Is religion a form of authority?

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such schools have no religious instruction, and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith; we need believing people.

- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Yes, I thought I’d start today’s post with a quote from one of the most famous and ruthless men who ever walked the planet. Adolph was indeed a religious man. Whilst he clearly identified himself as a Catholic, he also is religious in the sense he that he followed a strict, cruel dogma that could not – under any circumstances – be questioned. Religion today is obviously no where near as extreme, but the same form of unquestioning following tends to occur. If, say, the three monotheistic religions (Judaism, Islam and Christianity), were questioned using logic and deductive reasoning (e.g. “if God is morally righteous, why did he allow Hitler to come to power?“), then they – quite simply – would cease to exist in their current form. They rely upon authority for their survival; and what better authority than an ancient convoluted book whose sole existence has been reshaped, altered, censored and re-written across the centuries and is constantly being recited by men in clear authority (e.g. Pope)?

"I don't need to think for myself. I have this book to do it for me."

The reason the Christian Lobby is so avidly against any attempt to cement the separation between Church and State is because it means people will abandon its dogma and find their own path. But this is a good thing. One of my favourite philosophers, Bertrand Russell had this to say in his aptly titled essay “A brief Outline of Intellectual Rubbish“:

As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authoritiy, there is no end to our troubles. Whose authority? The Old Tesament? The New Testament? The Koran? In practice, people choose the book considered sacred by the community in which they are born, and out of that book they choose the parts they like, ignoring the others. At one time, the most influential text in the bible was: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. Nowadays, people pass over this text, in silence if possible; if not, with an apology. And so, even when we have a sacred book, we still choose as truth whatever suits our own prejudices. No Catholic, for instance, takes seriously the text which says that a bishop should be the husband of one wife.

Bertrand’s digress makes quite an amount of sense to me. All ‘holy books’ effectively act as a Rorschach test and are ‘piloted’ by a figure with power (such as the Pope, or the Ayatollah of Iran) to drive home their own belief system. It’s an intellectual dictatorship; a dogma, by which one may find themselves doing something against their own wishes through the whims of another entity simply because they happen to have faith in an ancient book.  As one anonymous commentator (on a forum somewhere) once remarked “Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned“. Spot-on, I think.

Know Thy Enemy: Fundamentalism

(Nathaniel writes:)

There is a powerful and dangerous idea among the ‘elite’, scientific intellectuals. It is by no means a new idea, having been around for quite a long while, and it is this: That most (or all) of the problems in the world have been caused by religion – or superstitious beliefs – in one form or another.

That’s the great thing about prejudice, isn’t it? You can form great judgments without first getting all of the facts. As we shall soon discover, getting all the facts is a very difficult process – some might say impossible – and that’s why certain individuals find prejudiced ideas so useful.

We know of countless wars that have been waged in the name of one religion or another. According to history – which is not in itself completely infallible – these wars happen all the time. According to the news, these wars are happening right now. You can be sure they’ll continue to happen in the future.

Now, here’s the problem as it affects our society. Religion and philosophy, despite making great advances in our time, cannot possibly keep up with the scientific revelations that occur every decade. They are simply no longer fashionable – in our culture, the things that move the fastest survive, and science most certainly moves the fastest.

Science is valuable. There are tangible benefits to supporting science. My enmity is not reserved for science, though – in and of itself I have no problems with science or its advancements. I’m weary of science, I’m paranoid of science, but I bear it no immediate ill will.

I bear fundamentalism ill will. Alas, most scientists these days are also powerful fundamentalists. Fundamentalism is, as I define it, the holding on to ideas until it serves to actually hamper intellectual growth. When a new, better idea is developed, the fundamentalist spits on it and cries heresy.

As most people around here know, I’m a self-professed magician. Not a stage magician, mind you, but someone who believer’s an individual’s will can strongly affect reality. This is, to most, crazy-talk; it’s up there with UFOlogy and ESP-research to most men of science. It simply does not warrant investigation.

That’s a problem. Not the fact that they don’t believe I’m right – that’s a normal, expected reaction – but that they’re not prepared to test that theory out. “It’s impossible!” they cry, when I talk to them of witchcraft and the latent psychic abilities within the individual human being.

