steeg@ai.toronto.edu ("Evan W. Steeg") (08/08/90)
In article <1990Aug6.081100.20510@Neon.Stanford.EDU> arm@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Alexander d Macalalad) writes: > >My point is that it is rather unfair to characterize religion as being >anti-knowledge. I know that probably a lot of theists have tried to >bring up supernatural "miracles" to prove the existence of God, but >.... >In fact, let me go the other way and say that religion represents human >striving for knowledge. I think one must make the distinction between "religion" and "the quest for religion" or some such. Religion, which I take to mean organized religion, imposes dogmatic belief systems, and is therefore, like Marxism or any other dogma, destructive of knowledge and intellect. People are encouraged, at best, or *coerced* or brainwashed, quite often, to carve out large areas of intellectual territory and declare those areas off limits for skeptical, rational inquiry and debate. Axioms are learned, indelibly etched into the mind of the true believer, and all subsequent observations are interpreted and filtered through the new belief systems. Information, facts, observations that seem to contradict the dogma are discarded, and sources of such facts, including people, are ignored, burned, excommunicated, jailed, or killed. One does not have to look at large world-historical examples in order to see mind-killing dogma at work -- engaging a fundamentalist Christian in a debate about evolution will suffice to display the interesting psychological mechanisms at work as a believer wrestles and squirms away from evidence and logic and tries to suppress, through yelling and cursing if necessary, the emerging truths. The yearning for religious knowledge, on the other hand, can be quite an impetus for intellectual inquiry. Many, if not most, of the great scientists and philosophers throughout history would have described their research and inquiry as "trying to understand God's creation", "trying to read God's mind", etc. Even within religious and other dogmatic belief systems, there are those who don't accept entirely the prevailing axioms and prejudeices. Even within Christianity there have been those like Augustine and Aquinas who sought truths beyond what was believed at the time. Today the Jesuits remain active open-minded scholars, learning quantum mechanics and studying existentialist thought in addition to the Bible. Likewise, even within Marxism there have been thinkers like Lukacs and Marcuse who refused to take Marx, Engels, and Lenin at their every word. The problem that religionists (dogmatic or organized theists) face in attempting to gain credibility with thinking people today is that at *every* major scientific discovery ever made, the large body of religionists stood around beforehand saying "that can't be explained; it is just the work of God". When the scientists discovered the reason, the mechanism, behind the phenomena, the religionists either stood around looking foolish, or, more often, sought to punish or destroy the scientist. After seeing this example repeated a few thousand times, why are we to suddenly believe the theists who say "Well, OK, sure, there are scientific explanations for everything explained so far, but *now*, now that you're looking at the first few seconds after the Big Bang (or whatever), there can be no explanation except that *God did it*...."?! Similarly, how is a thinking person to give any credence to the people who accept modern physics as it relates to designing the air conditioners they use or the jet fighers that they want to kill Communists or Moslems with, but who declare that the laws of physics don't count when it comes to radioactive-dating of fossils that show that the Earth is billions of years old?! We each have our biases, none of us is purely objective. Yet we differ greatly in the degree to which we either accept current prejudices and swallow dogma whole, or to which we continue to question beliefs, including (especially?) our own. Certain belief systems, when combined with other cultural attitudes, make for dangerous levels of narrow-mindedness, ignorance, and suppression of rational thought. Protestantism (despite its essentially revolutionary roots!), when combined with the deep-seated American anti-intellectualism (masked often as "populism" or "anti-elitism") is this way. After travelling to several countries and having met with people from all over the world, I'm sad to say I think my USA has the lowest rate of knowledge per unit of wealth of any country in the world, in history. Never mind all the tests done every year which show that today's high schoolers can't find France, Canada, or their own home state on a map, can't name the Vice President, and think Vietnam is somewhere in South America. One of the scariest things I ever saw was a televised "sermon" by Jerry Falwell, performed in a huge stadium somewhere in the southern US, in which Rev. Falwell railed against "the secular humanist evolutionists". Among the pieces of brilliant scientific reasoning was the following: "I just want the Evolutionists to answer me one thing. If Evolution is true and the Bible is wrong, then why don't we see any half-horse- half-pigs running around?!" This statement, displaying an ignorance of biology, science, and common sense so deep it's not funny, brought the cheering, "Amen"-ing crowd to their feet and concluded the sermon. I have heard that there are fundamentalist, "Creationist" Christians who have university-level (from *real* universities, even,) science knowledge. Until I meet a handful of them, I will continue to feel that those who quote Newton and Darwin in defense of "Creationism" are engaging in either pitiful self-delusion or despicable intellectual dishonesty. It *is possible* to be a rational and intellectually honest person and to believe in, and search for, some concept of God. It is a shame how 99% of the "religious" people we see, the ignorant self-deluding sheep and their nastier coercive or demagogic leaders, drive so many intellectuals away from any kind of interest in, or tolerance of, inquiry into metaphysical or spiritual matters. It is fascinating, and frightening, how the words and ideas of geniuses and revolutionaries -- people who seek to overturn existing prejudices and to make people think -- are quickly reduced to mindless slogans and mean prejudice within a generation or so. That's how it was with the belief systems started by Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Jefferson and Paine, and Marx. One might also add such as Freud and various (misinterpreted) tenets of Hinduism and Buddhism, as a vague and silly cloud of psychobabble and video-age mysticism has rolled in over the continent from (where else?) California. The sad fact is, most people are either too stupid, too lazy, or too busy to think for themselves, and are all too willing to get their religious and political philosophies verbatim from a book (or, these days, from the TV). -- Evan Evan W. Steeg (416) 978-7321 steeg@ai.toronto.edu (CSnet,UUCP,Bitnet) Dept of Computer Science steeg@ai.utoronto (other Bitnet) University of Toronto, steeg@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN X.400) Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4 {seismo,watmath}!ai.toronto.edu!steeg "Four legs good, two legs bad! Four legs good, two legs bad! ...." -- the bleating throng of sheep, in Orwell's _Animal Farm_ [This looks like an attempt to redirect a discussion from talk.religion.misc to this group. The subject seems acceptable, though I'd rather not see responses get into creationism. --clh]