On Dec 3, 2007, at 6:29 PM, William T Goodall wrote: > > On 4 Dec 2007, at 01:12, Warren Ockrassa wrote: > >> On Dec 3, 2007, at 5:03 PM, Nick Arnett wrote: >> >>> In hopes of going somewhere more interesting with this topic, let me >>> offer >>> this challenge -- can you (or anybody else who can stomach the >>> subject) come >>> up with external causalities when religion and evil co-occur? If >>> we're >>> going to argue about whether or not faith is anti-scientific, how >>> about if >>> we do so in a reasonably logical manner? It only seems fitting. >> >> If I understand the question properly, examples of the politicization >> of religion might fit the bill. There are are times when religious >> fervor has been manipulated as a tool by those in power to control >> various factions. >> > > Political ideologies are often matters of faith too though. That's why > politicians ignore scientific studies that contradict their beliefs.
I can't disagree with that. IIRC the "grand experiment" of American democracy was originally regarded as an insanely optimistic leap of faith in many other parts of the world. However the deliberate co- opting of faith by those in power is not new; it's how power structures were once built, as with pharaohs and Sun Kings and so on. The trick seems to be to attempt a disconnect between faith (of any kind) and behavior in the "real" world. And it seems to go in cycles. There didn't seem to be much antiscientific outcry, for instance, in the late 1950s when Sputnik I was launched and the US realized it needed to push science a LOT more heavily if it wanted to keep up with the next generation of USSR-based citizens. (On Plan59 recently I saw a posting of a Christmas card from the 1960s that read "Season's Greetings"; no one at the time was protesting that this represented a "war on Christmas".) > As I have pointed out before political cults like Nazism and Marxism > are quasi-religious in nature. Naziism was overtly religious. The movement was deeply enmeshed with Norse mythology. Marxism borrowed from the strong authoritarian model of fundamentalist religion to enforce obedience and conformity, as you suggest here. It's a little like attending AA meetings and trading your addiction to booze for an addiction to cigarettes and coffee and, of course, the 12 steps. > Religion doesn't have to be about the > supernatural - one of the world's major religions (Confucianism) is > actually based on a handbook for civil servants. There's an interesting slice of history I didn't know about; but Confucianism's roots haven't kept it from being about the supernatural anyway. The human capacity for short-circuiting logic is really rather breathtaking in its scope and endurance. That said, religion itself doesn't seem to my mind to be a source of evil so much as a symptom of ignorance (to the extent that blind faith and unthinking adherence are manifest, as opposed to an attempt at balance or recognition of the need for rational grounding), which isn't the same thing -- however, ignorance can definitely produce actions of stunning evil. This shouldn't be read as an attempt at appeasement. I'm quite comfortable with my atheism and would love to see it spread. I'm just trying to see if there's a root cause that goes deeper than the manifestations we're seeing in religion, since it makes more sense -- I think -- to find the source and attack that rather than the institutions it creates. -- Warren Ockrassa Blog | http://indigestible.nightwares.com/ Books | http://books.nightwares.com/ Web | http://www.nightwares.com/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
