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   Author  Topic: Reason Lost  (Read 567 times)
David Lucifer
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Reason Lost
« on: 2006-08-21 10:48:55 »
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vector: Premise Checker on the paleopsych list
source: Guardian Unlimited

August 15, 2006 12:57 PM

An Opinionpanel Research survey conducted in July this year found
that more than 30% of UK university students believe in creationism
or intelligent design. This raw detail is gasp-inducing enough in
its own right, as indication of the effect of the propagandised
resurgence of the fairy-tales that once served mankind's
intellectual infancy and are now reasserting a grip on too many.
But it is even more troubling as a symptom of a wider corrosion,
the spread of a more virulent cancer of unreason, which is
affecting not just the mental culture of our own country but the
fate of the world itself. If that last phrase seems hyperbolic,
read on.

Take the local concern first, and ask what is signified by the 30%
statistic at issue. From the day that the government of John Major
allowed polytechnics to redescribe themselves as universities, and
his and successive governments set a target of getting 50% of
school leavers into higher education, but without the huge
investment of resources at all levels that would make this viable,
it was inevitable that standards required for entrance to degree
level courses would fall. And so it has dramatically proved. At the
same time standards in public examinations at the high school level
have also fallen, by some measures a long way. The official line,
of course, is that the latter at least is not true: but such is the
way with official lines.

The combined result is that a significant proportion of university
entrants today are noticeably different creatures from their
average forerunners of a generation ago: quite measurably less
literate, less numerate, less broadly knowledgeable, and less
reflective. At the same time education has been infected by
post-modern relativism and the less desirable effects of "political
correctness", whose combined effect is to encourage teachers to
accept, and even promote as valid alternatives, the various
superstitions and antique belief-systems constituting the
multiplicity of different and generally competing religions
represented in our multicultural society. This has gone so far that
our tax dollars are now arrogated to supporting "faith based
schooling", which means the ghettoisation of intellectually
defenceless children into a variety of competing superstitions,
despite the stark evidence, all the way from Northern Ireland to
the madrassahs of Pakistan, of what this does for the welfare of
mankind.

The key to the weakening of intellectual rigour that all this
represents is that enquiry is no longer premised on the requirement
that belief must be proportional to carefully gathered and assessed
evidence. The fact that "faith" is enough to legitimate anything
from superstition to mass murder is not one whit troubling to
"people of faith" themselves, most of whom disagree with the faith
of most other "people of faith" (thus: a Christian does not accept
Islam, and vice versa; so a Christian's claim to be certain, by
faith, that his is the only true religion is rejected, on grounds
of faith, by the Muslim; and so on, to the point of mutual
assassination); which shows that the non-rational mindset
underlying religious belief, an essentially infantile attitude of
acceptance of fairy-stories, has not been affected by the best that
education can offer in the way of challenging and maturing minds to
think for themselves.

Example: ask a Christian why the ancient story of a deity
impregnating a mortal woman who then gives birth to a heroic figure
whose deeds earn him a place in heaven, is false as applied to Zeus
and his many paramours (the mothers of such as Hercules, the
Heavenly Twins, etc.), but true as applied to God, Mary and Jesus.
Indeed ask him what is the significance of the fact that this tale
is older even than Greek mythology, and commonplace in Middle
Eastern mythologies generally. Why are they myths, whereas what is
related in the New Testament (a set of texts carefully chosen from
a larger number of competing versions some centuries after they
events they allege) is not? Do not expect a rational reply; an
appeal to faith will be enough, because with faith anything goes.

"With faith anything goes": here is why the claim that the
resurgence of non-rational superstitious belief is a danger to the
world. Fundamentalism in all the major religions (and some are
fundamentalist by nature) can be and too often is politically
infantilising, and in its typical radicalised forms provides utter
certainty of being in the right, immunises against tolerance and
pluralism, justifies the most atrocious behaviour to the apostate
and the infidel, is blind to the appeals of justice let alone mercy
or reason, and is intrinsically fascistic and monolithic. One does
not have to look very far to find shining examples of this pretty
picture in today's world, whether in the Middle East of the Bible
belt of the United States. The rest of the world is caught between
these two appalling instances of basically the same phenomenon, so
it is perhaps no surprise, though no less regrettable, that the
infection should spread from both directions.

More regrettable still, though, is the fact that the civilised
quarters of the world are not taking seriously the connection
between the world's current problems and failure to uphold
intellectual rigour in education, and not demanding that religious
belief be a private and personal matter for indulgence only in the
home, accepting it in the public sphere only on an equal footing
with other interest groups such as trades unions and voluntary
organisations such as the Rotary Club. This is the most that a
religion merits being treated as, as the following proves: if I and
a few others claim to constitute a religious group based on belief
in the divinity of garden gnomes, should I be entitled to public
money for a school in which children can be brought up in this
faith, together with a bishop's seat in parliament perhaps? Why
would this be laughed out of court when belief of essentially the
same intellectual value, say, Christianity, is accorded all such
amenities and more?

