Ecclesiastes and the Rhetoric of Radical Agnosticism

Abstract

Employing the critical tools of religious communication scholarship, this essay explores Belief in a Just World Theory as a potent discursive source for unquestioned and oppressive norms of thought and speech. For many social scientists, Belief in a Just World Theory is an elegant, parsimonious, and compelling tool for exploring the sources of our most intractable social challenges. And yet, it seems our world maintains no homeostatic orientation toward justice. To reconcile that paradox, we begin this paper by re-positioning Belief in a Just World Theory as an unfalsifiable pseudo-science drawing rhetorical strength from a reservoir of religious discourse. We then analyze the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament as a theoretically rich and politically urgent source of reconciliation, before concluding with a discussion of the wider implications that can be culled from our analysis for building and advancing the stock of knowledge in communication and religion.