ETERAZ

Sadegh, you are absolutely

Sadegh, you are absolutely right. Short-sightedness can occur in any field, not just religion. It is a bit suspecious that such things are attacked these days only if they relate to religion. Could it be that it benefits some? Religion is intermixed with a lot of advancement in humanity. The fact is up until a couple of hundred years ago there was nothing else. There was no real science, and if there was any, it was all mixed with philosophy and religion, etc. Even today, these terms are not defined universally, so how could anyone say anything about them without first defining them?

During the process of evolving, mankind makes some mistakes. One shouldn't condemn all progress just because sometimes there are mistakes made.

Thanks Mehdi. True, but you

Thanks Mehdi. True, but you could also be a god-denying communist and fit the same profile; Stalin, Mao, Kim Jong-il, ex-Trotskyite neocons etc...It's a matter of unquestioned fidelity to a particular world-view or ideology, which has no room for query or question...'Religion' in the sense outlined by Jahanbegloo and the interviewer is merely one manifestation of a broader phenonmenon in my view. And in any case 'religion' is a straw man as cast in the interview. One can't pigeon-hole religious thinkers in such a manner...contributions to human thought, art and genius haven't been solely the province of secularists. In fact the direct opposite of this seems to be true. Pascal, Augustine, Aquinas and Plato are as important as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, and in the Iranian case the importance of Soroush on the one hand and Kasravi on the other is undeniable; both have made essential contributions to the development of the human spirit. 

Definitions

This discussion gets stuck in the fact that many of these definitions are not universally accepted. What is religion? What is intellectual? These are open to interpretations. Some consider Buddhism a religion and some don't. But it is quite clear to see that when someone has already made up his mind about something, he will not be an explorer in that field. When someone considers that he knows everything there is to know about a subject, he looses his ability to learn anything about that subject.

He of course has a point