No Peace With Religion

[BuddhistPunk]

No Peace With Religion

I’ve been reading a lot of factual scientific literature, so much so in fact that my taste for the fictional has vanished. I feel I’m wasting my energy and time submersing myself in the fictional when there is so much of the factual out there. The old adage of fact being stranger than fiction has never rung truer. Over the course of the past few years I’ve gone from agnostic, to atheist, to anti-theist. I have no time for anything that does not have any basis in scientific fact or cannot be upheld to scientific scrutiny and testing. As a result of this I’ve become increasingly convinced that we will never have peace so long as we have religion. It is my honest opinion that the majority of conflicts in our troubled history (with very few exceptions) have either been directly caused by religion or fought in the name of religion. Perhaps these conflicts were inevitable with or without religion, but perhaps not. We will never really know.

I have also become aware and angered at societies necessity to have a religious view on everything from politics to the latest advances in science and technology. It’s something I’ve always been conscious of but have never really thought about until now. If the best educated minds on a given topic are extolling their views on said topic I think that worthy of my time and find it worth listening to. After all who am I to argue with the experts? What I can’t and won’t listen to are the religious liars, and lets face it their all liars, spouting the same generic superstitious clap trap which seems to flow all to easily and mechanically from their mouths, and which seems so generic indeed as to suit every discussion with little or no tweaking. What can a priest possibly tell me about evolution and genetics, unless of course that priest is also an accomplished and well versed scientist, a paradox if ever there was one?

Why is so much time, energy and respect wasted on these voodoo quacks of all make and models?

Is it not time we shook ourselves off and carried on in the realisation that as a people, we would be far better off without the shackles of religion.

[Lightning Rod]

BP,

I'm inclined to classify science in the same category as religion. Science has it's orthodoxy and it's high priests just the same as religion. And there are just as many crack-pot scientists as there are religious fanatics.

Both religion and science depend on an intermediary clergy to reveal the 'truth' to their constituents. At some point it always comes down to a matter of faith. We 'laymen' have to accept the word of the priests.

Have you ever done a carbon 14 dating of a relic which has been found somewhere in the sediments that 'proves' that man was cooking giant sloth 25,000 years ago in Patagonia? No. You accept this fact from science because you have Faith in whatever voodoo they are using. Have you ever sniffed a stem cell? Do you even know what one looks like. How about a neutrino? Ever seen one of those? I don't think so. But you believe in them because a high priest scientist has assured you that science is infallible. Just like the Pope.

So I have as healthy a skepticism about science as I do about religion. "Science" told me that if I took LSD that my chromosomes would crack and I would try to fly out of windows. Every few days 'science' tells us of new imaginary ailments for which the drug company who sponsored the 'study' has a remedy which is about to emerge from their laboratories. Science contains almost as much voodoo as religion.

I must say that I trust science a little more than I trust religion. But only slightly. I'm slightly more inclined to believe that there is global warming than I am to believe that an itinerant Hebrew who may or may not have lived 2000 years ago, rose from the dead and is thereby somehow responsible for the salvation of my eternal soul.

[Zlatko Waterman]

BP:

This book, which holds a similar thesis to yours, is an interesting argument in the direction you've just outlined:



http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... ce&s=books


--Z

[whimsicaldeb]

oh!

thank you

[BuddhistPunk]

I understand the point your trying to make LR but I cannot agree with it. Science and the very notion of science is based in fact. I’m talking true science here not crack pot mumbo jumbo like ‘alternative’ science often talked about in relation to ‘alternative medicine’. There is no alternative medicine, only medicine, if so called alternative medicine worked it would no longer be alternative it would be medicine. In the same way there is no alternative science, only science, and for something to be called a science it must have its basis in fact. I agree that science has its leaders and preachers much like the faiths but the difference is one side is dealing in fact and the other fiction. If a theory cannot be proven then it remains just that a theory for something to become a scientific fact it must stand up to stringent testing. Religion cannot stand up to the merest questioning. If science were indeed as ludicrous as faith or perhaps I should say if religion were indeed as sound as science why don’t NASA save a fortune and fuel the next mission to Mars on a wing and a prayer.

[BuddhistPunk]

Cheers Zlatko I might check that out ...

