Modern Enlightenment man had thought, now that the secularisation of the public and their lives was nearly completed, that religion and its expressions; religious aspirations and spiritual phrasing and its intervention within the political life were over.
The political free man would derive from its social being his independance, the political environment would have become emancipated and thus be freed from all what is religious and devine. Today, that thought is no more a devoted wish of those who call themselves Aufklärung philosophers. Religion, religious thought and other spiritual trends show that their weltanschuung questions can 't be confined to the personal domain. Cultural philosophers too doubt the radical Laïcitié of the political and social life. Seemed it to be that the discussion about these things was over, today due to certain events, it is the themse of modern thought.
Especially what is happening in the US is food for thought. Where the Founding Fathers were concious partisans of the Enlightenment and in fact were and are fundamentalists, todays Amercicans dig more deeper and try to move the personal / private convictions and beliefs up to the (inter)national and the constitutional. This new kind of religious imperalism is dangerous because not alone it rejects what is modern ( Freud, Marx, Darwin, Feminism, Evolution, Atheism; intellectualism, rationalism,...) but due to their almost sacral belief / respect in / for the Constitution and its admendments they drag theselves ( and the world) into an odd- paradoxal position.
The US is under the spell of religious inspired thought, and that is so dan- gerous, so ideological perverse and so imperalistic that counteractions are needed. But where to begin if we acknowledge the simple fact how powerful religious thought has become ! How do we fight an enemy who is even more eager to spread Gods word than us !? How do we fight the enemy within who beliefs that the End of Times finally is arrived !?
How do we persuade, how in Gods name is it possible that we can 't and couldn 't convince people to follow in the footsteps of the Enlightenments principles !? How is it that we ain 't all atheists in the first place !? What went wrong !? Why can 't we persuade people to be rational, independent and individua- listic, atheistic, secular and liberal !? Todays freedom is liberal freedom and thus the idea of self- determination is inbedded. People think they know better and best and don 't accept any interference of what so ever. But can we handle this freedom !? Do we need religion, do we need religious thought !? What is wrong of being an atheist, being atheistic, what is wrong with atheism !?
I don 't know ! But what is the alternative to get things right !? That is inflecibility towards the Constitution wins from relious fundamen- talism !? Is the position of the US in the debate that of an Enlightenment fundamentalist !? Does the US handles in principle undogmatic views in a dogmatic manner !? And fundamentalism isn 't simply following rules. Fundamentalists are people who reject the traditional tenets and study the texts for themselves . By thinking they search for an undoubted fundament. Atheism is indeed the anti- meme of religion, but it won 't set it aside.
Re:Enlighttenment Fundamentalists !?
« Reply #1 on: 2007-01-06 15:19:00 »
I'll admit that I'm not familiar with the non-English terms you used, and that some passages of your post confused me a bit. But there are two points to which I wish to respond: First of all, if you were asserting that our founding fathers were religious fundamentalists, see http://non-religious.com/quotes.html. Frankly, I do not agree that they were fundamentalists about ANYTHING, though they all did agree pretty much with certain Enlightenment ideas.
Next: I could make a whole post in itself as to this, but regarding why we haven't been able to convince people to abandon their beliefs...well, we've been using the wrong strategies and approaching the situation from the wrong perspectives. Even the liberal Enlightenment idea of freedom never abandoned the principle that no one is free to perpetuate socially-detrimental actions. I've never heard of even one thinker who advocated the freedom to rape, murder, and steal at will. However, back then most thinkers seemed to believe that most "religion" is relatively harmless if practiced in private and not backed by any State endorsement. Nowadays, we see that this is not the case. Certain memes--i.e. religion--are effectively HARMFUL SOCIAL VIRII. The idea that people should be allowed to believe whatever they want about God is, to be blunt, out-dated. Religion is a plague and needs to be cured.
How to do this though? I have some ideas. One is to publicize all the ways in which Scientific Rational Atheism is better than religion at all the things religion claims to be good for. S.R.A. is a better source of ethics, it's a better source of purpose and meaning in life, it offers better means for coping with grief, it offers a better explanation for how the world works, it offers better ways to organize society, and it offers more ways to improve the quality of life. And by "better" I mean "more conducive to the survival of our species, and of each of us as individuals." Religion persists because (among other reasons) people feel like they need it. We Atheists need to lead both by example and by argument to show them that they DON'T, and furthermore that they're better off without it.
