Religion is irrational, no matter which one it is, strictly by definition. If rationality means 'based on reason', than faith-based religion is the exact opposite.
It seems to me that the politician best qualified to lead the country would be the one best able to apply his or her faculties of reason. It is, after all, difficult to pray away a budget deficit.
So why, exactly, would we want a Bible-thumper in the highest office in the land?
Good luck with that, Governor Perry.
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
"Ex Uno Fonte", Part II: A Common Search For Understanding
The motto of my school, the College of Wooster, is the following Latin phrase: "Scientia et religio ex uno fonte". Literally translated, it goes something like "Science and religion from one source". I've been saying since last year's History of Life class, if not before, that I know the name of the source. If you'll permit me a somewhat secularized look at religion (and if you won't, fuck you, I'm going anyway), the source is simply the human drive to understand the universe. It's not just curiosity, although our apelike brains do help us out by driving us to see what that thing means. It's not just intelligence, which gives us the ability to wonder "What's that?" and actually search for the answers. No, the source of these two disciplines started so long ago that, today, we've forgotten what it's all about. It is a combination of fear and awe.
We, humans, like to understand things. More than that: we can't not understand things. It drives us nuts. We can assume that this has been a constant desire for all of human history, right? Well, picture yourself as a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer/all-out wanderer. Picture yourself as a Roman, or as a Knight Templar, or as a Chinese sage. The world around you is absolutely loaded with things you don't understand. Forces of nature! Lightning! What's that? Thunder! Volcanoes! What are those? The whims of rain and cloud, the beasts around you that hunt you and are hunted in turn, why one plant is safe to eat and another turns your guts inside out. Why is the world the way it is? It can't just be arbitrary, oh, no. We won't accept it. There has to be a will, a plan, a divine plan. Ah-HAH! NOW you've got it! A divine plan! Beings older and wiser than our meager human selves have created the world in this, that, the other way. They made the world the way it was because of such-and-such a reason. It may sound arbitrary, but never mind, they're gods! They're capricious and beyond our understanding! There it is. Now we understand the world.
But it's not just limited to religion! That's science, too! We--scientists, even though I'm not remotely close to one, we're the same kind of Homo sapiens sapiens so I'll just insert a 'we'--are going after the world and trying to understand it too, just in a different way! What's the difference between a universal law--to pick a now-banal example, e = mc^2--and a God that says nothing in the universe can exceed the speed of light? What's the difference between a Higgs boson and an angel that weighs down each and every particle and gives it mass? Absolutely nothing! Sure, you can test for one and believe in the other, but at heart they're still explanations for the same basic phenomena! (Well, not basic, it took tens of thousands of years for us to work out the speed of light. But never mind.)
Science and religion are humanity's two great efforts to understand the world around us. They differ only in their methods and their conclusions; the underlying spirit is the same. We want to explain what we see, understand what we feel and why we feel it. We don't see them that way because they're so often in conflict, because the conclusions they draw are so very different. But that's fine! That's brilliant! It's the best thing that could possibly happen, because it brings us closer to a true understanding of the universe! When the theories come in contact and conflict, people's beliefs change. We're forced to ask the hard questions about what it all means, how one theory fits in with the other, how--and if--they can be compatible. We're forced to keep on looking for the one true answer, the answer that will reconcile the two systems and create our final understanding of the universe.
I know that this all sounds kind of nebulous (hee hee!). I know that words like 'understanding' and 'universe' are vague and all-encompassing. They're meant to be. They describe everything that we, as a people and as a species, want to achieve. Look, in physics right now there are two great theories: general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum physics, which describes the three other forces. Unifying those two will produce what physicists hope will be a complete understanding of the universe. The parallel between that idea and what I am saying is nontrivial (as a statistician might say). Sooner or later, science and religion will begin to work together on a grand scale to meet the ultimate goal. And you and I might just live to see it.
Thank you for reading.
We, humans, like to understand things. More than that: we can't not understand things. It drives us nuts. We can assume that this has been a constant desire for all of human history, right? Well, picture yourself as a pre-agricultural hunter/gatherer/all-out wanderer. Picture yourself as a Roman, or as a Knight Templar, or as a Chinese sage. The world around you is absolutely loaded with things you don't understand. Forces of nature! Lightning! What's that? Thunder! Volcanoes! What are those? The whims of rain and cloud, the beasts around you that hunt you and are hunted in turn, why one plant is safe to eat and another turns your guts inside out. Why is the world the way it is? It can't just be arbitrary, oh, no. We won't accept it. There has to be a will, a plan, a divine plan. Ah-HAH! NOW you've got it! A divine plan! Beings older and wiser than our meager human selves have created the world in this, that, the other way. They made the world the way it was because of such-and-such a reason. It may sound arbitrary, but never mind, they're gods! They're capricious and beyond our understanding! There it is. Now we understand the world.