I remind those who seek to counter with the tired old canard that
Stalinism and Nazism are proof that secular arrangements are worse
than religious ones, that fundamentalist religion is the same in
its operation and effects as Stalinism and Nazism for the reason
that they are at base the same thing, viz. monolithic ideologies.
Religion is a man-made device, not least of oppression and control
(the secret policeman who sees what you do even in the dark on your
own), whose techniques and structures were adopted by Stalinism and
Nazism, the monolithic salvation faiths of modernity, as the best
teachers they could wish for. When any of these imprisoning
ideologies are on the back foot and/or in the minority, they
present sweet faces to those they wish to seduce: the kiss of
friendship in the parish church, the summer camp for young
communists in the 1930s. But give them the levers of power and they
are the Taliban, the Inquisition, the Stasi.

Give them AK47s and Semtex, and some of the fanatics among them
become airline bombers, mass murderers of ordinary men, women and
children, and for the most contemptible of reasons.

How far are the 30% of students who believe in creationism from
airline bombers? A very long way, of course; the latter are a sick
and psychopathic minority only; but the point to register and take
seriously is that there is nevertheless a connecting thread, which
is belief in antique superstitions and the non-rational basis of
the putative values they represent, values which can lead in the
extreme to mass murder, as the chilling jingle reminds us: "faith
is what I die for, dogma is what I kill for."

As part of the strategy for countering the pernicious effects that
faith and dogma can produce, we need to return religious commitment
to the private sphere, stop the folly of promoting superstitions
and religious segregation in education, demand that standards of
intellectual rigour be upheld at all educational levels, and find
major ways of reversing the current trend of falling enrolment in
science courses. The alternative is a return to the Dark Ages, the
tips of whose shadows are coldly falling upon us even now.
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Re:Reason Lost
« Reply #1 on: 2006-08-21 14:02:09 »
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While, at least in places, the author seems to me to "get" the toxicity of belief, I'd suggest that on the whole, his rant reflects quite clearly what happens when you fail to differentiate between weyken and belief, and that the author is himself not entirely immune from the effects of the deliberate* erosion and elision of these boundaries.

I'd suggest that when you allow the superstitious to define "morality" as "that which flows from religiosity" (although that is not how the the superstitious would articulate it, it conveys what they mean) which then results in we-the-sheeple dutifully appointing these superstitious but intensely "moral" conmen - and conwomen- to positions where they allocate the spending of "our tax dollars"  (which, together with the English spelling and comment on a particularly British tragedy, raises some confusion as to which country the author is in), that the "ghettoisation of intellectually defenceless children" is in fact a logical conclusion.

I'd suggest that confusing the misery instigated by religion with the misery instigated by colonialism is a category error.

I'd remind the author that Adolf Hitler was a Christian and the Nazis were doing Christ's work with the support of Catholics and the Protestants both of which provided support in exchange for payment of a portion of the tax revenues of the Reich.

I'd remind the author that Stalin was a product, as well as a causative agent, of the "great" Russian agrarian revolution. Had the Americans had machine guns during the American revolution they might have achieved similar success in thinning the population of the UK. And then the books would read somewhat differently. As it was, Stalin's greatest success as a butcher required the active assistance of the Americans, English and French in feeding white Russians and Eastern Europeans to his mincing machines in the Crimea and Siberia. Which is omitted from this, oh, so nicely told mythic representation of his murders in a religious cloak. Meanwhile, the US and friends (including the UK and Canadians) rid the world of somewhere between one and two million Iraqi even before the the latest shooting crusade and its hundreds of thousands of victims. Are these not victims of a religious war too? Or are they victims of evil secularity?

I'd suggest that until the author can see that blowing up an aircraft "just because you can" in response to perceiving one's tribe as not having a viable future - and having no access to other channels of redress - or even other weapons - might possibly seem like a logical response to seeing those who you regard as "like yourself" marginalized and eliminated - and that doesn't necessarily need an "antique superstition" any more than it takes a "sick and psychopathic minority" the author is less than qualified to comment on this subject. Meanwhile, those capable of seeing potentially rational people as a "sick and psychopathic minority" are just as competent to blow them, their families, their relatives, their co-religionists and even just those who have a similar skin color or accent away with some nice clean bombs, or even some nasty, dirty bombs, as those "who believe in creationism" or the "non-rational basis of the putative values they represent".


*Deliberate not in the sense of a conspiracy, but in the sense of it being separately and jointly convenient to the believers so to do.
**It is probably worth observing that out of the forty-one suicide bombers that emerged in the long war against the Israeli, American and other occupiers of the Lebanon during the eighties, of whom thirty-eight have been reliably identified, they reflected the demography of the Lebanon fairly well. Twenty-seven were from leftist political groups (e.g. Lebanese Communist Party, Arab Socialist Union), three were Christians (contrary to later assertions about "the first female suicide bomber" echoed here, one of these was a female. And she was a University graduate and  high-school teacher) and only 8 were Islamic fundamentalists (of which Lebanon has a small, but like the rest of the Middle East under Bush's influence growing, number). All were born in the Lebanon. In other words, rather than "Islamic fundamentalists," or "Hezbollah the terrorist organization's members", they were merely Lebanese resistance fighters fighting in the only way they perceived as being available to them. Israel was very competent and the Lebanese are very smart. So they learned how to fight effectively and ultimately Israel could not afford the cost of the opposed occupation and eventually retreated. Interesting to consider that if Hezbollah had not fought back, that Israel would still likely be occupying the Lebanon.[ Hermit,  General / Serious Business / Inciting a War, 2006-08-04 ] (And I would suggest that the entire preamble is relevant here).
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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