Next, we have to recognize that trying to convert Fundamentalists is a lost cause. It's the agnostics, the "holiday Christians", and the apathetic that we should target, because unlike the fundamentalists, these groups are NOT IMMUNE to rational argument. Most of these people would be Atheists if they were given good reason to be, so we must give them reasons! It's the "swing" states that win elections, remember? If we can build an Atheist majority among the electorate, we can push back the tide of religious influence in our government. That is a good first step in eliminating the Theistic threat to our species.
I've never heard of even one thinker who advocated the freedom to rape, murder, and steal at will.
The Marquis de Sade. He was contemporary with the Founders, and as he was quite notorious and the French were our allies some (particularly Benjamin Franklin) were undoubtably aware of his writings.
Re:Enlighttenment Fundamentalists !?
« Reply #3 on: 2007-01-07 08:16:17 »
I may stand corrected. Did he earnestly believe his own writings, or was he just doing it to be controversial? Did anyone actually take him seriously? And didn't they lock him in an asylum?
Even Anton Lavey limited human freedom to "within one's lair, where all who enter do so knowing the conditions of their entry".
You wrote, " however, most think religion is pretty harmless. Nowadays, religion are effectively Harmful Social Virii. Religion is a plague and needs to be cured. Religion persists because people feel like they ' need ' it...."
Hm...yes, I agree with this view, but I think though that we need more or less an adjustment to the facts. What is forgotten, where noone is talking about is that religion / faith have worked its way up thru' the evolutionary pipeline and responded to the challenges of our modern times ! Religion, and specific Christianity, endured, in spite of itself, an internal transformation, in order, in pure Darwinian form to survive. But what is more striking is that Christianity didn 't simply survived, adapted itself to the changes but it made way, as its very own survival strategy for atheism, secularism and in the end for the social community. ( religion and the divine are the foundations for these things, they sprout out of the dichotomy...)
Christianity found its evolutionary niche right in the middle of the Western world, transformed itself, let in rationality, discussed its own rites and beliefs, re- interpreted its dogma's and convictions, allowed people and communities to step out of believing all together. It transformed itself from the institution is once was into a personal religion. It becomes more and more a religion of Pelgrimage, of Testimony, of Convertion. Re- Born Christians say it all !!
Christianity becomes a religon of the individual, ethics on a pure personal level, more a case of Sense than of Truth ! A religious personal act. Christianity presses itself in the middle of peoples memetic natural selection dictionary. It didn 't disappear and it won 't go away ! True believers, those infected with the HSV are trying to reverse the natural / evolutionary loop of the religion they belief in by fighting atheism, reason and rationality. Christianity transformed itself into a rational religion where some who belief did take up the challenges of modern society and began to think how to fill up the gaps left by freedom and democracy.
This is a complete different approach than pounding belief upon innocent people. Christianity is now a solo- religion, a kind of belief- individualism has set in and despite your thoughts about SRA- religion / Christianity / belief is here to stay ! It evolves away from politics but the problem remains. People, like- minded religious ones socialize and form strong pressure groups. The kind of thing Iam hoping for is that religion evolves further and skip collective modes all together. We have to wait and see. Fighting it...won 't solve the problem.
Re:Enlighttenment Fundamentalists !?
« Reply #5 on: 2007-01-09 19:55:03 »
Kenneth, I disagree that religion is here to stay. The fact that the progress of science has been so successful in forcing some religious organizations to change and adapt--and the fact that those adaptations almost universally take the form of limiting what religion can relevantly say about life--to me appear as signs that religion, like many genetic traits rendered useless by a change in circumstances, may be disappearing from the gene/meme pool. I view these "adapted" religions as the old cartoon character Wile. E. Coyote who has just run off a cliff chasing the Road Runner, but still hangs in the air because he has not yet noticed that there is no ground beneath his feet. I dream of the day that religious organizations realize that by "letting reason in", they have walked off a cliff, and subsequently must fall to their demise.
