Inheriting Faith
Rijk pointed me towards an interesting documentary “The Root of All Evil” by Richard Dawkins. After having watched both episodes I would like to recommend it to anyone interested in religion. Dawkins pointed out some interesting things that I had not thought much about before. Such as why do we inherit the religion of our parents? Is it really right to lock your child into your views, and for example replace their science education with theology education?
You can watch a fragment of the series in which a frightening person with self confidence at the size of a whale discusses how he is great and how evolution cannot be true. This is the leader of America's National Association of Evangelicals. It is extremely frustrating to watch somebody be this ignorant of their own ignorance. There are more equally narrow minded people interviewed in the two episodes.
The only complaints I had about this series was that it was a bit too one sided and that he had too little understanding for the reason why people believe. It is important to remember that not everyone is as fortunate as we are and faith can help people to keep on going. In other words it doesn't have to be a bad thing as long as it isn't blind faith.
To find more info about the show follow this link. Then if you are even more interested you could try visiting *cough*, *cough*. »
motives
Richard Dawkins represents in a general way my bent on all of this. His efforts to inform and enlighten those on the other side of the equation are useless.
The reason I say this is twofold: 1) The believers and followers of the evangelicals are totally sucked in. They so badly want a neat explanation of everything going on in the world and in their daily lives. Here in America we as a people have lost a bit of our self-confidence. We feel probably more vulnerable and unsure than any time since the early sixties. So we cling to leaders who bluster and tell us we can still do it. How else can you explain W Bush? Doesn't matter if he is smart or pisses off the rest of the world (that might even be a good thing) as long as he is sure he is right. We want our religious leaders to tell us that there can be no doubt about what we read in the bible (or their interpretation of it). It is infallible, literal and unquestioned above all. Cuts down on that bothersome 'thinking' thing.
2) The evangelical leaders are of suspect motives. I know this is a contentious point that will inflame some but I subscribe to it. How else can you explain their total unwillingness to consider other viewpoints. The fake crying and healings. The blindness to how science has completely altered the medical landscape, life expectancy and daily living. The obnoxious and continuous appeals for money. In this country churches are tax exempt. It is BIG BUSINESS and they are the CEO! $1000 suits and three acre conference tables and cable tv shows of their performances. The excesses are disgusting and money is the motive.
Here in Louisville we have the fifth largest curch in the country, Southeast Christian. They have a 5 story building that holds thousands and are building a second one right next to it! Big round buildings with copper roofs and green glass. I just cannot get the Tower of Babel out of my mind every time I pass by. How much good could be accomplished if all that effort and power were directed to a problem instead of self promotion. It is more religious country club than church. They are laughing all the way to the bank.
We are not talking about uneducated desperate people looking for something to assuage their miserable lives. This is the 'cream' of the local community and the upper middle class. It has become the test of your social credentials to be a member. Their literature is everywhere. In the supermarket, drug store, movie houses, auto parts, barbershops. If you refuse to have their little display they will rip you to their membership. They have economic clout that is frightening and real and wielded. BIG BUSINESS.
My brother in law's brother and his family are members. It is amazing the level of brainwashing that has overtaken their lives. Absolutely every action and thought is run through the Southeast filters. His parents are teachers and very open minded. He was once someone fun to engage in political and social discussions. No more. He has three young, impressionable sons that are being fed this stuff. And there thousands and thousands more just like them that are going to become dulled to what I consider reality.
I am 53 years old and I worry every day where we are headed with all of this. The American Taliban is alive and well and in control. It scares the daylights out of me. We are losing our freedoms inches at a time in the name of security. A thousand little cuts will sooner or later bleed you dry. Are we headed to another 'dark ages' with inquisitions and witch hunts and ignorance? Could we have a situation similar to the 'red scare' when senator McCarthy assured us that communists were everywhere and that we should inform on our family and neighbors? I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility.
Sorry for such a long post
John
Are we the witches of the future?
Don't apologize for writing a long comment! I really like your comments because they are intellegently written and insightful!
You give a rare insight into what is happening in the States. It must be strange to know people that are like the brother of your brother in law. While I have met people that are like that in some ways, I have really ever known anyone that has been that devoted really well. I have met fanatics in various ways but I have never really known them except for just on the surface.
The fact that you bring up the McCarthy situation as a possibility for the future is really interesting. That one is really known the modern day witch hunt. Will we in the future be hunted as atheists? So if somebody is bugged with us they will reports us as non believers to make sure we are punished? I still believe that there must be enough educated, smart people in the world for this to not to happen...
I you mentioned that churches in the States are tax exempt. That is something I never knew but that does really explain a lot. I remember being stunned by all the advertising signs that the churches had. "Come to God" and "Jesus loves you". It just never felt right that you needed to be lured to go to church...
