I'm prepared to accept a non-rational belief in things (after all, we're all human) however...Wombats and Noah's Ark come to mind. Some things aren't just non-rational, they're a bit...mad. And I think that madness is exactly the same as the lunatic Islamists, inasmuch as it informs every action of these people, and leads folk to contemplate violence against the things which are proscribed in such mad beliefs. Hence the firebombing of abortion clinics, which worse than the abortion clinics themselves. I think 'fighting fundies' are mad, and if that madness grows in response to the 'cognitive dissonance' they experience in a modern scientific society, those folk could always, like the Amish, discard all the advantages that the last three-hundred years of progress has made, and do without the benefits of Einstein, or Quantum Physics, like for example: vacuum tubes, transistors, computers, drugs targeted according to the genome of the organism concerned, the genetic profiling we do now, magnetic resonace imaging, or even the new batches of antibiotic drugs to deal with the evolving strains of bacterial resistance. I cannot deny the world I live in because some folk wrote rubbish in a book some thousands of years ago. The fact that the book also contains the description of someone I can admire more, almost, than any other human that has ever lived,* seems to me to be as nothing in comparison to the uses to which these people put the book as a whole. I often wonder what he would think of them. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this madness is merely that: just madness. And I think the time has come where we as a society should treat it as such. If necessary, I suppose, the powers that be can always invite me to drink the juice of the hemlock, but I do feel the time has come when we have to work out what to do about the various religious memes infecting people's psyches. Confucious said (and I paraphrase) that the Gods don't need worshipping: they can take care of themselves, and we should take care of ourselves. I find myself in agreement.
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I think 'fighting fundies' are mad, and if that madness grows in response to the 'cognitive dissonance' they experience in a modern scientific society, those folk could always, like the Amish, discard all the advantages that the last three-hundred years of progress has made, and do without the benefits of Einstein, or Quantum Physics, like for example: vacuum tubes, transistors, computers, drugs targeted according to the genome of the organism concerned, the genetic profiling we do now, magnetic resonace imaging, or even the new batches of antibiotic drugs to deal with the evolving strains of bacterial resistance.
I cannot deny the world I live in because some folk wrote rubbish in a book some thousands of years ago. The fact that the book also contains the description of someone I can admire more, almost, than any other human that has ever lived,* seems to me to be as nothing in comparison to the uses to which these people put the book as a whole. I often wonder what he would think of them. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that this madness is merely that: just madness. And I think the time has come where we as a society should treat it as such.
If necessary, I suppose, the powers that be can always invite me to drink the juice of the hemlock, but I do feel the time has come when we have to work out what to do about the various religious memes infecting people's psyches.
Confucious said (and I paraphrase) that the Gods don't need worshipping: they can take care of themselves, and we should take care of ourselves.
I find myself in agreement.
*I have a lot of time for Siddharta too.