However, I also disagree that religions are uniformly trying to adapt themselves to changin circumstances. While many Christian sects are attempting to become more "progressive", personal, and/or open, many other sects (and other religions entirely, including but not limited to Islam and Judaism) are responding in the opposite manner, by becoming hardline fundamentalists. Perhaps these are the minority, but they are a powerful, vocal, and dangerous minority--a very significant minority.
As I weyken, what makes religion a dangerous force is NOT the obviously harmful doctrines or teachings specific to certain religions; it is the compulsion to "believe" in unnecessary fictions. Any religion that grounds its teachings in mysticism or in some absolute metaphysical assumption that is "beyond" logical or empirical testability, regardless of how benign its teachings, is antithetical to science and reason, two of our most powerful tools for survival. Science and religion cannot logically coexist, unless one is willing to perpetually restrict one's religious views to keep up with the discoveries of science. If one was willing to do this, I'd have to ask: if science can shrink your God indefinitely, why continue to worship him when science is clearly more powerful?
In so far as Christians insist on the existence of an anthropomorphic personal paternal God that fathered a mortal son, or insist on the existence of the soul and a heavenly/hellacious afterlife, they have NOT "let reason in". Taken to their logical conclusions, both of these beliefs serve to reassure people that this life, this society, this species, this planet "doesn't really matter." We're all gonna live forever in some immortal non-physical world, right? And if God is all powerful, and he has decided when the world should end, nothing we do can bring about the end of the world against his wishes. Any Christian who would argue otherwise cannot be called a Christian without inviting paradox.
Frankly, I find modern progressive Christians to be in a way worse than their fundamentalist brethern, for in trying to reconcile reason and scripture, they have undermined and compromised both. Their "adaptations" consist of little more than dismissing an ever-growing number of biblical passages as "metaphor" and "allegory", or of simply ignoring whatever they deem unhelpful. This fatally undermines any authority they ascribe to the passages that remain; either the Bible is the literal word of God, or it's a storybook with no more moral authority than Mother Goose. However, at least many of these "progressive" Christians are not entirely immune to rational argument; press them enough and many of them will begin to abandon their beliefs.
Lastly, I'd like to say that "Fighting" is the wrong word to describe the approach I wish to take to religion. Fighting implies a contest between two fairly-equally matched opposing forces. There is no contest between religion and Scientific Rational Atheism; S.R.A. is superior in every respect, and I will gladly defend that point if you wish to challenge it. Anything religion can do, S.R.A. can do better, at least in terms of survival value for our species. What I desire to do is expose the public to the superiority of S.R.A. Given S.R.A., religion is obsolete. The only thing religion still has going for it is sheer numerical supremacy; but history is rife with examples of victories by the out-numbered underdog.
Kenneth, I disagree that religion is here to stay. The fact that the progress of science has been so successful in forcing some religious organizations to change and adapt--and the fact that those adaptations almost universally take the form of limiting what religion can relevantly say about life--to me appear as signs that religion, like many genetic traits rendered useless by a change in circumstances, may be disappearing from the gene/meme pool.
Hi there,
Sorry to disappoint you, but I am afraid religion is a thing for all times, although I'm an atheist myself and I can 't see any reason why people should belief in the first place. Today' s Christianity evolves into a religion of functionality, that is :- the ethical part, the moral side of the coin is used, is abused to get it better, to create status, to get in the end the girl. The functionality becomes a part of our sexual, meme- tical, genetical toolkit to survive, to propagate. We get the girl because we 're against abortion but full for familylife, because we have compassion, because we feel pitty for those who are poor. For the girl signs that we can be good fathers....
