Caltrops - Tales of the Sword Coast





	[quote name="Noi Dau Don"]Anyway the thing about religion is that there are worse ways to keep things running smoothly. It's irrational and it entombs progress and blah blah blah. SORRY! The problem is that people die anyway. So - In the first place, people like MM conscientiously and compassionately wish to reduce the total volume of suffering in the world. Science is pretty good for that! Rational thought in the abstract - not so much. But science, yes, procures an apparently endless stream of improvements in the quality of life of millions and billions of people. That's awesome. And then at the end of long, hopefully happy lives, people die. In between here and death there are a variety of fantastic experiences everyone can have. Moments of transcending joy, heartbeats of strange grey mystery, the delight of all earthly pleasures, a formless, shapeless, pathetic fear of their end; a gratitude that has no purpose nor specific object. Aberrations of brain chemistry, phantoms of reification and abstraction. Science and the philosophy of the mind have a miserable and uninspiring vocabulary for giving voice thereof, and they don't inspire much communication regarding those feelings anyway. Religion on the other hand excuses, permits, and enriches that whole emo world. It provides objects to adore and despise, rituals to make that adoration more palpable, and systems of morality to integrate that kind of madness seamlessly into a functional society. As a bonus, those same systems of morality act as a kind of survivalist pseudo-science in lieu of the development of actual science - since we don't know why you keep dying when you eat raw pork and crawfish, let's just take them off the menu. Since we don't understand about catching The Herp from unclean bedroom partners, be joyously celibate in the name of our lord ahura mazda or whatever. Things like teaching intelligent design in place of evolution in the classroom: this is a real and serious step backwards in terms of <i>the well-being of our country in the future.</i> Sound science education and an absolute insistence on rational, clear, direct thinking, speaking, and writing = better engineers for tomorrow's future. I get all that and I will never dispute it. The <i>symptoms</i> of religious mania must be considered and contained where possible. But until people are individually immortal and the heat death of the universe is averted for all time, there is no genuine difference between a world where religion dominates and one where science is the king of all. Logically. Religion itself is the shadow of the ape-mind and there's no doing away with it. <font size=-3>Also it's quite beautiful in places and in some of its products.</font> The ideal case, the dream solution, Future-NDD-Perfect, is that the instrumentation of religion is used to console and direct the mind to the objectives of humanist science just as it has been used to console and direct the mind towards the reinforcement of the political status quo for the last 6000 years or so.[/quote]