On Dec 4, 2007, at 4:46 PM, Alberto Vieira Ferreira Monteiro wrote: > Facts: > > (1) Most religions tell people to obey the higher authorities > and don't question them.
Yes. > (2) Most people are stupid, and forced to think for themselves > will opt for the most stupid and evil choices No. It's a mischaracterization -- and unfair -- to assert that most people are stupid. Most people are not stupid. They make the best operational decisions they can given the information available to them. If most people were stupid, our species would have been extinct long ago. What many people might be is unused to the processes involved in rigorous logical thinking, which leaves them with little more than "gut" or instinct responses. In the wild, this is sensible. A reaction of fear toward a threat is a positive survival trait. In a society, not so much, because the reaction might be a fear to a *perceived* threat rather than an actual one. It takes training to respond with reason, and that is a training many people lack. To this unfamiliarity with reason we can add inadequate or insufficient information, which might be the result of willful stupidity or willful ignorance (in some cases I believe that's a valid charge to level); but I think many of us here can recall a time when we made poor choices -- or what are retrospectively poor choices -- because we simply did not have the information then that's available to us now. Does that mean we were stupid then, or that we just weren't adequately supplied wit the tools we needed to make more appropriate decisions? And what does that suggest about where any of us might be in ten years' time? > Corollary: > > Religion is not evil, because it prevents most people from being > evil. My suggestion is that religion is neither inherently good nor evil, but is actually an institution of abstractions that are more or less applied to the world by the religion's adherents. To the extent those abstractions comment on what seems to be reality, we can easily test to see if they make sense; if not, they should be discarded. To the extent that the abstractions apply to behavior, morés and social customs, we should probably remember that they're actually social artifacts themselves and therefore almost certain to change over time as things fall into or out of vogue. Where I see a big problem is when we try to take the latter type of declarations and behave as though they are incontrovertible, bedrock Truths. That's the part that can lead to evil behavior. -- 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