Although I have to look more deeper into SRA, I agree with the arguments you make, however science has to acknowledge the fact that religion / faith is a very strong memetic tool. Moreover, the power of the word, any word, is the bias of believing. You believe that SRA is better just because words in a proper manner written down make more sense for you. But don 't forget that the Bible too is just a bunch of fucked up words written down just in the context the writers wanted it to be. The Old Testement is a political book but on the other hand none liberal soceity is willing to recognize how bad people need religion ! Maybe we have looked at the world down on from our ivory tower for too long and didn 't we see the growing sentiment for religion !? The enormous sense of security one finds in reading the Koran and live by its rules equalises the sense secular, liberal, atheistic people find in reading scientific texts or hold on to the literary canon. People are afraid for the doubt and rend themselves to the power / tiranny of the word. Maybe is our lineair view about our world and history wrong. Maybe there is an end to progress and do we go back in a great roundabout to the very start, back to a period of pre- Enlightenment thinking. And is religion and the growing interest in it, part of that puzzle.
Religion, won 't disappear, it is reduced to kinds of simple mass,poffed up, swollen with the importance that Believers attach to it. Believing is a kind of patchwork. Rather one that will never tire or hobbling back. People are composing their religious score and form due to it different / divers associations with ( more) aspects of different traditions, belief- items and practices up to the point where they hardly can conceal their coquerty. The new goal of religion, of Christianity is participation. Its educative, cultural, social institutions whose values aren 't fixed but constant variable must lower down the threshold for the oh so many little individualities within the masses. With it, religion remains, its dogma's saved from the rubble, salvation lies now in the fact that everyone can find suitable cuts without really ' believing '. Religion's goal is to ' reach', to ' touch ' people NOT to convert, NOT to postulate, but being something that is easily recognized, an intention. How higher the liberal community rises, the more pieces Christianity seem to be loosing, but the more it was dislocated, the more it scatters, the more it inbedded itself within the object of liberal desire. Christianity / religion buried itself, or better, got to the nerves, engulfed man !
But let us turn things upside down, inside out ! Religion isn 't on the move up. It is where political and social systems are weakened, where they fail, where they collapse their temporaly suspension opened up niched where religion simply stepped in. The consequence of such evolution is a new configuration of the political- religious landscape. The mistake of modernism is that the Enlightenment mis- judged its own utopic idealism:- where they thought man will abondon religion where reason, rationality, science, technology ' prooved ' they were right, it set a fundamental choise aside, namely the choise of being religious all together. The Enlightenment changed fiction into faction and in the end the movement became hostile towards man himself. The Enlightenment needs a kind of secularisation in the sense that she acknowledges the fact that she herself is formed by and within the Christian heritage and that religion / faith are part of mOdernism.
Furthermore, I know enough people who 's love- ones, children, friends died too soon, and they hope that those are happy now or at least find the peace they so desperate longed for,...how are you gonna ' convince ' them to change to SRA !? For those people it is important that a heaven, or even hell exist ! Christianity is a religion of hope ! Are you gonna take that away from those millions dieing in Africa believing that their sarrow, their frustration is part of their salvation !? How should you change in such belief by rationality, reason, logic, scientific proof and getting the same result !? Changing it would mean a very hard cold blooded blow to the way millions around the world live their lives and IMO it wouldn' t do nothing for bringing down the suffering, the sarrow, the grief, the mourning. You change one belief system in for another. The pre- supposed hard Darwinian rational arguments you are willing to apply won 't do the trick and aren 't things people associate with life.
It is not the sheer numerical supremacy you have to reckon with but with the ' belief ' itself !
Re:Enlighttenment Fundamentalists !?
« Reply #7 on: 2007-01-12 12:54:45 »
Kenneth, if you are of the belief that religion necessarily will exist for all times, despite the possibility of events like the technological "Singularity", the rise of spirothetes, and other eventual advances in science that quite probably will make religious belief nearly impossible to maintain with even the barest degree of logical consistency, there is nothing I can say to persuade you otherwise. Inspite of the fact that a growing number of people are embracing Atheism (thus demonstrating that there is nothing about religion "hard-wired" into the human psyche), a fact that demonstrates people from many (if not all walks of life) have found Atheism ideal for their "spiritual" needs, you seem to believe that for some reason or another the "rest" of humanity has some cognitive inability to let go of religion. Fine. I can't argue with that. All I can say is that what you are proposing (that religion will fragment, scatter, and imbed itself into everyday life through increasingly dislocated, generalized and non-dogmatic means) begins to look less like religion, and more like just tradition. There may always be churches, there may always be Christmas and Hannukah...the iconography and texts may stand for ages, but they alone are not sufficient to constitute "religion".
