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-Unknown Thank you Allie |
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You may have even heard me called an atheist, but that isn't quite true. Atheism is unprovable, so uninteresting. However unlikely it is, we can never be certain that God once existed-and has now shot off to infinity, where no one can ever find him...Like Guatama Buddha, I take no position on this subject. My field of interest pertaining to this matter is the psychopathology known as Religion. True the word "psychopathology" may be a harsh judgment, but it is amply justified by history. Imagine that you're an intelligent extraterrestrial, concerned only with verifiable truths. You discover a species that has divided itself up into thousands-no, by now millions-of tribal groups holding an incredible variety of beliefs about the origin of the universe and how to behave in it. Although many have ideas in common, even when there's a ninety-nine percent overlap, the remaining one percent is enough to set them killing and torturing each other, over trivial points of doctrine utterly meaningless to outsiders. How to account for such irrational behavior? Lucretius hit it on the nail when he said that religion was the by-product of fear-a reaction to a mysterious and often hostile universe. For much of human prehistory, it may have been a necessary evil-but why was it so much more evil than necessary-and why does it survive when it's no longer necessary? I said evil-and I mean it, because fear leads to cruelty. The slightest knowledge of the Inquisition makes one ashamed to belong to the human species...One of the most revolting books ever published was the Hammer of Witches, written by two sadistic perverts and describing the tortures the Church authorized encouraged!-to extract "confessions" from thousands of harmless old women-not unlike your own grandmother-before it burned them alive...The Pope himself wrote an approving foreword! But most other religions, with a few honorable exceptions, were just as bad as Christianity...Even in our century, little boys were chained and whipped until they'd memorized whole volumes of pious gibberish, and robbed of their childhood and manhood to become monks... Perhaps the most baffling aspect of the whole affair is how obvious madmen, century after century, would proclaim that they-and they alone-had received messages from God. If all messages had agreed, that would have settled the matter. But of course they were wildly discordant-which never prevented self-styled messiahs from gathering thousands-sometimes millions-of adherents, who would fight to the death against equally deluded believers of a microscopically differing faith. The "Rasputin Syndrome," it's been called after the Russian monk who was very peculiar indeed: There are millions of such cases-big and small-all throughout history, in every country. And about one time in a thousand the cult survives for a couple of generations. Perhaps "miracle workers" on television late night are a small problem, true, but I could multiply it by thousands-not just in our century, but all down the ages. There's never been anything, however absurd, that myriads of people weren't prepared to believe, often so passionately that they would fight to the death rather than abandon their illusions. To me, that's a good operational definition of insanity. What's that you ask? Would I argue that anyone with strong religious beliefs was insane? In a strictly technical sense, yes-if they were sincere, and not hypocrites. As I suspect ninety percent were/are. Another question? What about Einstein-a genius, with strong ties to religion and faith? You've chosen a bad example: genius often is! So let's say: not insane, but mentally impaired, owing to childhood conditioning. The Jesuits claimed: "give me a boy for six years, and he is mine for life." If a different faith had gotten to little Einstein in time, he'd have been a devout Hindu or Buddhist-not a Jesuit. And bear in mind that Christians make up only a very small subset of our species: far greater numbers of devotees have given equal reverence to such totally incompatible divinities as Rama, Kali, Siva, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, Osiris, etc., etc.... The most striking-and pitiful-example of a brilliant man whose beliefs turned him into a raving lunatic is that of Conan Doyle. Despite endless exposures of his favorite psychics as frauds, his faith in them remained unshaken. And the creator of Sherlock Holmes even tried to convince the great magician Harry Houdini that he "dematerialized" himself to perform his feats of escapology-often based on tricks that, as Dr. Watson was fond of saying, were "absurdly simple." (See the essay "The Irrelevance of Conan Doyle" in Martin Gardener's The Night is Large.) For details of the Inquisition, whose pious atrocities make Pol Pot and the Nazis look positively benign, see Carl Sagan's devastating attack on New Age Nitwittery, The Demon Haunted World. I wish it-and Martin's book-could be made required reading in every high school and college. At least the U.S. Department of Immigration has taken action against one religion-inspired barbarity. Time magazine ("Milestones," June 24, 1996) reports that asylum must be granted to girls threatened with genital mutilation in their countries of origin. This is a prime example of why I believe religion to be a truly "dirty" thing. Religion, astronomy, and human nature are all very closely intertwined. My next portion of this paper is devoted to those topics: I have found some quotes starting with our sheer ignorance in thinking and believing that we are at the cosmic center stage. We might call this the anthropocentric-the "human-centered"-conceit. This conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God's image: The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe looks just like me. My, what a coincidence! How convenient and satisfying! Xenophanes understood the arrogance of this perspective: "The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair... Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses, and oxen like oxen..." -Xenophanes, sixth-century-B.C. Greek philosopher Such attitudes were once described as "provincial"-the naive expectation that political hierarchies and social conventions of an obscure province extend to a vast empire composed of many different traditions and cultures; that the familiar boondocks, our boondocks, are the center of the world. The country bumpkins know almost nothing about what else is possible. They fail to grasp the insignificance of their province or the diversity of the Empire. With ease, they apply their own standards and customs to the rest of the planet. But plopped down in Vienna, say or Hamburg, or New York, ruefully they recognize how limited their perspective has been. They become "deprovincialized." Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home. "I have... A terrible need... shall I say the word? of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars." -Vincent Van Gogh "Some foolish men declare that the Creator made the world. The doctrine the world has created is ill-advised and should be rejected. If God created the Universe-or, at least, the world-where was he before creation?... How could God have made the world without any raw materials? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression... Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end." -The MajaPurana "What a beautiful sunset," we say, or "I'm up before sunrise." No matter what the scientists allege, in everyday speech we often ignore their findings. We don't talk about the Earth turning, but about the Sun rising and setting. Try formulating it into Copernican language. Would you say, "Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon"? Billy would be long gone before you're finished. We haven't been able even to find a graceful locution that accurately conveys the heliocentric insight. We at the center and everything else circling us is built into our languages; we teach it to our children. This is yet more of that self-congratulatory delusion I was speaking of. We are unreconstructed geocentrists hiding behind a Copernican veneer. One of the few quasi-Copernican expressions in English is "The Universe doesn't revolve around you."-an astronomical truth intended to bring fledgling narcissists down to Earth. In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth goes around the Sun. Let's take a closer look at this famous controversy. In the preface of his book comparing two hypotheses-an Earth-centered and a Sun-centered universe-Galileo had written: The celestial phenomena will be examined, strengthening the Copernican hypothesis until it might seem that this must triumph absolutely. And later in the book he confessed: Nor can I ever sufficiently admire [Copernicus and his followers]; they have through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over what sensible experience plainly showed them... The Church declared, in its indictment of Galileo: The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith. Although Galileo did apologize to the Church for his false opinion, surely the Holy Inquisition ushering the elderly and infirm Galileo to inspect the instruments of torture in the dungeons of the Church. The Church not only admits but requires just such an interpretation. This was not mere scientific caution and restraint, a reluctance to shift a paradigm until compelling evidence, such as the annual parallax, was available. This was a fear of discussion and debate. Censoring alternative views and threatening to torture its proponents betray a lack of faith in the very doctrine and parishioners that are ostensibly being protected. Why were the threats and Galileo's house arrest needed? Cannot truth defend itself in its confrontation with opposing views? Pope John Paul II adds: The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was in some way imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scriptures. Here indeed considerable progress has been made-although proponents of fundamentalist faiths will be distressed to hear from the Pontiff himself that Sacred Scripture is not always literally true. But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? Anne Druyan suggests an experiment: Look at our own pale blue dot in this cosmic soup. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life inhabiting that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim? What do you think they would have to say about our religious views and faith? Finally, I would like to assure my many Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and Muslim friends that I am verily happy that the religion which Chance has given you has contributed to your peace of mind(and often, as Western medical science now reluctantly admits, to your physical well-being). Perhaps it is better to be un-sane and happy, than sane and unhappy. But it is best of all to be sane and happy. Whether our descendants can achieve that goal will be the greatest challenge of the future. Indeed, it may well decide whether we have any future because humans never think for themselves, they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told-and become upset if they are exposed to any different view. The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their "beliefs." The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance to human beings. But at a time when our own behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other views on human awareness or our species is self-congratulatory delusion. -Justin Sirinek |
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