On 9/1/2019 4:28 PM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
On Sunday, September 1, 2019 at 6:38:31 AM UTC-5, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 Aug 2019, at 20:41, Lawrence Crowell
<[email protected] <javascript:>> wrote:
On Wednesday, August 28, 2019 at 9:46:21 PM UTC-5, Samiya wrote:
فَاذْكُرُونِي أَذْكُرْكُمْ وَاشْكُرُوا لِي وَلَا تَكْفُرُونِ
So remember Me, I will remember you and be grateful to Me and
(do) not (be) ungrateful to Me.
[Al-Quran 2:152 <https://www.islamawakened.com/quran/2/152/>]
The Quran does not discourage the HOW questions, rather it
encourages humans to ponder upon the creation, but it
emphasises the WHY questions. God does not need our help in
creating, sustaining, destroying or recreating everything.
What He wants from us is realisation and acknowledgement for
all He has done, and is continuously doing, and to realise
that there is great purpose in all of this.
For this reason religion has the effect of dulling minds. Science
is about asking how, it is not really about why questions that
are more in the philosophical domain.
There is no reason to not exige as much rigour in philosophy than
in any other domain or inquiry. Theology has been rigorous for one
millenium, but 1500 years of dogma made us forget this.
Paul in one of his epistles admonishes against study of the world
because one is worshiping the "creature" and not the creator. As
such this sort of religious ideology induces people to focus on
"the Truth," or really some illusion of such, and they lose the
ability to ascertain whether some proposition has some
probability or reason for being true or false. When religion
takes over you get a dark age.
When fake religion, or dogmatic religion, takes over. That leads
to absence of (genuine) religion.
The term genuine religion makes about as much sense as a “dry
hurricane.” I have to give my low down on religion now.
I think it stems from the evolution of the brain and in particular
with the development of language. At some point in hominid evolution
language developed to a level of sophistication that our ancestors
started to tell stories. Fouts et al showed with sign language that
Washoe and other chimpanzees communicated elemental language, and
later it was found the chimps in the wild appear to sign to each
other. However they do not appear to tell stories. With our hominid
ancestors these stories were important because they communicated
information about the environment in narratives the projected human
beings onto nature. This makes the stories interesting and relative,
so this means aspects of the natural world were anthropomorphized.
These are spirits, totems and demiurges and so forth. To cut to the
chase, with the developments of large scale societies, city states,
nations and empires religion matured from simple forest gods called
upon my shamans to organized social systems with big gods or later
with the “BIG GOD.”
Right. Originally there was no boundary between the supernatural and the
natural. Weather was driven by storm spirits. Disease was possession by
demons. Animals moved in accordance with totems. But with the
development of agriculture and city states man seemed to have conquered
most of the nature spirits. The city state had its culture and morals
and they were commanded by the leader; but to give them more force he
claimed they were the commandments of a great spirit leader in the sky
who handed down these commandments on stone tablets. And our people are
right and moral and other people, who don't agree are wrong and evil,
and we should conquer them and take their land. Got mit uns.
Brent
So I do think there is an evolutionary basis for mythic narratives and
this includes religion. However, religion starting in the ancient
world became totalitarian social control structures. Both Christianity
and Islam are complete totalitarian systems, and it works by
instilling the commands of an infinite authority into the minds of
people. Eric Blair wrote a fascinating treatise on the social
psychology of totalitarian power, where he noted how this is the most
effective way of controlling people. Eric Blair wrote this in
fictional form as /1984/ under the pen name George Orwell. His catch
phrases about THOUGHT CRIME and the rest are references to the sort of
internal control over minds based on terror, and in religion this is
called sin.
Religion though has ultimately this “emperor's new clothes” problem in
that our examinations of the world have revealed how religious ideas
about the world are wrong. The cosmology of the Tanach, or old
Testament, is based on Sumerian cosmology of a flat earth covered by
an iron dome all submerged in water. Ever wonder why the Israelis
called their anti-missile system Iron Dome? So much else is just wrong
as well. The intellectual power of religion has weakened since the
15^th or 16^th century. Religions, thought of as memes or sort of
brain viruses are fighting back hard these days. I would compare the
state of religion as similar to WWII Germany during the Ardennes
offensive in late 1944. At least intellectually this is the case, and
over half of young people raised religiously are leaving. Christianity
and Islam are worn out mythic narratives, which will in time if we
survive pass on as did the Orphic gods of the ancient Greeks..
What I see emerging is a new paradigm for mythic systems, and we see
it in superheroes Yugio and Magic cards etc. It is a suspension of
rational thought to imagine super-powered people, who are almost like
gods, but it does not command your complete attention and it is
largely a systems of games and entertainment. This fulfills the
psychological need for mythic narratives, but without the totalitarian
ideology.
LC
The expansion of the influence of Christian fundamentalism is one
reason the US has this orange baboon, or Godzilla, as President.
People are becoming stupid, and this unfortunately appears to be
a trend in the rest of the world as well.
It is just that we have not yet transformed the Renaissance. Not
all science have come back to reason. We are still leaving
theology in the hand of people advocating (if not imposing) dogma.
The entire God/Non-God debate hides the original questioning of
the greek, where the question was about the existence of the
universe, not of God, which is a nickname for the truth that we
search, with the (enlighten) understanding that nobody can claim
to have found it.
It is the separation of theology from science which has made some
people thinking that science = truth, and religion = fiction, when
(of course) science is doubt, especially about the ontology
commitment, be them personal and impersonal.
Please, I wish this religious stuff were taken somewhere else.
Religion has no more sense than if I wish upon a star my fairy
godmother will come, transubstantiate mice and a pumpkin into a
horse drawn coach and take me to eternal bliss --- or happy ever
after. It is all just magical thinking and ultimately
preposterous nonsense.
It can be, but biology has become a similar non sense in the
materialist dogmatic USRR. It is not the domain which is a
problem, but the use of dogma, and the discouragement of the
doubt, and that is insane, but is not “religion”, it is the fake
religion that we deserve as long as we don’t let the domain to
come back to reason and experiences.
Bruno
LC
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