However, I can address your questioning of whether S.R.A. (or just Atheism in general) can provide adequate "theodicies" (consolatory explanations) to grief-stricken humans faced with the loss of a loved one, but I'll do it in another post called "How I became an Atheist" in the Religion and Philosophy forum. Because, you see, I lost a loved one, and while religion failed me in trying to deal with it, Atheism and Science have given me much more effective ways to deal. I hope to illustrate to you with my story the ways S.R.A. are superior in dealing with grief and loss.
Kenneth, if you are of the belief that religion necessarily will exist for all times, despite the possibility of events like the technological "Singularity", the rise of spirothetes, and other eventual advances in science that quite probably will make religious belief nearly impossible to maintain with even the barest degree of logical consistency, there is nothing I can say to persuade you otherwise.
Perplextus, Thanks for the respons ! I have giving this some thought and I know I won 't convince you and that isn 't my goal either. What is of interest is how we both stick to our ' beliefs '. We agree in disagree.... But back to the drawingboard....
I don 't want necessarily that religion will exist for all times, it is just the most logical evolutionary explanation there is for certain events happening since the rise of the Enligh- tenment movements and the beginning of Modernism. Where IMO religion is fragmentated, dispersed over its own inner convictions and dogma's; liberal societies don 't excape either to the kind of evolution that is going on. Religion is now scattered over the individualities within the masses, where in the early days everyone had to belief and believed in quite the same things, nowadays everyone picks out what is necessary or can be of importance to his or hers propagation. Where Christianity stood for hope, love, compassion, solidarity, respect,...people today pick out just what they value most and live and work accordingly. So will people blast themselves skyhigh in the name of their god and other will join the Red Cross or Doctors without Frontiers.
I admit that this stands far from what religion is all about but when we talk about humanism, solidarity and respect, atleast it is important to know where the roots of such preferences ( evolutionary onces) stand and come from. Religion, and thus Christianity, evolves up to a kind of faith which doesn 't seek any kind of universal validity, but it wants to co- exist with the secular liberal trend for individualism_ it orders the extreme secularisation of its own perspective and binds us to come forward with clear and deliberated ideas.We are all individuals, with ideas about freedom, democracy and in a way we are obliged to have an opinion of our own simply to survive_ that is a consequence of the Darwinian rule. The evolution of Christianity shows, and belief me, there is one...and in that respect the same thing can be said about the liberal society_ an extreme disintegration of assumptions, dispositions, needs, desires, convictions, preferences, ideas, validity into little individualities. It is just within the radical dispersion of the Christian, historical heritage that we 've lost the way to see where the liberal, secular respect for minorities, dissidents comes from; where the dissolution of sacral structures leaded to; where the proces of the change- over from slave/ servant to the autonomous individual has been marked and thus where ideas like about atheism and SRA began to form. In a way you 've moved already 2/ 3 steps further up the ladder of memetical evolution.
I don 't say that some people have some cognitive ability to let go of religion, it is just that one is drawn to one single aspect of Christianity, this propagates, thus never can be neutral, but always ventures for any interpretation, escapes from the extreme laws and rules by the wear of Christianity itself, but she stays the only fundamental maxim we got. In other words, it is just by the weakened position of strong structures ( like the enfeeblement of Christianity bears the liberal secular community; like a for ever evolving materia- listic, technological world creates religious secularition) that people feel the need to return to those historical contingent frameworks of which is presumed they hold the answers.
Much of the Christian values seem more popular than they were 30- 40 years ago. There is the general rejection of racism, a certain humanism is spreading, the idea of war has been renounced. In other words over and out with, with the modern anti- clerical state of affairs that was based upon the self- complacement of the scientific and historic reason that saw no limit to man 's completion. It seemed so easy, it was so easy to talk about the free, secular man in Enlightenment terms, but individuality isn 't that simple ! What religion does is showing that she still stands strong, that she isn 't weakened, so she holds the dogmatic prin- ciples where in contrast the liberal society gives the indi- vidual everything she got over all possible angles to become an individual, but where with the man in question seem to be lost any way.
