The End of the Future of Reason:
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.
Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.Sam Harris/LATimes/CommonDreams 16.Mar.07
Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.
The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality.
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Everything that people get from the grocery store can be had more readily, more healthily if they grow it themselves. Without relying on faceless corporate entities that don't have their best interests at heart.
Of course they'll have to actually grow it, which takes time and depends on things like rain and frost etc. and if we shut down the grocery stores tomorrow there's going to be hell to pay until that all gets sorted out, because the transition will be neither smooth nor timely in its completion.
Theoretically science, or scientific reason, or rationalism, or rational/positivism, or some form of non-metaphysical, non-faith-based, non-outside-the-system-ish thought can as readily come up with a moral system whose laws and spirit - or whatever we're going to call that intent behind the making of regulations - will be more tuned to the exigencies of human life on earth as it is actually lived, now, and as it will be lived once we get all this religious claptrap out of the way.
Theoretically, sound reason will make better laws than mumbo-jumbo ever could. Of course it will.
But you better hurry up and get them in place, because everything that drives your scientific engines is coming directly out of the bizarre yet complex social architecture religion has made possible over the years and centuries. And every single last one of the hunter-gatherer societies that preceded whatever this is, or that parallels it out on its margins, had or has religion of some kind holding it together. In case you were thinking of some kind of retro-atavistic fall-back-and-start-over high-tech nomadic clad thingie.
But hey you can do it, in spite of the odds and obstacles. Have at it.
I have a few questions though.
Do you think that'll be before, or after Bush invades Iran at the behest of the delusional religionists that pull his strings behind the scenes?
Is there a "continuum", or a "spectrum" just like the ones Harris draws for believers, on the rational side of the polarity? Where the fanatics of the rational, like Joseph Mengele and Sidney Gottlieb and thousands of more anonymous but equally heartless scientific pragmatists take shelter in the benevolent shade of "progress"?
Does science have a justification, outside the burrows of academia and its erudite suburbs for placing rationality above delusional belief?
Evolution doesn't, we know that. We know evolution's all and only about success, through any means. Thus the poisonous frog, the poisonous butterfly and the not poisonous butterfly but looks-just-like-it. The carnivorous plant, with its enticing trap. The leaf-colored snake. The liar, the con-man, the politician, the - well you get the idea. Nothing in nature says you have to tell the truth. Nothing in nature says telling the truth will even improve your odds of surviving. That's beaten into you at school, or in church, or at home, and home and school's the only places that holds - the real world doesn't care if you're honest or not
But don't let that stop you. Honest people have just as much right to live as bullshit artists, any day. Will we have some Inquisitional determinations? Will it be against the law to teach kids to believe in an afterlife? Since we have no rational basis, no proof of that other world. The main complaint against religious delusion is it doesn't work - for the complainers. It works for the delusional, so where's that argument?
How hard is it to imagine a sci-fi dystopia where rationalism's the dogma, and scientists its priests, and heresy condemns you to the primate "research" camps? Will our new morality cover that specifically and strongly enough to protect us, the way compassion as dogma has protected us from at least some of the degradation of inhuman cruelty?
And how many people will be allowed to continue, you know, existing, once the rationalists assume control and it becomes clearly obvious there's way too many of us humans around demanding resources of which there aren't enough?
Ever stop to think maybe the delusionalists recognize that cull sitting just over the horizon, before you even think of it?
That that may be the single biggest payoff religion's providing them? Protection.
Survival. Hey.
Everybody's raison d'etre, c'est vrai.
