking hierarchical is inevitable→ having sense of good/bad= language symbol using beings.

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Goaded by the Spirit of Heirarchy

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Human beings are symbol making, symbol using beings.
“Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about thing in terms of what they are not- and in this sense we start out beset by a paradox. Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about. Indeed, they can even be so useful that they help us to invent way of threatening to destroy ourselves. But even accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared with the substance of the things they name. Nor is such abstractness confined to the language of scientific prose.

“Human beings are the inventors of the NEGATIVE.”
There are no negatives in nature and this ingenious addition to the world is because of the human symbol systems.
There are no negatives in nature, where everything simply is what it is and as it is. To look for negatives in nature would be as absurd as though you were to go out hunting for the square root of minus-one. The negati

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The Negative (Burke)

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they did not understand how to properly use rhetoric.
-Faithful witness essay, oversimplified idea of US history and religion.
-attached to a single terministic screen without realizing how to appeal to other audiences.
-Pro-choice side had set up groundwork to defend themselves throughout the 1950's and 60's

-christians within these faith traditions have:
-confused pluralism and relativism
-confused or ignored the relationship between means and ends
-succumbed to the political stances of victimhood and resentment

-characterize abortion as the murder of infants, which is common for a pro-life standpoint and that it is the basis for God's judgement upon the nation.

By supporting Roe vs. Wade, the government is straying from their divinely appointed purpose.
-pre roe vs. wade USA, was highly moral in his eyes.
-compared to the civil rights movement and the actions of MLK Jr. and also comparing abortion to the holocaust.

Burke: rhetoric as identification: was able to build ethos, but only with a set group

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why did operation rescue fail?

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Importance:
Hitchens' examples of the danger of religious rhetoric. (Salmon Rushdie and the threat of death due to "the satanic verses")
Garver: religious rhetoric is:
-comprehensive
-principled
-motivated
-authoritative

need to understand why religion drives people to have certain beliefs and do certain things: (ex. WBC)

"there is a great deal of religious language, but little argument" (Garver)

What can be gained:
Garver: building ethos for religious rhetoric
-Hermeneutic principle of Charity (Garver)
-Understanding the mentality of religious mindsets. (Shrek review, WBC, appeals of evangelical films, etc.)

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Why is studying religious language and religious symbolism important? what is to be gained from such study?

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Smith:
-clear cut sense of "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong"
-acc to smith: "good" and "evil", "right" and "wrong"within a matrix of a modern christianity, the base ingrediants is the individual, the church, then is simply a collection of individuals (it creates community).

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What "modernist epistemology" is? How does it shape understanding of what religious faith is? How does it shape understandings of learning and applying religious truth? How does it shape the way in which people practice of "live out" their religious faith? how does it encourage certain kinds of public and political behavior?

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Burke: "definition of man" and "terministic screens"

terministic screens: influence what we notice an argument, influence what we ignore in an argument.

the screens we use can influence what we see and understand in religion.

Patch Adams: "how many fingers do you see"

Garver: the reasons that people don't listen to religious arguments is because of screens

Action vs Motion

Modernistic epistemology is shaped by the ideas of frames. it is a frame in and of itself.

Hitchens viewed religion from a frame of negativity, only saw the dangers of religion. carter saw the benefits of religion from another frame.

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How do the ideas of Burke change how we understand the nature, function, and importance of religious discourse?

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Postman:
-religion is presented as a form of "entertainment" rather than a dignified religious service.
-"everything that makes religion a historic, profound and sacred human activity is stripped away; there is no ritual, no dogma (set or principles laid down by an authority that are seen as true), no tradition, no theology, and above all no sense of spiritual transcendence."

problem= the medium itself

The ability to move about, get up, not complete focus on the service (you're not in a church)

"the television screen itself has a strong bias toward a psychology of secularism (contradictory to sacred, there is no sacredness with a tv screen)

TV is meant to entertain, constant advertisements and distractions for us.

trivialized ideals and embracing affluence= high ratings

attempts to make religion entertaining are deprecating to its validity and quality.

Trivialized ideals and embracing affluence= high ratings

attempts to make religion entertaining are deprecating to its validity and quality.

Focus o

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To what degree are electronic media forms (particularly television and personal mobile media [computers and smart phones] damaging to religious faith?

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(Burke- The Definition of Man)
All definitions stressing man as moral agent would tie in with this claus (quoted from a passage from “the rhetoric of religion”)
“Action involves character, which involves choice—and the form of choice attains its perfection in the distinction between Yes and No (shall and shall-not, will and will-not).

Though the concept of sheer motion is non-ethical, action implies the ethical, the human personality. Hence the obvious close connection between the ethical and negativity, as indicated in the Decalouge.”

Action=ethical (the human personality)
Sheer Motion=non-ethical (sheer secular ambitions that justify themselves)

Action=character→choice→yes or no/shall or shall-not/will or will-not
Hence the connection between ethical→negativity

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Action vs. Motion