Bibliographic record
Abstract
The kinds of unbelief with which we are most familiar today are respectful indifference and such a nostalgia for lost faith as goes with an inability to distinguish between theological truth and myth. Are not these kinds of unbelief much more insulting to belief than is an unbelief like Machiavelli's which takes seriously the claim to truth of revealed religion by regarding the question of its truth as all-important and therefore is not, at any rate, a lukewarm unbelief? – Leo Strauss If we secular humanists have our way, the liberal democracies will eventually mutate into societies whose most sacred texts were written by John Stuart Mill. – Richard Rorty If the purpose of the civil-religion project is to domesticate religion in the light of political requirements, then the liberal tradition as a whole is in some sense closely allied with that project. If the project of domesticating religion per se is what defined civil religion, then one would even be justified in saying that the liberal tradition is coterminous with the civil-religion project. However, in order for the domestication of religion to count as specifically a civil-religion project, it must be animated by the idea of using religion itself to domesticate religion. Somewhat surprisingly, as we have seen in earlier chapters of Part II, there are some liberal political philosophers who cross into civil-religion theorizing in this sense. Reading John Stuart Mill's proposal for a Religion of Humanity in his essay “Utility of Religion,” one is at first tempted to add him to this list of “civil-religion liberals.” On closer examination, though, it becomes clear that his Religion of Humanity is not a civil religion as we have just defined it. Mill wants to give believers something that they can embrace in place of the “old religions” that he is urging them to relinquish, and calling this something a religion should, he thinks, ease the transition to this new more radically humanist dispensation. Whatever existential needs were satisfied by the old religions – for consolation in the face of loss and death, for a sense of absolute foundation for human purposes, for giving support to our intuitions that there is grandeur and meaning to human doings rather than unrelieved insignificance – can therefore continue to be met when those old religions fall into eclipse. Ultimately, though, what he means by a Religion of Humanity is an ungrounded faith in the meaning of human purposes – that is, a faith ungrounded in anything beyond itself – and a “religion” that could achieve this, rather than being in meaningful continuity with the history of religions throughout human experience, would break this continuity and show that human beings had safely arrived at a stage of their development where they could deal with their world without religion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".