But it's not just limited to religion! That's science, too! We--scientists, even though I'm not remotely close to one, we're the same kind of Homo sapiens sapiens so I'll just insert a 'we'--are going after the world and trying to understand it too, just in a different way! What's the difference between a universal law--to pick a now-banal example, e = mc^2--and a God that says nothing in the universe can exceed the speed of light? What's the difference between a Higgs boson and an angel that weighs down each and every particle and gives it mass? Absolutely nothing! Sure, you can test for one and believe in the other, but at heart they're still explanations for the same basic phenomena! (Well, not basic, it took tens of thousands of years for us to work out the speed of light. But never mind.)
Science and religion are humanity's two great efforts to understand the world around us. They differ only in their methods and their conclusions; the underlying spirit is the same. We want to explain what we see, understand what we feel and why we feel it. We don't see them that way because they're so often in conflict, because the conclusions they draw are so very different. But that's fine! That's brilliant! It's the best thing that could possibly happen, because it brings us closer to a true understanding of the universe! When the theories come in contact and conflict, people's beliefs change. We're forced to ask the hard questions about what it all means, how one theory fits in with the other, how--and if--they can be compatible. We're forced to keep on looking for the one true answer, the answer that will reconcile the two systems and create our final understanding of the universe.
I know that this all sounds kind of nebulous (hee hee!). I know that words like 'understanding' and 'universe' are vague and all-encompassing. They're meant to be. They describe everything that we, as a people and as a species, want to achieve. Look, in physics right now there are two great theories: general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum physics, which describes the three other forces. Unifying those two will produce what physicists hope will be a complete understanding of the universe. The parallel between that idea and what I am saying is nontrivial (as a statistician might say). Sooner or later, science and religion will begin to work together on a grand scale to meet the ultimate goal. And you and I might just live to see it.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
God As Father, Not As Lord
The traditional view of the Torah, the Bible and the Qur’an has been to believe that they are sets of heavenly laws, handed down by God to man to show us the proper way to behave. This corresponds to the Old Testament-style God of rewards and punishments, and accords with God’s revealed word in the Qur’an. God is the Lord, and we are His subjects. It is because of this mindset that religious fundamentalists (of whatever stripe) seek to follow every command of their respective religious texts with as much narrow-minded zeal as they can muster, and to convince others to do the same.
But there are many names that we ascribe to the Judeo-Christian God. One of those names is Father. A stern Father, at times, yes; perhaps God is a former drill sergeant, who expects his offspring to snap to and salute before saying grace at the family dinner table. But a father nonetheless. If we start to think of God in this way, and take His commands as “more like guidelines than actual rules” (to quote Pirates of the Caribbean) we come up with some interesting ideas.
When a child is young, his father or her father does not tell the child everything about the adult world. How could he? The child is not ready; he is too young for certain topics. He is too young to know how babies are made, or about the smoky mysteries of drugs and alcohol. On a more social level, the child does not yet know how to act around other human beings. He is not ready. So the father does not tell his child everything, but he tells the child what not to do, to keep him safe. Do not play in the street. Don’t touch hot objects, don’t do this, that or the other action that might hurt you. He doesn’t always tell the child why it should avoid these things, only the prohibitions. Of course, the child will sometimes do these things anyway, and come away with bruises and scars. But with those injuries will come lessons. And when it is time for the child to become an adult, the father will begin to tell him—as he has been doing, by example, for years—what it means to be an adult. The child will begin to understand why the father told him not to do things, and learn to avoid them or to make them safer on his own.
Why, for example, did God tell us to abstain from premarital sex? Someone who believes in the Lord might answer, “Who cares why? It is forbidden, and that is enough!” But someone who believes in the Father might say, “God told us not to have sex before marriage because, in the time and place when He gave that command, unwed mothers were scorned and looked down upon. Worse, in God’s view, it was bad for the community as a whole. So God warned us against premarital sex, not because it is intrinsically bad, but because it can have a bad result. But now we have condoms, we have IUDs, we have the pill and we have vasectomies. We are old enough to understand how we work, and we’ve figured out how to avoid getting pregnant. Because it is not wrong in and of itself, it is not a sin.” In other words, God isn’t concerned with some higher right or wrong. God is not Law. God wants what is best for His children, and in that particular place at that particular time, that command was what was best. Now, we’re old enough—in a species- and technological sense—to know and avert some of the risks.
