Re: Re: Interesting take on Scien
By: sn0w0wl to Curt on Thu Dec 10 2009 12:00 am
> just my opinion though...course I'm not an extremist...
No, it sounds like you are a moderate. According to Sam Harris, moderates are
the most problematic of all:
The Problem with Religious Moderates
We can no longer afford the luxury of political correctness. When religion
causes violence, its root claims must be challenged.
BY: Sam Harris
While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in
light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers
no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. The problem that
religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything
very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that
fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of
belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because
their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as
religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a
full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or
even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a
variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with
God.
Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question-i.e., that we know
there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us-religious moderation
will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith
is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor
does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting
the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings. Religious
moderation, insofar as it represents an attempt to hold on to what is still
serviceable in orthodox religion, closes the door to more sophisticated
approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong communities.
Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight
and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.
Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on
the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience,
moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient
superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was
passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their
basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such
subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics
suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values
and spiritual experience.
Imagine that we could revive a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth
century. The man would prove to be a total ignoramus, except on matters of
faith. His beliefs about geography, astronomy, and medicine would embarrass
even a child, but he would know more or less everything there is to know about
God. Though he would be considered a fool to think that the earth is flat, or
that trepanning constitutes a wise medical intervention, his religious ideas
would still be beyond reproach. There are two explanations for this: either we
perfected our religious understanding of the world a millennium ago-while our
knowledge on all other fronts was still hopelessly inchoate-or religion, being
the mere maintenance of dogma, is one area of discourse that does not admit of
progress. We will see that there is much to recommend the latter view.
With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of the
data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of
understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress;
its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less. Progress in
religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of present inquiry, not
the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true now should be
discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to
the rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire project
of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the changes that have
come over us-culturally, technologically, and even ethically. Otherwise, there
are few reasons to believe that we will survive it.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to
keep using the word "God" as though we knew what we were talking about. And
they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in
the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred.
To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world-to say, for
instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of
life-destroying gibberish-is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently
conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political
correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the
iconography of our ignorance. "
Nightcrawler +o Dark Sanctuary
darksanctuary.servebbs.com
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