[mtmynd]

BP!! Fancy meeting you here. Nice seeing you about...

It was only an hour or two ago that I answered/commented to K&D somewhere around this place regarding pretty much the same thing -

(to quote myself)

It does seem that way, K&D..."we'd be a lot better off without religion," but it ain't gonna happen. Like truck said, "Stalin cured religion in the USSR and it did not seem to help," and it went underground.

It's not really religion that's at fault, but the interpreters of religion that give it a chilly effect. Too damn many people that think they know what the books say, when in reality, they haven't a clue...

If I may assume - you are going thru a period of disbelieving anything that does not show absolute proof of existence. Why not? Only good can come out of those doubts... if you pursue an answer.

[whimsicaldeb]

New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed,
without any other reason but because they are not already common.
John Locke
Essay of Human Understanding

and ...

If you find a good solution and become attached to it, the solution may become your next problem. ~ Dr. Robert Anthony ~

and ...

“The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them." - Albert Einstein


Thus; all these New Opinions about religion(s) ... are not only needed -- but are indicating our natural, healthy next step.

While religions solved many problems in there day (the past); that day has passed (is passing...) and we can tell this is so because they have now become 'the problem' where once they were 'the solution.'

Einstein is correct ... we can not get a ‘new world’ together at our current level of thinking – so our level of thinking is rising to bring us our next ‘new’ solution – and part of that solution is us moving beyond our need of/for 'religion' - as we should.

Then the cycle will repeat again … and that what we’re forming now will eventually need to be replaced.

You're questionings and "new" opinions BuddhistPunk (and K&D) are you responding because you're "in touch" with human understanding. At this point life is clearly showing us that those being/staying "in touch" with their religions are now 'out of touch' with humanity, and humanity’s needs.

And so, they do not (are not able yet) to understand, what you are already understanding, and why you even question. And why would they… after all, it served them so well – in the beginning anyway.

What I’m so long windedly saying is … Don’t be afraid to keep up this line of thinking … it won’t lead you astray.

[mtmynd]

Good reply, Deb! Or to paraphrase another time: "Right on!"

[mnaz]

Yeah, science is great. But science also gave us the bomb. What we need is a collective head check.... a turn more toward a humanistic sort of environmentalism, if I had to guess.... science of real life contribution and conservation, not science of excess and destruction.

As far as religion, it offers a path of inner peace to many. Religion, in the light of love and nourishment is boon. Religion for the sole purpose of serving religion is a curse.

No peace with religion? No peace through science, either. Peace is an internal phenomenon, anyway.

Well, that's my take.

[whimsicaldeb]

fyi... the current issue (November 2005) of Smithsonian is dedicated to "35 Who Made A Difference" - artists, scholars, and scientists, because it's their 35th anniversary ...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsoni ... rent.shtml

and one of those scientists is Edward O. Wilson, known for "sociobiology" and he took a lot of heat for his beliefs in the beginning ...
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsoni ... ilson.html

excerpts

Vindicated for his controversial sociobiology? Yes. Satisfied? Not yet

Three decades ago, Edward O. Wilson underwent a bittersweet transformation: from accomplished-but-not-famous Harvard biologist to famous-but-vilified prophet. The man who had spent much of his career holed up in an office writing monographs and got his thrills by tramping through jungles in search of ants became a painfully public figure. As he walked across campus, he heard bullhorn-amplified calls for his dismissal. Protesters handed out leaflets at his lectures. He even got a bucket of water dumped on his head at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The cause of it all was the 1975 publication of his Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. This weighty (5.5 pounds) tome proclaimed that recent extensions of Darwinian theory would bring a revolution in our understanding of the behavior of animals, notably including people; if we wanted to grasp the human predicament and unravel the emotions that push and pull us through life, we had to think about human genes and the process that assembled them, natural selection.

With the project to sequence the human genome essentially completed and newspapers awash in stories about genetics, it may seem hard to believe that juxtaposing "genes" and "human behavior" once aroused grave suspicions. Many incoming Harvard undergraduates have "never even heard there was a controversy," Wilson told me the other day. But in the 1970s, psychology departments were still under the sway of B. F. Skinner's behaviorism—the idea that people are almost infinitely malleable and that characteristics such as jealousy and status-seeking could be eliminated through enlightened child rearing. And political activists on the left were mindful of the unsavory characters who had emphasized biological heredity in the not-too-distant past, from American eugenicists to Adolf Hitler. Thus was Wilson linked to racism and Nazism, notwithstanding the absence of any corroborating evidence.

