From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Wed Aug 15 2001 - 10:20:37 MDT
Samantha Atkins wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > 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.
>
> All of that doesn't have a lot to do with religion. It has more
> to do with the persistent habit of human beings to think they
> can just figure it out in their heads or to trust their
> intuitions and random correlations too much. Religion doesn't
> have a monopoly here.
No, but religion is one of the more commonly used excuses for such
thinking, again in my experience.
> The actual going and devising an
> experiment to test a supposition is a fairly recent innovation.
In all of human history, maybe...but it's far older than I am and
therefore is not "fairly recent" from my perspective. It is an upgrade
that, like email and automobiles and sanitation, has been known to and
used by the public for long enough that its novelty is no longer an
excuse not to use it where appropriate. (But like those examples,
experimentation can suffer from technical/physical realities that
preclude its application in some circumstances.)
> > 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).
>
> Such dismissal is never ever safe because it over-generalizes.
> It is guilty of the same sort of sloppy thinking you just
> castigated some religious people's thinking for. Life is seldom
> so simple and religion is no exception.
It does seem like an over-generalization, but I have yet to encounter a
case where a religion did not either dissolve to general moral guides
which could be overridden by proper logic, and thus could be ignored
when convincing someone of something, or was a hard-and-fast barrier to
rational thought, along the lines of the examples listed above.
(Perhaps it is better to say that it can be categorized and dismissed
when it matters at all. This may seem a bit harsh, but outside of a
given person, that person's beliefs only matter to the point where they
influence words and actions and other phyiscal effects on the external
world. Thus, if a person believes in God but does not let that affect
any earthly action or utterance, the belief does not matter to the rest
of the universe.)
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