Lest this note begin to sound like I’m merely defending teenage licentiousness, you can apply this sort of thinking to dozens of commands. Why shouldn’t you lie with a man as you would with a woman? God might say, “If you do not procreate, your community will die out and that will be the end of you.” This is another danger we are no longer in. Why shouldn’t we drink alcohol? God might say, “In a desert environment, can you really afford to dehydrate yourself?” Why should we go forth and preach the gospel to nonbelievers? “To spread the word of our religion,” God might say, “for the more ears you reach, the less chance you will die out.” Why did God give us all these laws anyway? “To unite your people under one set of rules and help bind your community together.”
If we assign pragmatic motivations to each individual command, if we assume that his commands are paternally intended for the good of the community, we find that many still apply-the Ten Commandments, for example-and many are no longer necessary.
I know that assigning motivations to God is the height of arrogance. But in my view, the choice is between believing that God gave His commands just because, and we should follow them just because… or that God gave His commands to protect us, and we should follow the ones we need to follow and discard the ones we no longer need. Not because something is intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong, but because it’s a good idea or a terrible idea, like adultery. God gave us brains with which to think, and He gave us maturity so that we may think critically about the world. I believe that He wanted us to decide, in time, which of His commands we should follow… just as a parent eventually allows their child to see the world for themselves, and decide for themselves what to make of it.*
*I’m a pragmatist, and this is generally how I see the world. Instead of judging, I ask “Does it work?”
But there are many names that we ascribe to the Judeo-Christian God. One of those names is Father. A stern Father, at times, yes; perhaps God is a former drill sergeant, who expects his offspring to snap to and salute before saying grace at the family dinner table. But a father nonetheless. If we start to think of God in this way, and take His commands as “more like guidelines than actual rules” (to quote Pirates of the Caribbean) we come up with some interesting ideas.
When a child is young, his father or her father does not tell the child everything about the adult world. How could he? The child is not ready; he is too young for certain topics. He is too young to know how babies are made, or about the smoky mysteries of drugs and alcohol. On a more social level, the child does not yet know how to act around other human beings. He is not ready. So the father does not tell his child everything, but he tells the child what not to do, to keep him safe. Do not play in the street. Don’t touch hot objects, don’t do this, that or the other action that might hurt you. He doesn’t always tell the child why it should avoid these things, only the prohibitions. Of course, the child will sometimes do these things anyway, and come away with bruises and scars. But with those injuries will come lessons. And when it is time for the child to become an adult, the father will begin to tell him—as he has been doing, by example, for years—what it means to be an adult. The child will begin to understand why the father told him not to do things, and learn to avoid them or to make them safer on his own.
 |
| "Do not touch!" |
Lest this note begin to sound like I’m merely defending teenage licentiousness, you can apply this sort of thinking to dozens of commands. Why shouldn’t you lie with a man as you would with a woman? God might say, “If you do not procreate, your community will die out and that will be the end of you.” This is another danger we are no longer in. Why shouldn’t we drink alcohol? God might say, “In a desert environment, can you really afford to dehydrate yourself?” Why should we go forth and preach the gospel to nonbelievers? “To spread the word of our religion,” God might say, “for the more ears you reach, the less chance you will die out.” Why did God give us all these laws anyway? “To unite your people under one set of rules and help bind your community together.”
If we assign pragmatic motivations to each individual command, if we assume that his commands are paternally intended for the good of the community, we find that many still apply-the Ten Commandments, for example-and many are no longer necessary.
I know that assigning motivations to God is the height of arrogance. But in my view, the choice is between believing that God gave His commands just because, and we should follow them just because… or that God gave His commands to protect us, and we should follow the ones we need to follow and discard the ones we no longer need. Not because something is intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong, but because it’s a good idea or a terrible idea, like adultery. God gave us brains with which to think, and He gave us maturity so that we may think critically about the world. I believe that He wanted us to decide, in time, which of His commands we should follow… just as a parent eventually allows their child to see the world for themselves, and decide for themselves what to make of it.*
*I’m a pragmatist, and this is generally how I see the world. Instead of judging, I ask “Does it work?”
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