thread: 2005-06-06 : Happenings
On 2005-06-06, Brand Robins wrote:
Religion huh? Let's see. Here?s a random thought that I dregged up from the deeps of my undergrad religion courses.
1. Secular Humanism and Objectivism are religions, just as much as Roman Catholicism. They have their priests, their devout and transcendental followers, their dogma of unexamined assumptions, and a million ways in which they act as power structures to transfer money and influence from many hands to one.
2. For years I did not understand the presumed divide between reason and science on one side and religion and faith on the other. When I was growing up in a very LDS house with very LDS parents I was always told the quote, from one of Spencer W. Kimball's relatives, a brother or brother in law: "Religion is the search for truth. Science is the search for truth. Where the two seem to disagree it is only because we do not have the full story yet." Because of this I grew up always trying to balance both, and assuming both to be mostly true, though subject to review and verification, and both to have some way to go.
Now, I came to understand why fundamentalists of various religions had some problems with my attitude: because it (for them) contradicts their assumption of their beliefs as god-given absolute truth, subject to no more verification than their personal testimony. I could see that from their POV, and many were able to explain it very articulately. I never agreed, and was often scared by what they said, but at least it fit within the paradigm they claimed. They were honest in their close-mindedness.
Secular Humanists, otoh, were just as close-minded, as mocking, judgmental, and paradigm controlled: but they were unable to explain fully their problems with seeing religion as a path to seek truth, hitting only on tangential points or taking the worst excess and straw-manning them for the norm, or simply begging the question away. (This is not all people who are non religious, btw, these are those who have become priests of their own philosophy.) While their reason could be sharp and their rhetoric sublime, they were unable to get past the tips of their own noses in their assertions: always falling back onto the axiomatic.
3. This has lead to me to the following conclusion: Blind faith is dangerous. However, the current focus on traditional religion as the center and source of blind faith is, in and of itself, blind. Blindness towards any philosophy that becomes powerful enough to culturally indoctrinate people is a road to hell. The cult of Reason is still a cult, and should be treated as such.