Vindication often comes posthumously in the world of ideas, but Wilson has lived to see his. Theories he hailed as cornerstones of sociobiology—Robert Trivers' "reciprocal altruism" and "parental investment," and William D. Hamilton's "kin selection"—have become powerful tools in the thriving young field of evolutionary psychology, the attempt to explain human emotions and thought patterns as genetically inherited adaptations. And for the record: Wilson's promised revolution in the study of nonhuman animals—a subject that consumed most of Sociobiology's 697 pages and roughly none of the publicity—is proceeding apace.

so why am I posting about him? cuz of what he's talking about now ... (continuing excerpt from the same article)

Besides, no sooner had Wilson's left-wing antagonists faded than trouble appeared on the opposite horizon. He says that the religious right's increasingly vocal opposition to Darwinian theory is rooted largely in a "dislike of human sociobiology," especially the idea that human values flow from biology rather than from a nonphysical soul.

He doesn't expect a rapprochement between the two worldviews. When it comes to the "meaning of humanity, the meaning of life, which is what the cultural war is all about," says Wilson, "we do differ drastically, and I think insolubly." But that hasn't stopped him from writing about an alliance between science and religion, to be published next year and tentatively titled The Creation. The alliance is political. He's "calling on the religious community," he says, "to join the scientists and environmentalists to save the creation—the world's biodiversity."

(cutting)

"Men would rather believe than know," he wrote in Sociobiology.

But Wilson's sharp pen isn't the only reason the last of those books made him so renowned. There's another virtue he has in rare quantity. His 1998 book, Consilience, about the convergence of diverse scientific fields into a unified explanatory framework, was a blast of Enlightenment-era optimism about the scientific project. Someday, Wilson believes, the cause-and-effect principles of psychology will rest solidly and specifically on those of biology, which will rest with equal security on principles of biochemistry and molecular biology, and so on down the line to particle physics. ("Consilience," with its air of interdisciplinary harmony, sounds much nicer than its rough synonym, "reductionism"—another tribute to Wilson's rhetorical prowess.)

This optimism—or even "faith," as Wilson has unabashedly described his conviction about the unity of knowledge—is what propelled him on the epic exercise that produced Sociobiology. In three years, even while teaching, he wrote half a million words—about four normal-sized books. As a result, Wilson was the one who got to trumpet the coming revolution. His book came out a year before Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which made much the same argument.

Wilson's fervent faith in scientific progress proved more than a motivator; it proved right. Witness advances in fields from neuroscience to genomics to pharmacology—and their increasing interconnection. So even if posterity forgot about Wilson's many contributions to the study of insects and other nonhuman animals, it would have to concede that he is more than a popularizer. He is a visionary, and a visionary whose track record is looking pretty good.

Wilson is a lapsed Southern Baptist—Christianity yielded to Darwinism during his undergraduate years—but in the end his salvation has nonetheless come through faith. And, of course, through works.

Science and faith (the spiritual side of ourselves) can and does work well together... unless we tell ourselves it can't, or it shouldn't. But religion alone, no longer works -- nor does science alone, work well by themselves; and people are realizing this same 'fact' within all the various titles (labels) whether that label is scientist, artist, religious leader etc.

If one were to take that goal out of its religious form and look merely at its purely human side, one might state it perhaps thus: free and responsible development of the individual, so that he may place his powers freely and gladly in the service of all mankind. -- Albert Einstein

More and more, people ARE taking the goal out of all the religious forms we've we/they've orginally put them in and are looking purely at our human side. Thank goodness!

[gypsyjoker]

if we wanted to grasp the human predicament and unravel the emotions that push and pull us through life, we had to think about human genes and the process that assembled them, natural selection

God save us from the improvers of man.
BP, LR is talking about "priests" in white lab coats.

