I don’t find any actual contradictions… then again, both the English and French wikipedia pages provide little to no information on their creed, doctrine, and practice, only on their historical circumstances. Let’s see what some journals had to say
“France stands apart in the worlds history as the single state which by the decree of her legislative assembly, pronounced there was no God.” Blackwoods Magazine Nov. 1870
“On November 26 1793, the convention, of which 17 Bishops and some Clergy were members, decreed the abolition of all religion.” The Age of Revolution, W.T.Hutton, Page 156
“In 1793, the decree passed the French Assembly suppressing the Bible. Just three years after, a resolution was introduced into the Assembly going to supersede the decree, and giving toleration to the scriptures. That resolution lay on the table for six months, when it was taken up and passed without a dissenting vote …. On 17th June 1797.” George Stoffs, Midnight Cry, Vol 4, Nos.5-6, 47
So, it seems like the French had done something, that, at the time, was truly horrifying to everyone else, ans sent ripples throughout the world. They broke a taboo, they thought the inthinkable and did the impossible. Most of the Google returns for “Culte De La Raison” turn out to be religious pages complaining about it in a horrified tone, when they aren’t expressing it in apocalyptic terms (The End Is Nigh!) . Of course, we’d have to wait for over a century before the Bolshevic revolution made “outlawing religion” commonplace.
In a word, in Raising The Sanity Waterline terms, they seem to have wanted to do away with the dead canary but they did little about the gas, confusing the symptoms for the disease. Notic though that this civil cult wasn’t merely an artificial creation: Patritotic Fervor was really at an all-time high in France back then, the martyrs of the revolution were adored by the crowds, and a religious sense of nationalism, of a secular sacrality, was everywhere.
For those among you who have watched Legend Of The Galactic Heroes, remember the Republic? Well it’s pretty much the same deal.
Raising the sanity waterline is not about imposing decrees to control what people think. It’s about encouraging people to understand that they are in control of their own rationality and they should work towards improving it.
… Yeah, I guess imposing “God doesn’t exist” by decree, no matter how strongly supported by the population, doesn’t make much sense.
And yes, the guys were very clumsy about it, but that’s pioneering for you. But I’m really really curious as to what those people’s rites consisted of.
I have come to understand that religion is not about belief or dogma at all: those are chosen, picked, and altered, emphasized or forgotten, by the correligionaries, at their own convenience as a society. Religion is about links, about ties, about a community: that’s what the word actually means, religation. And those religations, those group-creeds, were imposed by the group on its members. A common reference, a sign of identity, a law they all obey. There was never a law of God, only of men.
If you go at it from that perspective, and see the Cult Of Reason as a purely societal phenomenon with only the trappings of a religion (including the practice of imposing by decree what members of the group should think), then the idea becomes more understandable. The French had slain the King: all is a lie, everything is permitted, so why not kill God too? (it’d take them until the Fifties to actually achieve that task, in their collective minds, but now most Frenchmen are atheists, and aggressively secular to the point of intolerance, and they didn’t try to replace it with any new “sacred” thing).
I don’t find any actual contradictions… then again, both the English and French wikipedia pages provide little to no information on their creed, doctrine, and practice, only on their historical circumstances. Let’s see what some journals had to say
So, it seems like the French had done something, that, at the time, was truly horrifying to everyone else, ans sent ripples throughout the world. They broke a taboo, they thought the inthinkable and did the impossible. Most of the Google returns for “Culte De La Raison” turn out to be religious pages complaining about it in a horrified tone, when they aren’t expressing it in apocalyptic terms (The End Is Nigh!) . Of course, we’d have to wait for over a century before the Bolshevic revolution made “outlawing religion” commonplace.
In a word, in Raising The Sanity Waterline terms, they seem to have wanted to do away with the dead canary but they did little about the gas, confusing the symptoms for the disease. Notic though that this civil cult wasn’t merely an artificial creation: Patritotic Fervor was really at an all-time high in France back then, the martyrs of the revolution were adored by the crowds, and a religious sense of nationalism, of a secular sacrality, was everywhere.
For those among you who have watched Legend Of The Galactic Heroes, remember the Republic? Well it’s pretty much the same deal.
Raising the sanity waterline is not about imposing decrees to control what people think. It’s about encouraging people to understand that they are in control of their own rationality and they should work towards improving it.
… Yeah, I guess imposing “God doesn’t exist” by decree, no matter how strongly supported by the population, doesn’t make much sense.
And yes, the guys were very clumsy about it, but that’s pioneering for you. But I’m really really curious as to what those people’s rites consisted of.
I have come to understand that religion is not about belief or dogma at all: those are chosen, picked, and altered, emphasized or forgotten, by the correligionaries, at their own convenience as a society. Religion is about links, about ties, about a community: that’s what the word actually means, religation. And those religations, those group-creeds, were imposed by the group on its members. A common reference, a sign of identity, a law they all obey. There was never a law of God, only of men.
If you go at it from that perspective, and see the Cult Of Reason as a purely societal phenomenon with only the trappings of a religion (including the practice of imposing by decree what members of the group should think), then the idea becomes more understandable. The French had slain the King: all is a lie, everything is permitted, so why not kill God too? (it’d take them until the Fifties to actually achieve that task, in their collective minds, but now most Frenchmen are atheists, and aggressively secular to the point of intolerance, and they didn’t try to replace it with any new “sacred” thing).