“religion is an insult to human dignity. with or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”
- steven weinberg, 1979 nobel prize winner for physics
i find it fascinating to think that altruism is a development that happened naturally; by process of elimination, it remained alive as a concept programmed into our genes that proved beneficial and remains as a result. science, in this way, and as richard dawkins adamantly explains, is the secret ingredient of atheism that makes it life-affirming. religion dwells in rigidly-asserted assumption while science seeks to constantly understand the truth by adjusting its outlook. religion, a restrictive life banking on eternal vindication in tired rehearsal and science, acutely devoted to the questions of the immediate and the now.
but in secularism and atheism we have also steadily advanced culturally, a process much like the very genetic on goings that brought us to where we are now. things have improved socially where we have abandoned the exhausted hollows of faith and allowed for liberal interpretation and interaction. progressive notions regarding the need for equality among all people regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation have been attained through education and the questioning of a system conveniently focused around a patriarchal deity.
in learning to selectively follow conveniently applicable areas of text written thousands of years ago, one thus negates the integrity of the whole as an infallible source. and to follow the whole of any major theological text is simply a means to recalibrate a phallic assertion within the programming of our social structures and ongoing cultural story. religion seeks to extend the chapter of human history that has been drawing gradually - progressively - to a close.
religions and faith encourage us - sedate us - beyond the grasp of the experience we have at this moment. can you recall the names of your familial predecessors more than four generations ago? do you know the lives of each of your great-great-great-great grandmothers? their lasting legacy is you, the ongoing experience of your life in the perpetuation of the genes each of those women passed to you. indeed, you may have very little remaining connection to each of the contributing women in your history, aside from the genetic legacy you are proof of. this same process happens all around us on the earth - not in an unproven postmortem haven of bliss and reward for the rehearsal we had as organic matter. you feel that? life is happening to you right now.
the beauty all around us - in the earth, the stars, all life and its origins - cry out to us to explore and interpret the mystery of simply being something, anything. try to take in the vastness of the universe or consider the age of our incredible home planet. take it all in and see where we, each of us the product of countless genetic permutations that have occurred along the way, have come in making the world a better place through peace and altruism and recognizing the value of order and welfare and empathy. it is a behavior patterned that we are programmed to accept and pass on, not for fear of an consequential afterlife but instead for the benefit of the guarantee we have in the cognition of now. it is by no coincidence that we love - for it is by love that we are we.
"we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. most people are never going to die because they're never going to be born. the number of people who could be here, in my place, outnumber the sand grains of sahara. if you think of all of the different ways in which our genes could be permuted, you and i are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. we are privilged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world." - richard dawkins, from the root of all evil
Saturday, February 11, 2006
Riding Cockroaches Through Morality Plays
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7 comments:
it is only in a small mind that faith cannot coexist with reason. and only a man who'd never actually known faith would call it hollow.
interesting. i've known faith and was raised in a roman catholic setting for 15 years. i can appreciate the human aspirations that smart principles and good values work to foster, but institutionalized groupthink inhibits individual potential.
should we be indoctrinating our children with falsehoods? religion, as an institution, has had to repeatedly adjust its ever-stubborn stance as science proves the irrefutable. fundamentalists would have us believe that the earth was created in six days about the time that science has shown human beings to be in the advent of the agricultural revolution.
i should hope that the faith you speak of is one that transcends the idea of a deity and embeds itself in the very real human spirit of fairness and virtue.
i suspect that the real picture is not as black and white as the one you paint. religion, as an institution, has, historically, been all the things you have said, and intentionally so. but faith is something very different than religion; it is more than precepts and dogmas, doctrine and belief. it is something living; that which animates all the "goodness" you speak of. tt is faith, in a very general sense, that is the foundation of all belief, hope, and in its splendour, love. it resides in the human spirit, but is not contained therein, as itself transcends all that we could ever hope to be. it is that which links each one of us in one spirit of empathy and understanding, regardless of genetic bond or lack thereof. that is faith. within the model of religion you propose [erroneously] as the only model, faith is indeed dead and individuals are indeed inhibited. but that need not be the case; true faith stimulates the intellect, it does not deaden it.
well said. i suppose my qualm is not at all with faith itself, but rather with an institutionalized attempt to steer and herd the faithful into accepting a whole history of ongoing erroneous judgment. i never claimed that all faith was hollow but instead i try to challenge the exploitation of the faithful. perhaps we have reached a schism in our semantics over this issue.
if you are positing that faith is the stuff of dreams/imagination/ambition, then i will recognize its value by your definition. but to condone a systemic oppression of women, gays, ethnic groups based on ones faith in a text written by men over the course of thousands of years is one of humanity's darkest legacies and should not be accepted on the shallow justification of faith. should millions of catholic africans die of aids because their church won’t allow the use of prophylactics? should a victim of incest be allowed an abortion? it depends who you ask.
do you understand my point? the faith itself is not shallow, but the use of it as a justification (for anything, really) is not sound when the now – the tangible – is an actual reality that we should really be trying to invest more in.
RIDE THE ROACH BABY, RIDE THE ROACH!
I think you are both a little too faithy, and wrapped up in your own faithiness. That's right... I just invented two, count em, TWO words in that last sentence. Have faith in my ability to constantly manifest this moment as my own.
"It's not about Christianity. It's about being a Christian." - Rob Bell in Nooma
Insert what faith, religion, creed, docterine, internal genetic development of altruism you want into that quote. The point is not the religion, as an institution, but the way of living one's life. How you treat yourself, others and all that surrounds you. But at the pinncal is that your relationship with God is just that: a personal relationship. Not that of an institutionalized groupthink. For those are semantics. It is in the truth of your faith; that relationship.
lighten up
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