Please keep writing about your experience! It gives me a lot more to think about!
You wrote: Faith doesn't have
You wrote: Faith doesn't have to be a bad thing as long as it isn't blind faith.
Faith is blind, that is why its called faith.:)
If you have some sort of proof or reasoning behind it , it is no longer faith - it is science or logic or common sense and no longer faith.
Blind what?
I've always taken the expression "blind faith" to mean that faith can make you blind to everything else *but* your faith. Like science, etc. ...
Mild faith?
I guess "blind faith" isn't the best expression to describe what I was trying to say. I still think you can believe and have a little bit of faith without being blind towards everything else. As a Christian, you don't need to take everything in the Bible, or as a Muslim in the Koran. As with every other book in this world they do get outdated as we learn more about the world around us.
So if you do decide to ask "God" to cure you of something or help you through something difficult and feel better going to church, mosk whatever, that isn't really that bad is it? As I have said it before it is dangerous when you use religion to excuse bad actions, to use it to think you are better than other people that don't believe (or believe something else), and if you make that your reference to everything such as the evolution, laws, etc.
In short, as long as your religion hurts no one else it is perfectly all right in my opinion. But this documentary actually pointed out to me something that I had never thought before. In some instances people are hurting their kids by forcing religion opinions on their kids... then it no longer falls under the "ok to believe as long as you don't hurt anybody else".
That's pretty much how I understood you
And to elaborate on what I said above: What I was trying to say, is that by "blind faith" I understand faith that ignores facts and evidence contrary to your own literal understanding of e.g. your holy book.
Hm, I'm not sure that made it much clearer. Maybe I'll think some more about how to put it ...:)
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The knuckles! The horrible knuckles!
Blind faith is maybe sometimes OK
Yes you are absolutely right, that made it clearer:-). Blind faith ignore facts! While I don't necessarily like people that ignore facts, I can understand it in some situations. Like in situations where all medical evidence says that you have no chance of living you want to ignore those facts and believe that you still have a chance. And as long as it doesn't hurt other people that should be allowed. Miracles occasionally happen even if those are rare you sometimes need to believe.
Like they say: you can't pl
Like they say: you can't please all the people all the time.
There will be as many opinions in a room about what is right or wrong, good or bad as there are people.
I see that in a general sense we need to define what the majority thinks is best to keep the world moving in what the majority beleives is the right direction.
But on a philosophical level, I disagree that one group ( those who beleive in science) have right to give definitions to words like faith and logic to the other group ( those who don't believe in evolution) or the other way round.
What was good 1000 years ago like whipping your kids in to good behaviour is outdated today and what we think is good today like making sure everyone goes to school might feel wrong tommorow.
We can't stop people from thinking differently even if their thoughts are in direct conflict with ours nd even if they hurt our sentiments. This goes both ways.
However as I said philosophicaly I think I am making sense. But on a practical level, I would ofcourse rather that my views prevail over the rest. ( regardless of whether I am minority or majortiy opinion). Lie the whole world should turn vegetarian and there should be a ban on strawberry shakes and thursday should be a weekend etc etc. But isn't that with everyone? :) Divisha
Critical thinking is the way to go
Yes, I have to agree that majority is the right way to go here. That combined with freedom of speech. You should be allowed to try present your ideas and reason to people around you and I honestly believe (or at least hope) that the world will be OK. Democracy without freedom of speech wont work.
I see your point on the fact that we of course always want people to believe what we believe. There are a lot of things that I would like people to believe that I would like to believe but that I deep down see that are not really realistic. If you have good reasons to ban strawberry shakes or make thursdays weekend then please give them;-). We might be able to follow you on that. At least the thursday-weekend idea:-).
As for vegetarisim, you will be able to give some good reason why everyone should be vegetarians. Such as not hurting the animals and all of that:-) Those arguments I can relate too and maybe that will be the "thing" in couple of decades. Right now there is too much history in the colder areas of the world for us to become vegetarians. It is too difficult to grow vegetables, it is too difficult to get all the vitamins and nutrition that we need, and the animals we are breeding will die anyway if nobody gets money for breeding (harsh fact of reality). We are moving the right way. Most of us wont kill animals for fun, only for eating... at least it is a start.
No, maybe we don't have right to force people to believe in science instead of religion... but we should have the freedom to critical towards religion. We should be allowed to critisize and bring towards fact that discredit religion. Just as religious people should be allowed to bring forward facts that discredit science. That will only help us move forward and help us seek further truth! Critical thinking is the way to go, both towards science and religion!
freedom to give up freedom
"Islam" means something like submission. Not as in "hand over your brain at the door", but more like "sign the contract for your job please". It comes from another time, a time when people generally (i.e. not only in the US) professed a belief in something divine, and more or less matched that in their actions.
