Why is fundamentalist religion (and other forms of irrationality, such as conspiracy theories and mysticism) so potentially dangerous? Because, as Voltaire put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
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Interesting blog. I like Voltaire myself. As a Christian who fully acknowledges the dangers inherent in extremist ideology of any kind, I can fully appreciate the connections you have made with this quote. But I would also say that Obama has made the American public buy into his absurdities to the point that the lovefest many have for him no matter what, we could well see that evolve into attrocities. I am not at all comforted when I see so many argue against anything one presents about the ObamaMessiah’s record regardless of the amount of evidence one presents. I think he and his “followers” may well prove to be more dangerous than any religion in the U.S. today. Simply put, there are absurdities to be bought into in more than just the religions of the world, IMHO.
I am thinking I may be looking for a pirate ship and crew before the year is out.
Why do you hold cognitive dissonance, or rather, how?
2+2 does not sum to 5 no matter what your opinions are.
Bill,
I agree, but when you put a lot of intervening numbers around 2+2—in other words, a lot of blue smoke and mirrors around a subject—you can quickly forget the simple equations you started with. Your cognitive dissonance is burying something amidst a lot of noise.
—Santi
Also, please forgive my writing skills. I have been in IT for so long, I don’t have any writing skills anymore. LOL!!!
Hoosier Army Mom:
I’m okay with you not liking the Obama cult. I don’t like cultic behavior of any sort either. We need a world of human “cats” who are not easily herded, not human “dogs” who run in agressive packs.
Having said that, I am a very strong supporter of Obama, but I have my eyes wide open, and wherever he is wrong (from my perspective) I certainly will resist him.
But I’d like to point out something about the Obama cult which you might (or might not) agree with: Obama is a product of a culture that follows things, not based on reason, but on affiliation.
And where is this taught? By religion, of course. We are taught from a young age not to be critical thinkers, and it’s okay to declare your allegiences and stick with them in the face of contrary information, and then we are surprised and appalled at politicians who use media and propaganda techniques to sway large audiences.
Well, what do you expect? Rationality, complexity, and nuance is not valued by much of our culture. It makes us all vulnerable to stupidity. I don’t think that Obama is a “stupidity”—but he uses the techniques of stupidity to get his way. All religionists and politicians and corporations in the United States do this, and when you are at the skewering edge of this stick you complain. But when your ideology uses the same techniques to gain power, might you be tempted to defend it?
—Santi
Hi, I have fought my whole life against “stupidity”. I am a retired musician/educator. You have hit a bulls eye with me. Thank you. The worse part is teaching people to think especially those one-issue voters(abortion) who will bring down this country yet because of their irrationality.
but you idealize the TEA PARTY????
Santi
An honest self criticism of US culture ,vulnerable to propaganda and herd like unthinking acceptance of mass media pronouncements.Obama and others will exploit this of course. We are not immune in UK either to the creeping mental paralysis brought on by the rule of mass media and mass entertainment. We have however largely escaped the dead hand of blind religious fundamentalism which undoubtedly paralyses the critical and rational mental functioning of much of small town America. Ironically the puritan founding fathers responsible for the origin of American protestantism left our shores.After Cromwell’s time we Brits with typical pragmatism re-instated the monarchy and a rational broad ‘anglican’ religion capable of encompassing many ideas and preferences developed. Interesting how Voltaire apparently admired British intitutions especially the unwritten and pragmatic Constitution which still seems to save us from the worst excesses. US does it appear remains largely insular and ignorant of much of the rest of the world. More outward looking might develop those critical faculties.
Aunty Dawkins:
Like Voltaire, I too am a big fan of the British. Indeed, I married an English woman (from the Midlands). I have tried to puzzle out why the British are (in general) so much calmer and sensible about religion (as compared to most Americans). There is so much religious fanaticism in the United States—it’s breathtaking how pervasive it is—and it is mixed in, and seems to live perfectly comfortably with, consumerism. Very odd.
—Santi
“it is mixed in, and seems to live perfectly comfortably with, consumerism. Very odd.”
It is not really so odd to me once I realized that christianity is based on one absurdity after another. For all the criticism they hurl at other religions, christians are perhaps the most dangerous because they justify all their actions as , “good deeds, glorifying god”. Christianity will one day be known as “Christian Mythology” just as ancient Greek and Roman religions became mythology. Why? Because it is based on absurd stories supported by something equally absurd: faith.
Is American Christian fundamentalism due to the fact that conflict, compromise and negotiation between different religious factions hasn’t been as neccesary in American history? Puritan Protestantism was able to expand and dominate unimpeded. Did the doctrine of manifest destiny include a protestant religious mandate too ,even if unarticulated as such? In comparison religious wars were endemic in medieval and post reformation Europe and Religion of course was the catalyst for the so called ‘English revolution’ in 17th century. As for the apparent conflict with consummerism, money is no barrier to Church going in UK! Cosummerism is the driving force of capitalism and the protestant work ethic it has been argued was responsible for the growth of capitalism in Europe and presumably the US. (RH Tawney ‘Religion and the rise of capitalism’)
Well, the test for whether religion has caused intellectual torpor is simple: all “religious” people should tend to have failing intellects, while all non-religious people should have strong intellects. So, let’s cut to the chase. Einstein was religious (eg. “God does not roll dice” in his objection to quantum theory), Leonardo da Vinci was a Catholic, C.S. Lewis was a brilliant Oxford Don and Anglican; the list goes on and on to include Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Descartes, Plank (starting to get the idea that we are looking at some of the greatest thinkers in the last thousand years?).