What is of interest is how we both stick to our ' beliefs '. We agree in disagree.... But back to the drawingboard.... I don 't want necessarily that religion will exist for all times, it is just the most logical evolutionary explanation there is for certain events happening since the rise of the Enligh- tenment movements and the beginning of Modernism.
To say that I have a belief I'm sticking to here is a mistake. Do I believe that religion will someday be wiped out? Goodness, no! I can think of countless things that could prevent that from happening. However, if current intellectual trends based on the progress of science were allowed to continue unchecked for a sufficient amount of time, I think it entirely logical that religion could be relegated to the "scrap heap of mythology". Do I believe religion is unnecessary, or useless, or harmful even? No. I simply have no evidence to the contrary, and thus no reason to maintain otherwise.
Your argument is entirely based on what you perceive as the "advantages" religion gives to people, and appears also to ignore the social progress S.R.A. has made in overcoming those advantages. Excuse the polemical nature of what follows, it is merely my attempt to respond to your "argument" in kind.
Historically, atheists usually found themselves at a loss for something when they abandoned religion; many of them made the "sacrifice" only for the sake of truth, because they believed truth to be more valuable than the "helpful" aspects of religion. The notions of sacrifice and loss is spread liberally through the writings of many early atheist commentators. At the same time, it was also seen as a heavy burden to bear: the loss of religion necessitated for many people a new toilsome struggle to find meaning, to give a foundation to ethics, to explain various phenomena of existence...early atheists were indeed faced with much existential difficulty, which made their cause thoroughly unappealing and memetically-weak. For many, the chief attraction of atheism was its apparent permissiveness of moral relativism, the old "anything goes" mentality that seemed to sanctify hedonism and hypocrisy. Thus many early proponents of atheism were vicious and unethical, they sought to do away with religion only because it stood as an obstacle to their basic desires.
The case for Atheism has considerably evolved since those days. Scientists and philosophers from many fields who have taken up the cause of Atheism have helped the growing irreligion overcome the snares and pitfalls of its youth. No longer do atheists struggle to explain the strange phenomenon of existence; no longer do atheists founder on the shoal of the impossibility of ethics amid the sea of moral relativism; no longer do atheists bemoan their Sisyphean fate of meaningless toil. Atheists can now have their cake and eat it, too! It has become possible to shrug off the burdens of religion--of metaphysical belief in general--and walk through life on lightened feet. It has become possible for one to gleefully watch the Sun of religion setting over the far horizon--for the last time--and have no fear of the impending darkness: what need have we for fear, when we know that that Sun is but the torch of our forefathers, and that we moderns have made for ourselves torches that shine EVEN BRIGHTER?
That religion has any advantage over atheism, science, and reason: my own life is refutation enough of that. That others have not yet noticed the brightness of the torch we atheists carry, and scamper for the far horizon in a desperate attempt to catch more light from a Sun that has been outshined by the very light it gave birth to...this cannot be explained in terms of the brightness of the setting sun. It can only be explained in terms of a mindless fear of darkness, of a refusal to trust what is new. Humanity invented religions braces for its weak young legs, to help it learn to stand. Now that its legs have grown strong, humanity can cast off those braces. Only custom, and the mindless fear of falling inspite of our mature strength and balance, has prevented our species from casting these braces off as the scraps they have truly become. So long as we wear them, we can stand...but not until we cast them off will we learn to walk--or run.
Religion, and thus Christianity, evolves up to a kind of faith which doesn 't seek any kind of universal validity, but it wants to co- exist with the secular liberal trend for individualism_ it orders the extreme secularisation of its own perspective and binds us to come forward with clear and deliberated ideas.We are all individuals, with ideas about freedom, democracy and in a way we are obliged to have an opinion of our own simply to survive_ that is a consequence of the Darwinian rule. The evolution of Christianity shows, and belief me, there is one...and in that respect the same thing can be said about the liberal society_ an extreme disintegration of assumptions, dispositions, needs, desires, convictions, preferences, ideas, validity into little individualities. It is just within the radical dispersion of the Christian, historical heritage that we 've lost the way to see where the liberal, secular respect for minorities, dissidents comes from; where the dissolution of sacral structures leaded to; where the proces of the change- over from slave/ servant to the autonomous individual has been marked and thus where ideas like about atheism and SRA began to form. In a way you 've moved already 2/ 3 steps further up the ladder of memetical evolution.
