The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

Responses

And lo, here we are again. Responses to comments and the like. Regina's fault, Marechal's fault. Yes.

Giantly long post ahead, Cap'n!

To quote myself from July 5th:

Religion, on anything more than a purely personal level, is our enemy. I say this as an athiest, of course, and with a nod to the discussion on the nature of monotheisms and organized religion in the Tonto thread. To continue with that, religion is our enemy because faith and reason, faith and science can after a certain point no longer co-exist. As it is reason and science that are the keys to any sort of progress socially, materially, or otherwise, blind religious faith must be cast aside and replaced with a capacity to be skeptical and question our surroundings until we are left with an answer that is satisfactory. A life-encompassing scientific method, if you will.
Now, followers of moral monotheism will and have said to me that the end result of athiesm is an abandonment of morality, and that athiests will lose all thought of "good behavior" using, say, Communist China or Russia as an example. To that, I say that morality can be replaced with ethics - and there is a subtle distinction, in that morality is what our religion tells us is right, while ethics is what we tell ourselves is right. Athiests can be ethical beings, and as I am one such person, I ought to know.

To quote Marechal:
I would also contest your generalization that progress only comes from science and reason.

I said what I said on the subject primarily because it was the scientific revolution that began in the late Middle Ages that has led us to the world we live in today. That revolution has led us to what I think every one of us would deem a "better" world, especially in first world nations. We have, for the most part, conquered disease. Everyone but the very poor lives a materially better life than his ancestor of even 150 years ago (perhaps even 100 years ago or even 50 years ago). On the flip side of that, it is my observation that, in Europe and the Middle East, said progress was largely inhibited by both Christianity and Islam, never mind that most of the early scientists were religious men - obviously Islam has fallen far from being the height of learning and culture, and as for Christianity, let us note the Inquisition, of both types but especially the Spanish one. In today's world, it is largely "fundamentalist" Islam/Christianity that is opposed to whatever the latest new research topic is.

On a tangent, we note that religion HAS been successfully coopted in a lot of Asian countries, and I'm specifically thinking here of the Meiji reshaping of Shinto as a Japanese national religion. For whatever reason, religion never really stood in the way of science there. Differences in theology, perhaps, or a simple realization that if they didn't catch up to the West technologically, they were screwed. Whatever.

People gathered around a pipe organ on Sunday mornings singing hymns is not an "evil" thing.

It's not the social gathering part that freaks me out. It's the bit where a few thousand years ago somebody said "this is how the world works" and for the most part you aren't supposed to question any of that, or, and this is important, what the priests say. Yes, I know Papal infalliability went out the window some time ago, but it seems to me that a lot of that hasn't gone away just yet.

Regina's turn.

The first thought that pops into my head upon reading this is that, actually, Christianity makes the most sense of anything I've ever heard. Note: I did not say most rational, but makes most sense, on more levels than the logical one. It's as Pascal said: "The heart has its own reasons, about which reason knows nothing whatsoever." Y'know how it is, when you read a book, and it not only makes logical sense, but emotional sense? (For me, that would be Lord of the Flies. First book I ever read that did that and it blew me away.) See, Christianity is like that for me. Only multiplied.

Two things. Firstly, the thing to understand about where I'm coming from is that I am by and large not an emotional person. I can be, in various ways, but I also attempt and I think do maintain a certain rational detachment from things. That ought to be fairly apparent in my little championing of science and reason here, and my musings on superstition and the like elsewhere on this blog. So I can see where you're coming from, but I don't really operate that way myself. OTOH, on a tangent, I can be moved by books/movies/whatever, but only in an emotional release sort of way. To make sense of something, I then rely on logic.

Secondly, you'll remember as how I once said that I think Christ had some good things to say. And most religions I can think of off top of my head have some good things to say, or they obviously wouldn't catch on with anybody. The only exception I can think of is Aztec religion, which is a scary, scary thing from what I know of it. But anyway. My whole point is that I absolutely cannot stand the moral codes many religions enforce, because not only where most of them written a Long Time Ago, you can't change them at all for the times, 'cause, uh, they're the mandated Word of God. That's also aside from whatever the priestly hierarchy tacks on to that to put themselves in charge.

Faith vs. science: If faith is belief in that which is not proven, and science is the study of that which is provable, then wouldn't faith *have* to continue existing until we knew everything that was provable? And even then, wouldn't faith still have to exist, seeing as how we can't know everything?

That's the paradox, really. I'm sitting here preaching about eliminating faith in religion, and advocating faith in the thing that's supposed to replace faith, only it hasn't yet. Where I think science is superior, though, is that when a theory or something is proven wrong, it can be changed or abandoned relatively painlessly. This same process usually leads to centuries of warfare for a religion. See also: Protestant Reformation, The. The other thing I think science has going for it is that scientific knowledge is expanding all the time. We might know everything yet, but it's not for lack of trying.

And to re-iterate: There's a difference between religious faith and blind religious faith - there are some religious scholars who are amazingly smart, frex. One of the things that I have found so great about Christianity is that you can question it and it still makes sense. The more I read the Bible, the more questions I come up with, and the more answers I eventually get. It's an amazing process.

*ponders this for a time* Yes, there are differences. And I hope it should be obvious that I view the real enemy as blind religious faith, and indeed blind faith in anything. OTOH, it also seems to me that religions are much more predisposed to blind faith than science is. The scientific method is a wonderful instrument in that regard. And certainly Christianity (and other religions) can and have been questioned, and that's being done moreso now than ever before. OTOH, there are certain limits. It's pretty hard, in my mind to question something like the Ten Commandments. It has also been sort of hard historically to question whoever the head of the church was. *shrug*

That makes a bit of sense, I hope.

So yeah, I'm interested in what you think about that. As I am interested in what you just said. :)

And this post ought to make it clear that I'm interested in what you (and everyone else) has to say. Especially, for the obvious reasons, here. I always read the comments. I might not always reply, but I always read and appreciate the comments.

Posted by Dwip at July 19, 2003 2:36 PM