Einstein was not religious. The God does not roll dice quote was not actually referring to the God of Christianity. Read The God Delusion if you don’t believe me.
Einstein made public a statement dispelling the rumor that he was a religious man. He said he did not believe in a personal god. His references to god were about nature. C.S. Lewis can hardly be considered a great intellectual, da Vinci lived in a time and place where Catholicism had a monopoloy.
There are many scientists who are religious but the issue is whether they apply science to their religion?
Even were all those you quoted theists (and they weren’t, Einstein in particular), it really doesn’t prove what you want it to. You see most scientists of past ages lived in periods when religion was the overt and oppressive majority; where being an atheist wasn’t really an option. You were either a theist, or dead (and for a modern day example, see Sharia Law). So when people list famous scientists of the past and say ‘Ah-hah! This scientist was known to be religious so that proves it!” they’re simply misunderstanding history.
A better examination is to look at modern western society, a place where people actually have a choice as to be religious or not. And what do we see? A massive discrepancy between religiosity and education. This applies on low levels in populations; higher educated populations gravitate towards less religion. And it extends into the upper echelons of education, the most well known and respected scientists of the world have an undeniable tendency not to be religious.
I will end this with a greatly relevant quote from Christopher Hitchens:
“Let me tell you something. For hundreds and thousands of years, this kind of discussion would have been impossible to have, or Sam (Harris) and I would have been having it at the risk of our lives. Religion now comes to us in this ‘smiley-face’ ingratiating way….because it has had to give so much ground and because we know so much more. But you have no right to forget the way it behaved when it was strong and when it really
did believe that it had God on its side!”
Einstien might not have been “religious”, but he believed in a strong ethical code and objective morality: i.e. laws and rules that guide the universe and should order our lives. The problem today is that religious and non religious alike fail to rationally seek answers to problems and concerns.Religious people comment that issues are not supported in the Bible and non-religious people seek answers within the natural sciences or merely say that everyone should be able to determine his own moral code: relativism. I am a Catholic and firmly believe in the correlation between faith and reason. All in all reason will lead to truth which is what we are seeking right? I firmly support a previous comment on leadership and following based on affiliation. This is the ‘therapeutic state effect’ in which the state panders to the feelings of others and seeks control through the media and psychology.
Wow! The clearly wrong and uninformed spewing of opinion as means of swaying or stating belief is not checked on the comments to this quote?
Who’syourmamy, straight from FOX to your ‘beliefs’? Cute, way to spew and re-spew as it were. If you don’t KNOW the difference between opinions created to sway your beliefs and Truth, facts, and reality, then you really have no basis to form an honest opinion of anything do you?
Way to get your propagandized ‘beliefs’ public to prove your incapacity to think for yourself.
You are exactly the believer of absurdities that this quote is referring to. Congratulations!
May we all assume, rightly, that you are also a ‘believer’ of the christian faith. Faith, which is in short the absurd ‘belief’ in what one KNOWS is not and cannot be the truth!
Appease the Ignorant Masses of Religitarded Sheeple and you reap what you sow. Ask the pope, Hilter and Shrub to a bit lesser extent….
One problem for me. The ‘conspiracy theorists’ referenced at the top are not under the influence of ‘absurdity’, rather they are trying to disabuse ‘conspiracy deniers’ of their tragic folly. For it is the conspiracy deniers that are commiting or condoning attrocities under the influence of the absurdity of the official version of 9/11 and other official versions of history.
I agree. Too often I see people who I’d otherwise consider completely rational when it comes to topics such as religion, go on to commit the exact same irrational errors as the religious when you bring up another topic that they don’t like. 9/11 is a good example here. My position on 9/11 is that I don’t know what really happened but that I doubt the ‘official story’ due to gross inconsistencies. This is more or less my same position in regards to the existence of God. As it is for many atheists.
And yet when you bring up a topic like 9/11 they can engage in such utter deluded denial. You see them making countless excuses to explain away inconsistencies… in the same vein as the religious do with the bible. It makes me lose a bit of hope for the ‘rational community’ when they can be so utterly blind about one thing just because it doesn’t happen to appeal to them. One would have hoped this sort of imbecilic behaviour would be checked in those who break free of the shackles of religion but then they seem to get just as caught up in it if you bring up another topic like politics.
Men were once like cats – each thinking and working on their own, for about 2.5 million years. Then spiritualism was invented (religion basic), and they began working together like dogs in packs (hunter-gather bands to be more politically correct – see Boehm, ‘Hierarchy in the Forest’). Lifespan about doubled, innovation accelerated and the archaic (cat like) humans were driven extinct (see: Upper Paleolithic Revolution – try wiki or google). With the Neolithic Revolution, organized religion was introduced and men became like sheep or cattle. Most were disarmed and sent to the fields to farm, leaving fighting to the kings and nobles. While I do blame (credit) organized religion for turning men to sheep, it was Mother Nature who condemned the independent thinkers (ie. Neanderthals and contemporaries) and the aboriginal hunter/gatherers will likely go extinct in a few generations. The problem with free thinking humans is they have not competed well against the sheep (or their armies).
I don’t think religion can be blamed as the only sheep making agent. Nationalism, politics and religion are all part of the tribal ‘isms’. Historically the main carrier of the isms has been violence.
Good point.
Religions is not the only one to blame,but it must be acknowledge that religion has (and will continue) to be the main and most powerful reason of why innocent and willingly ignorant continue to die.
How Obama got into this discussion God knows. So who was your solution hoosier…Rick Santorum?
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