You are making the statistician's error of conflating "correlation" with "causality." That these liberal humanistic ideals emerged under (and to an extent according to) principles of religion does not mean that religion is necessary for these ideals. Yes, religion was the best tool for justification back when these ideals were born; does that mean it is the only tool? Certainly not. Religion, because of its omnipresence, certainly shaped the expression of these ideals, but can take no credit for their birth. There is as much--and you should know this--within world religions that is AGAINST humanistic liberal ideals as there is in favor of them. Google the "Skeptic's Annotated Bible". Religion is an expression of innate evolved human ethics, and a circular way of justifying them. Religion is the result of Reason's encounter with the limited empirical data of primitive peoples--it is an attempt to explain the world according to the best evidence available at the time. Religion was born from Reason, not the other way around...and like some species of insects, Religion tried to devour its parent. Science, liberalism, humanism...these did not come from Religion, nor did they require Religion. They are not children of Religion, they are more like half-siblings.
Kenneth wrote, What is of interest is how we both stick to our ' beliefs '. We agree in disagree.... But back to the drawingboard.... I don 't want necessarily that religion will exist for all times, it is just the most logical evolutionary explanation there is for certain events happening since the rise of the Enligh- tenment movements and the beginning of Modernism. Perplextus replied, To say that I have a belief I'm sticking to here is a mistake. Do I believe that religion will someday be wiped out? Goodness, no! I can think of countless things that could prevent that from happening.
Kenneth replies,
Yesterday I tried to post this but it failed, so I gonna split it up in 2 parts, this is part 1.
Ok I stand corrected ! It was just a way of saying things ! But yes, I agree and moreover one of the fundamental problems of todays masses is their lack of memetical, psychological, neurological and even biological ' strenght '. Yes, memetically, weak they are! But in the context of this thread can we atleast say that the liberal community is the legal, historical heir/ hostage of religion !? It seems however to me that she is over- optimis- tic and delivers fault, wrong and elusive values. That is if we look at its credo's_ freedom, democracy and liberty_ where with people try to fill the emotional empty- ness since religion has left the building. It obliges and invites, these things set ethical acts in motion, they do this far more by all sorts of romantic provocations than by yet factual context. We aren 't yet free in the true sense of the word- discon- nected from all ol' traditions. Today, what is left is a strip- ped, corrupted Self_ with only one virtue, freedom or at least eventually sincerity, a common reasonbleness, poli- tical correctness.
Liberal communities are defenceless against the irrespon- sibility, and the lack of sense of direction of that lousy little bit of self- asuredness which goes hand in hand with the ( pseudo)- scientific determination. And moreover, there is still the illusion that we can escape from the Darwinistic machinery that rules our world. Don 't misunderstand me !!
But as long we hold onto as Hegel to the charm of History, like Kant to Reason, like man of today to Freedom , Tole- rance and Democracy to find Meaning and Purpose, to the Believe there exists a foundation to ethics, we hypothesize a form of reality that ' exist ' outside ourselves. We must come up with an ideal, save fininshing point, one that reflects one ' psychology ', one that will lead us to a perfect self- asuredness that will make us totally detached and totally free. Atheism and SRA are only steps, sources for inspiration. They hang in- a tight squeeze and it contributes obviously to the warm athmosphere but we musn 't forget about the condition humaine.
We must more or less condemn man as a quasi- genetic/ memetical essentially automatic object, largely defined by history and describe him as a heir of what his forfathers prefered, sticked to and stood for. Man and his psyche, believes what is sexual and is ambi- guous and what is hard to control and to understand. Fantasy is much stronger than Reason! Man isn 't objective and unselfish ! People are genetic/ memetical defined and determinated_ only the ' strong ones ', those with NOT the easy going, the ego centristics, those who cross and recross the bridges, only the Ubermenschen can handle the truth.