Z

Not long before the birth of Christ, in an age of violence and turmoil, the Roman poet and Epicurean philosopher Lucretius wrote an epic masterpiece titled De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things"). His goal, in part, was to liberate humankind from the religious superstitions that he believed stood in the way of true peace of mind and happiness. Author Sam Harris plays the role of a contemporary Lucretius in his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and is a doctoral candidate in the field of neuroscience. Well aware that a book about the inherent dangers of institutional, dogmatic religion would court controversy, Harris wrote The End of Faith out of a sense of urgency regarding what he argues constitutes perhaps the greatest threat we face today. He shared his thoughts about the character of dogmatic faith versus mysticism, the role of reason in civil discourse, and the hope that humans can overcome the propensity toward religious violence before it's too late.

Good stuff.
But what if the religion is wired into us. Saw a NOVA show about religious states and brain scans. They can pin point it. Send us into states of omnificent bliss. Maybe the cure will have to be surgical. One Flew over…
Or genetic Brave New World. I think sum how, we will have religion, magic, or something like it forever. It is our nature. Make it humanistic as mnaz said of science. is it going to be a peaceful revolution you think?

[gypsyjoker]

BP it sounds so easy when you say it. I think there will be no peace without or without religion.

I can see peace as slavery. I am sick puppy today just going with the weird energy. I used to be stilltrucking.

I like this bit from the book Z posted

Amazon.com: In other words, you are careful to distinguish between what you term "faith" and "spirituality." In a nutshell, what is this distinction?

Harris: "Faith" is false conviction in unjustified propositions (a certain book was written by God; we will be reunited with our loved ones after death; the Creator of the universe can hear our thoughts, etc.). "Spirituality" or "mysticism" (both words are pretty terrible, but there are no good alternatives in English) refers to any process of introspection by which a person can come to realize that the feeling he calls "I" is a cognitive illusion. The core truth of mysticism is this: It is possible to experience the world without feeling like a separate "self" in the usual sense. Such a change in the character of one's experience need not become the basis for making unsupportable claims about the nature of the universe, however.

Amazon.com: Why have earlier attempts at erasing faith through classical materialism resulted in a level of violence similar to what you believe faith itself has inspired (i.e., Communism)?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The core truth of mysticism is this: It is possible to experience the world without feeling like a separate "self" in the usual sense.

I been practicing the faith of a heretic myself. Those Marches in Ireland, I never could get over those. Unbelievable. How do you tell a protestant from a catholic. Is one tall like a Tutsi and the other a short Hutu? A lot of things for Cro-Magnon killers to compete for. Life and Death, we are so fruitful at both.

[gypsyjoker]

On a somewhat related note: I think it would be a good idea to take away tax exempt status for any church whose pastor makes two million dollars a year.

[abcrystcats]

Zlatko --- YYEESS! I was pushing that book heavily on the AC website a few weeks ago. I read it in about a day. It was VERY readable and I think he hit on a few basic truths.

Here's the problem: the minute we start relying on things other than the evidence of our own senses, and logic and order and proof, to form our beliefs, we get into a dangerous area. My belief in MY God, versus YOUR belief in YOUR God. My book of fairy tales about the way the world's supposed to be, versus your book of fairy tales about the way the world is supposed to be.

In general, the world is pretty reliable. What's blue to me is probably blue to you, as well. No matter how far-out another person's culture is, if you shared the same language, you could probably sit on a park bench and observe the world going by with that person and find some things in common in the way you are interpreting events. How we see the world is not the problem. "Cultural" differences are not the problem. The problem is the sets of myths and fictions we've repeated over and over to ourselves over thousands of years. We BELIEVE that these are truths and that they are, or ought to be, self-evident, when they are not and never can be.

I'm not an atheist, and I don't think Sam Harris was necessarily promoting atheism in his book. What he WAS promoting was a healthy skepticism of anyone or anything who claims to know the WORD of God, or who claims to know that there is one (a God). We can't know that there is a God, let alone that "He" inspired anybody to write one damn word. Beliefs in things unseen are certainly "hard-wired" into us. Whatever. It doesn't mean that beliefs in detailed dogmas need to follow suit.

Unless we begin to give more credence to science, to PROOF and evidence, and less to these historical documents that make up our mystical literature, we will sink into more violence, more conflicts in the world in general. There are worse consequences even than that, but Harris didn't go into them, so I won't.

I really liked his book. His thesis was simple, but I thought it was basically sound.