Science does not work that way. Science understands that the laws it establishes are not really eternal, unbreakable laws: they cannot be absolute ideas, in a Platonic sense, because certain absolute ideas since that time have already been broken. We do not accumulate scientific theories until we have collected them all and reach enlightenment about everything in the universe; we collect and revise, add the good and subtract the bad.

To claim something is impossible is a powerful statement to make. In order to make it, you have to show that you know everything that is and is not possible. This is illogical. In a time where our understanding of the world is being shaken every decade, to say that we know everything is a monumentally stupid thing to say. If science, our dear friend, has proven anything, it is this: that nothing can be considered entirely impossible.

“Ah,” but some men of science will reply, “But magic and ESP and UFOlogy and paranormal events defy common sense!”

It’s often said that common sense is not all that common. There is a damn good reason for this. It is detrimental to the evolution of mankind as a whole. Still, common sense is a little too common among the intellectual elite for my liking.

Common sense is not what we need: what we need is a healthy agnosticism towards everything in this world. A weary, sceptical approach is prime – not the immediate shutting-down of all new ideas, not this common sense. Einstein’s theories attacked the common sense of physicists at that time; Galileo’s astronomical findings attacked the common sense of those who knew that the Earth wasn’t moving; Darwin’s theories of evolution attacked the common sense of those who knew they weren’t primates.

As it has also been pointed out numerous times before, common sense and logic are not purely objective things. How could they be? There is no ‘true’ objectivism; at least, not as true as we would like to think. While there may be objective truths, the problem is that when they are deciphered by an individual the individual’s subjective thoughts get in the way.

This is called a reality-tunnel; our sphere of beliefs. Reality-tunnels, in and of themselves, are fine – but we have to understand that there will always be more to the world than to what our reality tunnel tells us. Our paradigms should be used until they are useless, in which case a better model should be found.

Ultimately, every individual’s reality-tunnel is flawed. Our beliefs are always going to be influenced by (a) the beliefs of those around us and (b) our previous beliefs. Let’s look at a typical Marxist socialist, for example. A typical Marxist shows typical rage towards those who do not agree with their ideals – capitalists, in other words. Any who do not support their cause are evil scum, and should be destroyed.

However, a Marxist also has to somehow come to terms with the belief, eschewed by Marx himself, of economic determinism; that capitalism will fall, communism (or socialism) will rise, and we will enter a utopia world. Every man and woman has his place – either as a capitalist or a revolutionary – but it ultimately doesn’t matter, because socialism will win in the end.

Ultimately: it’s not the fault of the capitalists. It is their place to fall – someone has to do it! The two ideas would clash within the reality-tunnel of an established Marxist more than they would realise, I should think, at least subconsciously. The Marxist sphere of belief is flawed.

There’s a reason we do not talk about truth in things such as mathematics, the ‘pure’ science: we talk about validity. How valid is this idea, now? It may not be true, but it can most certainly be valid for our purposes, and in this case mathematics got things right.

After all, there’s more than one type of self-consistent algebra and more than one type of geometry. We use the different types as we need to. One type is only better than the other in that it is more useful – not, as some would believe, because it is more right. All of them are wrong.

We’re quite honestly working with dodgy models of thought that only work in certain situations, and we have the nerve to cheerfully proclaim what ‘is’ and what ‘is not’? They’re useful, yes, but the idea that they are right is a powerful misconception. There are no eternal truths that we know of – there is no pure reason.

We see something occur, some event in space-time, and some (but not all) of that energy hits us. We process the energy, and then the neurological processes subtract and add things to what we ‘saw’. The important thing is that we could not possibly have experienced the entire event, so how can we fully judge it?

“This is an apple” then equals the much more correct “this seems like an apple to me”. Now, if we all had reasoning like that – if we all had the gall to admit that our spheres of thought may be incorrect – how many atrocities would have occurred this century?

Hitler: “The Jews are evil filth” sounds a lot worse than “the Jewish people seem like evil filth to me”. Bush: “The war in Iraq is fully justified” would be much better as “the war in Iraq seems fully justified to me”.

Religion doesn’t cause all the wars and terror in this world – neither does science. A greater, darker force – a force that encompasses the two of them – is the problem humanity needs to overcome before things get better. Sheer-minded fundamentalism is the enemy. Since we cannot possibly get all of the facts, we must admit that we’re all prejudiced in one way or another; but come on, can’t we just admit that?

Thoughts?