Reading through my previous posts, as it has been a while, I find myself wondering about the power plays betwixt New Athiests (NA) and Religious Believers (RB). Putemtogetherandwotavyougot? NARB, or, anagramatically, BRAN, which sounds wholesome enough, until you read this :
http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/6-health-risks-of-eating-too-much-fiber.html
Yes, atheism has bottom problems. Although I think Dawkins, for example, is a stalwart and wholesome individual with bags of charm (despite his apparently elitist smarm), he is also a good example of, if you will, intestinal blockage. Too much of a good education has left Dawkins unable to fully absorb the real force of religion, which is entrely social.
The good professor reminds me again and again that given a basically decent education little humans can grow into basically decent bigger humans capable of making more rational decisions than deciding to believe in an omnipotent and invisible creator that demands that they do what He tells them. Well, ok, but naive.
As I wrote in an earlier post, there are perennial problems with the extent to which humans can make decisions, when this is conceived as the whimsy of an ahistorical mind. Now, we can of course accept that the mind is historical and go about making decisions as if it were ahistorical, but that would be wrong. A more correct way of retaining the idea of a decision would be to heavily and constantly inform it with knowledge about history, about demographics, about cognitive science, and so on. Would a mind of this type be able to 'unchoose' itself and use its power of decision to assert that it is the incarnation of an immortal soul? Not credibly.
What I neglected to bang on about was the complete importance of the context in which the decision making mind exists, and how education actually has to struggle and go out of its way to make points against the social dogmas of the status quo. If you are educated to a high degree in a non-religious school, what are the actual chances that you will choose to relinquish your inadequate ideas if you turned up for your first day as a religious zealot? There may be a chance, and it does happen that deconversion is a fact of a western sceptical education, but I just wonder how completely rational students, say gifted with GCSEs (yes I'm taking GCSEs as a high standard of education, because anyone who has them in the UK has likely gone through 10 or so years of relentless boredom at school and whatever was meant to be inculcated should have been expected to work within that timeframe), have simply blossomed out of the religious influence of their family and community life because of this now well developed rationality. (If you still think taking GCSEs as a standard of good education is a cop-out, take whatever you want, college, Uni... I've met zealots at Uni). I'd wager not as many as might be thought. Part of my job as an RE teacher is to pander to belief systems and walk on eggshells just in case knowledge upsets some parent.
Some nominal athiests turn to religion. Fact. But the amount of children born to religious parents that then become religious themselves of course completely overwhelms this fact. So it seems even if you grant that a wholesome education occured to an atheist, who was able then to decide not to turn to religion (...), the point still has to be addressed as to how the 99% of religious people keep going and going for generation after generation, granted that you subtract the 1% of atheist conversions that seem to be targeted educationally for letting the side down. Education just seems to be besides the point, or, better, that the kind of education Prof. Dawkins and others implicitly rely upon for their appeal to reasonableness and the rational appraisal of evidence, just doesn't yet exist. And it may never.
If I had an intestinal blockage where 99% of the good stuff wasn't being dealt with, I might feel pretty sick. Metaphorically the question arises - how does one eat a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew? Surely some kind of yoghurt-attitude needs to be developed here to get the atheistic bowels moving, and the world can then finally drop some dung on the dry and hungry Plants of Hope and Adventurousness.
So, for the sake of mixing up some creamy yoghurty goodness and finally getting some human being in your system (what?), lets do:
How to eat Islam
1. Encourage confused young Muslim men to experiment with any homosexual feelings they may have, and provide safe environments for them to do so.
2. Marry a woman from a country where women are terrorized by men and make lots of lovely brown babies that you can lavish with love. If you have the means, try to set up her whole family with a more progressive lifestyle (i.e. because it's better, and it's loving, to do so. Don't read tabloids).
3. White Western men to wear Burkhas, to sumbolise suffrage and unity.
Or, of course, we could just have another debate from entrenched positions. But isn't this more practical, more about actually changing circumstances and mixing things up? There is a lot that atheism is in fact able to achieve in its own name that could not be achieved otherwise - could someone motivated by a moderate view run around in a Burkha (haven't tried it yet but if I find nothing better to do I might prefer it to a worthy debate)? Could anyone but an atheist deliberately put the oar in and help out homosexuals, disrespecting the moral culture of one of the world's biggest religions? There is no secular political will on earth right now that will disregard the balance of power to such an extreme extent as to upset religious communities (read: religious old men), because power is so fragile, and because it depends on the authority of such men even in 'such enlightened times' (*cough*). Working in the name of atheism sounds good to me. Atheist weddings please, table 4.
There was an interesting story in Time (I think) which described a group of reform Jews in Israel that run around at night in balaclavas putting up posters of tittilating artworks, to try to discourage the Ultra-Orthodox from moving in and aggressively taking over their community, which apparently is happening a lot there. Worth a thought or two.