Our freedom, morality and the ethics we have in common, are based upon the fact that we choose and can choose! I admit, we choose, may choose, because genes / memes have prepared us for making choises and thus is our ' free choise ' no more than the result of an impersonal mecha- nism, a hidden weave, a background with a life_ the ani- mated ideas about freedom, justice, will- power, the simple, healthty thoughts of reason knowing that there are duties, rights and obligations to administer are complicated enough to right themselves.
But who we really are is due to the choises we make and the deeds we perform and that depends upon the condition of the system. And we can_ may_ change it, how egoistic the system may be, to our liking and push it in any direction we want if choises has to made especially at the level of survival. The Ubermensch- idea is a memetical technique, which directs our thoghts directly to the idea.
People are lost these days because they can 't resist ar may resist the powerful egocentric machinery of Darwinism that rewards constantly and consequently man in his search for straight answers. But it isn 't part of our nature_ the kind of language used is suspicious; the conceptions considerable non- characteristic, the techniques of religion on the other hand stand closer to us and we believe them to be more trustfully. Believing/ religion is of interest on a pure psychological level. The idea that all have to make sense somehow keeps dispair and sarrow at a distance; the difficulty with such thought is maintaining it without loosing oneself in the proces! That happens, of course and the idea consequently runs wild in one's head. But from the point of view of meme- tics the idea is just a quick step to crank up another more shadowy emotive use of language, to get ever changing patterns of behaviour and attitudes in order to propagate.
That is what I am trying to say, that as well as religion, SRA and atheism are fake_ the idea must be reduced to the more understandable thought that they are just ' sugges- tions' of a pschological force that we just derive from and just find within ourselves. The idea of faith/ SRA works only within certain bounderies/ scenes and brings along a growing sense of direction_ alone with a certain amount of experience someone can be made ' to fully trust ' what lies hidden within what has been told. That is equally so for the true Believer as it is for the fol- lower of SRA/ atheism. God only exists as a kind of ' necessity ', serving the memes. That someone beliefs or not is a Darwinian coincidence.
It is a fact that a lot of people can 't bear the superior arguments of Darwinistic ' reality ', much of them want to live within a condition of illusion, irony and fantasy so that they don 't have to think twice what it would really mean to live within the ' real/ true reality '. Maybe noone will ever know what reality is all about anyway!
But it seems that we can 't accept a pure and simple psychological explanation. How stronger the idea that other people are quite different; accepting the fact that someone have needs and desires that are equally urgent than the ones we have, how more difficult or more easier, to fight it. Memes don 't tell us solely what we shouldn 't. If the moment of choosing has broken, more likely is it that the nature of our deed was already determinated by the quality of the experience or was indebted by the number of past ex- periences.
Of course, that doesn 't mean than that memetic dispositions are useless or are untrue. What lies within the memetical mechanism liberates. The ideas about religion and atheism are eachother complete opposites, but both are side- e(a)f- fects of the power and violence of the memetical mechanism. It is true however that common Darwinistic research and common sense will eventually win, and it is even better to let go of the picture of God all together, but I am afraid that this too will be short lived. If we don 't believe, the problem with Evil, for example will never occur. It is than very hard to pin point our attention towards the suffering of others without representening it completely wrong and different. The hard Darwinistic mechanism does hurt itself sometimes. But there has to be more than just the blank guess that ' there is more to it ' than just selfish genes and memes, so they say !!
But we shouldn 't mess it up with a kinky theological point of view either, that's for sure ! We can and may critisize, change, enlarge the body of Christian faith/ religion_ faith isn 't NOT- representable, and can be defined and equally we are the living proof of necessity and coincidence. Can we say now that religion/ SRA is better or worse than the other !? Surprise or nothing !? No!!!!!
Both are anyhow pre- suppositions and thus disputable. The only thing that we can do is pin point to certain charac- tersitics and usefull metaphors and where necessary come up with efficient conceptions in order to percept certain characteristics. Since that absolute determinism_ natural or otherwise_ can 't be proven in any way, it is atleast permitted to presuppose that a part of us is ' free ' from any given mechanism. I defend this part and I wish that you would do the same or atleast acknowledge the fact that this point is the most important of all.
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