Hey, I am a Theology student and have been studying Kant’s Religion Within The Boundaries Of Mere Reason and have found much of his theory compelling. I know Soren Kierkegaard is very popular and I am a big fan too but there is similarities in terms of the subjectivity of faith and yeah their dismissal of organised religion. And yeah I did find it quite interesting how he tries to make Christianity palatable and give Jesus Christ a more symoblic value and integrate it into a Religion of Reason. He sees religion as following on from morality and not the other way round. Also I find it quite interesting how he states that God and immortality are postulates of practical reason, necessary for moral faith rather than anything that can be proven. Basically I think he believes that reason dictates that we should aspire to the Highest Good as the proper object of moral reason and he believes the highest good is essentially a proper proportioning of happiness to accord with the virtue of each person in society. People talk about duty with Kant but I think he believes the moral law is based on willing the highest good which is happiness for moral agents ie humanity. Any thoughts? Am I getting this right? He talks about the concept of an ethical commonwealth on earth, a kinda ideal society but given the practical postulates I guess you can make it transcendental.
I’ll take this up a bit… since I’ve disappeared from here for months.
I am not all that familiar with Kant’s views on religion, however; I have begun to dable in Kantian moral philosophy. I Kant’s system as largely coherent and logically sound, excpet for its starting point. It seems one has to acknowledge that reason can be used to determine if a moral imperative is true or false; one must accept morals to be objectively true or objectively false in order to be a Kantian. I’m not convinced there is any dicatate of practical (or pure) reason that mandates a rational being to acknowledge that moral statements can be show true or false through reason. Thus, the choice to take the first step in Kant’s moral philosophy is to make a choice… a leap of faith (I think the converse of Kant’s view, moral relativism is also a leap of faith too. After all, if it’s all relative, how can you prove it’s relative?). So… in some ways I would agree that Kantian moral philosophy is a religion of reason.