From: Tonie Putter (t.putter@ecoport.org)
Date: Tue 17 Jan 2006 - 12:09:43 GMT
> Chris Taylor <chris.taylor@ebi.ac.uk>
> Subject: Did we change, or did the world change around us?
Wrote:
> Point is almost as soon as I had critical faculties, I chopped
> it; and not just for a lie-in on a Sunday.
There's your answer: religion is a crutch until reason prevails. You either
create values using your own mind, or, as Dan Dennet put it so succinctly;
you leave the dirty work to others. (Unfortunately reason is a necessary but
not a sufficient cause. Furthermore, some things are, intrinsically, really
tough to understand no matter how high your IQ. Then there is the 'fact'
that we are rather good at copping out.)
I read somewhere that by the time roughly 27% of any given nation has
telephones, military dictatorships become impossible. Of course such a
threshold concept does not say anything about the financial clout of
lobbyists in Washington; the power of intimidation, indoctrination,
brainwashing and social marketing in general. (It may, however, say much
that positively corroborates Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative
Action, which I submit as a rich vein of ideas for memetic inquiry.)
Its also hard to believe that prayer hacks it, when the only reliable
(honest) way to get money is to work for it or earn it in rather concrete
ways. (Further thanks to Dan Dennet for this cleaver meme...)
Obviously prayer does bring in salaries for some; largely by (i) conning
others into thinking that they are not worthy; (ii) convincing them that
they are not praying enough and/or (iii) that they, themselves don't
*really* know what's best for them. (And which one of us can doubt the
power of guilt, and isn't vice so very, very nice ;-)) This keeps them
fearful and stupid enough to pay the guy with the Hell-fire and Brimstone's
salary.
What a dirty business....
All of us can fool ourselves some of the time, but many of us can still fool
ourselves all the time. Perhaps simply because religion is wonderfully
self-serving and open to infinite *personal* interpretation.
By the way, Thank God for religion: just imagine a society wherein guys who
seriously believe in un-measurable force fields were also to make up the
moral rules whereby we should all live! Keeping my hands off my neighbours
wife is much less scary.
As Flip Wilson used to say; "The devil made me do it...." and where's there
sin there's redemption for the sinner and business for the pastor.
There are good reasons why Jesus as a fall guy for our sins was such a good
social invention. But I will leave that for a later post.
Tonie putter
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