« Voegelin then concludes his argument with a mischievous sleight of hand, when he further attributes to this range of individuals the beliefs of just one, Comte, presumably on the basis that it is easier to fit Comte’s positivist views into Voegelin’s meretricious argument that all gnostics were driven by the need for immortality, by a need for personal salvation.
This argument must fail because Voegelin is ascribing religious sensibilities to people who are, in some cases at least, not religious. The idea of personal salvation cannot explain the actions of a scientist.»
I do not think that a scientist is an irrational animal, i.e., a person without “religiosity”. I would ask the guy who wrote the aforementioned stuff to be more concise and distinguish between “religion” A or B, and “human religiosity”.
Furthermore, it seems that the blogger does not know much about classical culture and politics ― namely those of Ancient Greece ― as Eric Voegelin knew so well. The same concept of “immortality” Voegelin argues belonging to modern gnostics existed before Christianity with the Roman concept of “tradition”, which was the influence and the remains of Greek culture.
“Immortality”, for the Greeks, was exactly the concept of outstanding and exceptional human acts ― being either in literature, arts, politics or in philosophy (which was considered as “science”, for the Greeks) fields. Eric Voegelin did not create any new concept; rather he just looked back in History before Christianity to verify how a similar concept of “immortality” could be transposed through History and assimilated in a so called “post-Christian” Era.