It also comes from a similar time, a time when many people were cynical about religion, were using it mostly as a way of making money, and were happy to enforce it as the rule of the day.
Our modern "underlying" religions are often about having a job, science being good (as opposed to just being neutral, something that we can do like planting crops or making sacrifices in the belief that it brings us net benefit), and freedom being essential to a reasonable life.
"Science" is a religion for non-believers, those who profess to have no faith. It's a religion, because clearly many of its followers are in fact believers - they have no idea what nuclear physics is about, yet they accept the words of one or other high priest ("it gives clean energy instead of polluting the planet with your barbaric oil sacrifices" or "it pollutes the globe and brings plague and pestilence") and make real decisions based on it.
Democracy is a complex beast. The "tyranny of the majority" is tempered by freedom of speech, which leads to the price of democracy - the obligation to think carefully. This is a price most often unpaid, with the result that many societies which could be democratic are in effect fairly fascist, with a partial choice offered every so often on what flavour people want. A real democracy does not simply impose the will of the majority, and a practical democracy of any size cannot, since there is not enough time to trade in the various desires and preferences. Instead we are governed by a few people who convinced us that they were more like us than the other one, or two, or three, and that overall the hundreds and thousands of decisions they take in the next few years will reflect our will. Scarily, many of us actually believe them, and would be horrified by anyone truthful enough to say "vote for me, I am smarter than most people and will decide the right thing whether you like it or not" - since we recognise fascism in that approach and recoil from it.
A religion that encourages thinking, then, seems like a good one. Judaism, Islam, Science, Buddhism, and a few others are pretty widely interpreted this way. But there is a difference between encouraing thinking and people doing it - like most of the other facets of a religion, the practice isn't quite what the theory predicts, and people fall easily into the trap of letting others do the tiresome thinking, and the even more tiresome discussing the results of thinking.
Should kids inherity a belief that science == progress? Definitely not - it is nothing more than a blind religious faith. Science provides more ways of understanding how to do things, whether good or bad. In some areas it drives us into extraordinary calculations - we can spend millions dealing with analyses of bird flu, a disease that kills a handful of people but may turn into an epidemic, when we cannot find anywhere near the same resources to fight malaria, a disease that already kills millions of people, or even dysentery, a disease that is equally lethal on a holocaust-type scale, but is in general preventable and treatable, both for a relatively low cost. We can bring cheap round-the-world travel to half a billion, but we can't distribute the world's overall excess of food to the half-billion who don't have enough to eat.
We can pontiificate like this, but we find it harder to actually do anything about it. Sigh. Does really trying to make the world a fairer place, where people can all get a bit more, justify flying around and around it, filling it with pollution and destruction? Or should I give up that freedom, stop arguing for what I see as better, and accept the lot that is handed down by my parents, my school, the priests, the government...?
Dunno. Such is Life.
We will learn something new everyday.
You should keep questioning and questioning. Even if one voice isn't going make a lot of difference it might occasionally be heard by somebody that joins in and maybe it might make a difference in some important cause.
It is an interesting point that you bring out that science is just yet another religion. I cannot fully agree to that. I think it is too fluctuating to be termed as religion which tends to stay the same over a long time.
I agree though that we shouldn't believe blindly in science. It is scary that we do believe so blindly in some of the things that science tells us. Unfortunately, we are only human and each person can not read up on all the different things in the world. I guess we are forced to believe in somethings even if we haven't researched it ourself. Everyone can use few common sense rules such as checking if more than one people have done research on the same thing, if there is a big money making industry behind the research (that will benefit from the conclusion). If we teach people critical thinking than there will always be some that argue and try to take a part the research if it is questionable.
Yes, it is scary how easily we follow people like politicians. I do it myself but I am doing it less and less with the years. I cannot even pick a political party here in Norway because I think they are all to weak or wrong on some points even though I agree with them on some.
Life is complicated and it is difficult to know what is right and what is wrong. We will keep learning something new everyday we live and I believe we can accelerate that learning if we try to be critical in our thinking.
Religions fluctuate too
Big time. If that's the test, science really really is a religion, a fundamentalist one where the god is reproducibility, and anyone can make their interpretation and become a preacher, although there is the formal priesthood of "scientists", the scriptures published under the name of academic journals, interpreted by the priesthood for the most part.
"Modern" religions have done big backflips on questions like war, slavery, history, and so on. I don't think that most christians really believe in evolution (although a lot certainly do), and it is surprising to me how many of them don't really believe in hell...