From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Aug 14 2001 - 10:42:56 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
> There are so-called religious "leaders" who will try to tell
> everyon that they must think and act like the leader believes is
> correct. But relatively few sects support such group think and
> even in those that do (e.g. Roman Catholic church) many of the
> adherents do not believe their religion requires them to refuse
> to think for themselves.
That has not been my experience. In theory, judging by written,
formal policy, most religions arae this way. In practice, whenever
people cite any religious reason for anything, it has usually boiled
down to "I believe reality should be this way, facts be damned". Only
demonstrations that reality is not that way - for instance, the old
experiment with three jars of meat left outside (one sealed, one
covered by cloth, one open) to demonstrate that decaying meat does not
itself produce maggots - have proven sufficient to dislodge said
thinking, and then only among those who do not insist that such
disproofs must be some kind of unspecified trickery (whether or not
they can figure out how such trickery could be accomplished) since it
goes against their beliefs.
Therefore, in practice (at least such as I have personally observed),
religions can be safely categorized with, and dismissed along with,
thinking along the lines of that which, for example, claims the moon
landing was a hoax, or that the earth is flat, or that all living
organisms must eventually die (see certain bacteria that have lived
millions of years, or certain lines of human cancer cells that so far
appear to show no signs of aging over multiple decades).
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