Ann Taves's Religious Experience Reconsidered is a sign of a global apocalypse that will kill us all

Abstract

According to Ann Taves, many humanist scholars of religion are afraid of science. In particular, they object to scientific reductionism because reductive explanations violate taboos that prohibit reducing religion to something else. This essay will analyze how Taves and other proponents of cognitive approaches to religious studies fashion a kind of secular praxis in which breaking taboos is a crucial attribute of scholarly integrity and intellectual heroism. I will argue that this equation between reason and profanation reproduces the discursive logic that legitimates the global expansion of a constellation of overlapping secular scientific, economic, political, and religious institutions.

Keywords:

• Reductionism
• Taboos
• Profanation
• Secularism
• Enlightenment
• Fear

Notes

The author would like to thank Jay Geller, Gabriel Levy, Roger Friedland, Mark Elmore, Michael Stausberg, Steven Engler, Ted Trost, and John Lardas Modern for their help and comments on earlier drafts of this essay.