Peace,
V
http://www.fitday.com/fitness-articles/nutrition/healthy-eating/6-health-risks-of-eating-too-much-fiber.html
Yes, atheism has bottom problems. Although I think Dawkins, for example, is a stalwart and wholesome individual with bags of charm (despite his apparently elitist smarm), he is also a good example of, if you will, intestinal blockage. Too much of a good education has left Dawkins unable to fully absorb the real force of religion, which is entrely social.
The good professor reminds me again and again that given a basically decent education little humans can grow into basically decent bigger humans capable of making more rational decisions than deciding to believe in an omnipotent and invisible creator that demands that they do what He tells them. Well, ok, but naive.
As I wrote in an earlier post, there are perennial problems with the extent to which humans can make decisions, when this is conceived as the whimsy of an ahistorical mind. Now, we can of course accept that the mind is historical and go about making decisions as if it were ahistorical, but that would be wrong. A more correct way of retaining the idea of a decision would be to heavily and constantly inform it with knowledge about history, about demographics, about cognitive science, and so on. Would a mind of this type be able to 'unchoose' itself and use its power of decision to assert that it is the incarnation of an immortal soul? Not credibly.
What I neglected to bang on about was the complete importance of the context in which the decision making mind exists, and how education actually has to struggle and go out of its way to make points against the social dogmas of the status quo. If you are educated to a high degree in a non-religious school, what are the actual chances that you will choose to relinquish your inadequate ideas if you turned up for your first day as a religious zealot? There may be a chance, and it does happen that deconversion is a fact of a western sceptical education, but I just wonder how completely rational students, say gifted with GCSEs (yes I'm taking GCSEs as a high standard of education, because anyone who has them in the UK has likely gone through 10 or so years of relentless boredom at school and whatever was meant to be inculcated should have been expected to work within that timeframe), have simply blossomed out of the religious influence of their family and community life because of this now well developed rationality. (If you still think taking GCSEs as a standard of good education is a cop-out, take whatever you want, college, Uni... I've met zealots at Uni). I'd wager not as many as might be thought. Part of my job as an RE teacher is to pander to belief systems and walk on eggshells just in case knowledge upsets some parent.
Some nominal athiests turn to religion. Fact. But the amount of children born to religious parents that then become religious themselves of course completely overwhelms this fact. So it seems even if you grant that a wholesome education occured to an atheist, who was able then to decide not to turn to religion (...), the point still has to be addressed as to how the 99% of religious people keep going and going for generation after generation, granted that you subtract the 1% of atheist conversions that seem to be targeted educationally for letting the side down. Education just seems to be besides the point, or, better, that the kind of education Prof. Dawkins and others implicitly rely upon for their appeal to reasonableness and the rational appraisal of evidence, just doesn't yet exist. And it may never.
If I had an intestinal blockage where 99% of the good stuff wasn't being dealt with, I might feel pretty sick. Metaphorically the question arises - how does one eat a Muslim, or a Christian, or a Jew? Surely some kind of yoghurt-attitude needs to be developed here to get the atheistic bowels moving, and the world can then finally drop some dung on the dry and hungry Plants of Hope and Adventurousness.
So, for the sake of mixing up some creamy yoghurty goodness and finally getting some human being in your system (what?), lets do:
How to eat Islam
1. Encourage confused young Muslim men to experiment with any homosexual feelings they may have, and provide safe environments for them to do so.
2. Marry a woman from a country where women are terrorized by men and make lots of lovely brown babies that you can lavish with love. If you have the means, try to set up her whole family with a more progressive lifestyle (i.e. because it's better, and it's loving, to do so. Don't read tabloids).
3. White Western men to wear Burkhas, to sumbolise suffrage and unity.
Or, of course, we could just have another debate from entrenched positions. But isn't this more practical, more about actually changing circumstances and mixing things up? There is a lot that atheism is in fact able to achieve in its own name that could not be achieved otherwise - could someone motivated by a moderate view run around in a Burkha (haven't tried it yet but if I find nothing better to do I might prefer it to a worthy debate)? Could anyone but an atheist deliberately put the oar in and help out homosexuals, disrespecting the moral culture of one of the world's biggest religions? There is no secular political will on earth right now that will disregard the balance of power to such an extreme extent as to upset religious communities (read: religious old men), because power is so fragile, and because it depends on the authority of such men even in 'such enlightened times' (*cough*). Working in the name of atheism sounds good to me. Atheist weddings please, table 4.
There was an interesting story in Time (I think) which described a group of reform Jews in Israel that run around at night in balaclavas putting up posters of tittilating artworks, to try to discourage the Ultra-Orthodox from moving in and aggressively taking over their community, which apparently is happening a lot there. Worth a thought or two.
Peace,
V
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