Religion vs. Science
By Daniel Miessler on April 16th, 2006: Tagged as Philosophy | Religion | Science
Mabye one way to judge the moral strength of mainstream religion vs. mainstream science is to compare how the objects sacred to them are treated by their devotees.
It struck me the other day that scientists find ways to share important scientific finds. They schedule time with whatever the object is, e.g. space rocks, fossil finds, etc. And for archaeologists, teams from all over the world can work onsite together doing their respective research.
Jerusalem, however, is the site of endless war. Many religious people would rather kill other human beings than share their most sacred holy land, and this to me is proof that the entire premise is faulty.
Imagine, for a second, an archaeological dig where the research team from the University of Chicago shows up with humvees and automatic weapons to remove the team from the University of Helsinki.
“We just can’t have them there, doing their impure research. They go against everything we believe and are a discrace to science. We must kill them.”That doesn’t happen in science, but it does in religion.
In science, conficts are “squabbles”; the weapons come in the form of research and journal publications refuting the validity of various theories. That’s how civilized people wage war — they publish an opposing viewpoint and encourage public debate.
Some day everyone will settle disputes using this method, but not until religion in its current form has been seen for what it truly is — groupthink barbarism.
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Could you qualify these statements a bit? It seems to me that there are huge differences between science and religion, even though they share some common ground. To me, religion is different because people take it personally, they define themselves and others with it, and not just the world around them. Thus, there are plenty of examples where ’science’ fits very clearly into this definition. When this gap has been leaped, I think the dangers are the same: these religious moods can be used for political and personal gain. For example, this mass annihilation of the people who once inhabited this continent (native americans? insert non-offensive group descriptor here) was justified largely by the fact that they were not civilized - that is, they did not posses the various scientific and socio-scientific traits that Europeans had come to take as granted for anyone one ‘fully human’ (the fact that Christianity was also seen as a trait of ‘being civilized’ only further goes to show the potential for close proximity between a people’s scientific advancement and their religious creed). Just the same, religions differences all over the world are manipulated to justify the less-than-humanness of a target group. Being manipulated for horrible deeds, is not the fundamental characteristic of religion, however. Instead, I think that the part of religion that makes it dangerous (but not evil) and prone to abuse (but not a tyrant itself) is exactly the part of it that makes it religious. People take it personally. I don’t think that will ever change. What I think can (and must) change is the way people view religion as fitting into civil life. In other words, it is not religion that needs to change - for it cannot, but the way people use it and work to ensure that it is not misused. It is totally inappropriate for anyone in a position of power to use something that anyone takes ‘religiously’ to manipulate them. Whether it is a tenet of a particular faith, a Scientific ethos, or a aspect of a national identity, these symbols must be entirely left out of the civil process. Separation of church and state, was (if you think we have truly achieved it) a good start. In fact, however, there are few people, and probably not nations, on earth that have truly achieved this mark of ‘civilization’. Could a war ever be justified without some sort of these illegal manipulations? Anyway, my point (at length) is, I suppose, simply that we will not achieve the desired classification of ‘civilized’ simply by blacklisting religion. In fact, we will do considerable harm to our goal. It is only by seeing the larger picture, of the way any attitude that can be taken in this wide sense of ‘being religious’, that we can truly keep them out of the political process. Moreover, it is only by accepting a multiplicity of world-views – including the fundamentally ‘religious’ one – that we as individuals can begin to accept what it is to live in a society where people’s believes differ. Perhaps such scientific debates are a good model for this type of behavior. However, I do not think that hailing science as the father of modern society, and labeling religion as ‘group-think barbarism’, truly accepts the situation for what it is.
Comment by William — 4/17/2006 @ 4:08 pm
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