From: Jonathan Davis (jonathan.davis@lineone.net)
Date: Mon Sep 01 2003 - 17:43:04 MDT
Hi Sebby,
I posted it without comment for a reason. I like Fred generally and I think
he writes very well. That said, his arguments in this piece are flawed, but
then again he is not really trying - it is a dispatch to his loyal readers
and consequently conversational and assumptive, not a tightly argued
treatise.
We need to be challenged. We need to guard against hubris. We need people
like Fred to call us out occasionally.
I am just stirring it up a bit.
Kind regards
Jonathan
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-virus@lucifer.com [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com] On Behalf Of
Dr Sebby
Sent: 01 September 2003 21:03
To: virus@lucifer.com
Subject: Re: virus: Fred Reed on Religion...
...jonathan, was this posted as if to say you somewhat agree with Fred's
essay? i cant tell. if this is the case, i couldnt disagree more. his
essay was outright full of horribly weak links, assumptions and other
unstable 'house of cards' considerations. this essay and the points therein
can be hacked to peices on so many points, it's not even worth mention.
DrSebby.
"Courage...and shuffle the cards".
----Original Message Follows----
From: "Jonathan Davis" <jonathan@limbicnutrition.com>
Reply-To: virus@lucifer.com
To: <virus@lucifer.com>
Subject: virus: Fred Reed on Religion...
Date: Mon, 1 Sep 2003 13:13:17 +0100
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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