From: Walter Watts (wlwatts@cox.net)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 17:53:40 MDT
Thanks for this, Jonathan. Very nice piece.
Walter
Jonathan Davis wrote:
> Believing, Disbelieving, And Suspecting - Disordered Thoughts On
> Religion (August 25, 2003 )
>
> http://www.fredoneverything.net/Faith.shtml
>
> We live in a wantonly irreligious age-at least at the level of public
> discourse. In America the courts, the schools, and the government seek
> to cleanse the country of religion. More accurately, they seek to
> cleanse it of Christianity. We are told, never directly but by
> relentless implication, that religious faith is something one in decency
> ought to do behind closed doors-an embarrassment, worse than public
> bowling though not quite as bad as having a venereal disease.
>
> Which is odd.
>
> I do not offer myself as one intimate with the gods, and on grounds of
> reason would be hard pressed to choose between the views of Hindus and
> those of Buddhists. I note however that over millennia people of
> extraordinary intellect and thoughtfulness have taken religion
> seriously. A quite remarkable arrogance is needed feel oneself mentally
> superior to Augustine, Aquinas, Isaac Newton, and C.S. Lewis. I'm not up
> to it.
>
> Of course arrogance comes in forms both personal and temporal. People
> tend to regard their own time as wiser and more knowing than all
> preceding times, and the people of earlier ages as quaint and vaguely
> primitive. Thus many who do not know how a television works will feel
> superior to Newton, because he didn't know how a television works. (Here
> is a fascinating concept: Arrogance by proximity to a television.)
>
> It will be said that we have learned much since the time of Newton, and
> that this knowledge renders us wiser on matters spiritual. We do have
> better plastics. Yet still we die, and have no idea what it means. We do
> not know where we came from, and no amount of pious mummery about Big
> Bangs and black holes changes that at all. We do not know why we are
> here. We have intimations of what we should do, but no assurance. These
> are the questions that religion addresses and that science pretends do
> not exist. For all our transistors we know no more about these matters
> than did Heraclitus, and think about them less.
>
> Many today assuredly do know of the questions, and do think about them.
> One merely doesn't bring them up at a cocktail party, as they are held
> to be disreputable.
>
> Yet I often meet a, to me, curious sort of fellow who simply cannot
> comprehend what religion might be about. He is puzzled as distinct from
> contemptuous or haughty. He genuinely sees no different between
> religious faith and believing that the earth is flat. He is like a
> congenitally deaf man watching a symphony orchestra: With all the good
> will in the world he doesn't see the profit in all that sawing with bows
> and blowing into things.
>
> This fellow is very different from the common atheist, who is bitter,
> proud of his advanced thinking, and inclined toward a (somewhat
> adolescent) hostility to a world that isn't up to his standard. This is
> tiresome and predictable, but doesn't offend me. Less forgivably, he
> often wants to run on about logical positivism. (I'm reminded of
> Orwell's comment about "the sort of atheist who doesn't so much
> disbelieve in God as personally dislike him." Quote approximate.)
>
> Critics of religion say, correctly, that horrible crimes are committed
> in the name of religion. So are they in the name of communism,
> anti-communism, Manifest Destiny, Zionism, nationalism, and national
> security. Horrible crimes are what people do. They are not the heart of
> the thing.
>
> The following seems to me to be true regarding religion and the
> sciences: Either one believes that there is an afterlife, or one
> believes that there is not an afterlife, or one isn't sure-which means
> that one believes that there may be an afterlife. If there is an
> afterlife, then there is an aspect of existence about which we know
> nothing and which may, or may not, influence this world. In this case
> the sciences, while interesting and useful, are merely a partial
> explanation of things. Thus to believe in the absolute explanatory power
> of the sciences one must be an atheist-to exclude competition. Note that
> atheists as much as the faithful believe what they cannot establish.
>
> Here is the chief defect of scientists (I mean those who take the
> sciences as an ideology rather than as a discipline): an unwillingness
> to admit that there is anything outside their realm. But there is. You
> cannot squeeze consciousness, beauty, affection, or Good and Evil from
> physics any more than you can derive momentum from the postulates of
> geometry: No mass, no momentum. A moral scientist is thus a
> contradiction in terms. (Logically speaking: in practice they
> compartmentalize and are perfectly good people.)
>
> Thus we have the spectacle of the scientist who is horrified by the
> latest hatchet murder but can give no scientific reason why. A murder
> after all is merely the dislocation of certain physical masses (the
> victim's head, for example) followed by elaborate chemical reactions.
> Horror cannot be derived from physics. It comes from somewhere else.
>
> Similarly, those who believe in religions often do not really quite
> believe. Interesting to me is the extent to which those who think
> themselves Christians have subordinated God to physics. For example, I
> have often read some timid theologian saying that manna was actually a
> sticky secretion deriving from certain insects, and that the crossing of
> the Red Sea was really done in a shallow place when the wind blew the
> water out.
>
> Perhaps so; I wasn't there. Yet these arguments amount to saying that
> God is all-powerful, provided that he behaves consistently with physical
> principles and the prevailing weather. The sciences take precedence.
>
> Now, people who seek (and therefore find) an overarching explanation of
> everything always avoid looking at the logical warts and lacunae in
> their systems. This is equally true of Christians, liberals,
> conservatives, Marxists, evolutionists, and believers in the universal
> explanatory power of the sciences. Any ideology can probably be
> described as a systematic way of misunderstanding the world.
>
> That being said, at worst the religions of the earth are gropings toward
> something people feel but cannot put a finger on, toward something more
> at the heart of life than the hoped-for raise, trendy restaurants, and
> the next and grander automobile. And few things are as stultifying and
> superficial as the man not so much agnostic (this I can understand) as
> simply inattentive, whose life is focused on getting into a better
> country club. Good questions are better than bad answers. And the
> sciences, though not intended to be, have become the opiate of the
> masses.
>
> http://www.fredoneverything.net/Faith.shtml
>
> ---------------
>
> Regards
>
> Limbic
> ---
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