George Bush: intelligent design??
No beating about the Bush
RELIGION was branded "stupefying" by a professor during a fierce debate at the Cambridge Union.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens and Cambridge philosopher and author Prof Simon Blackburn battled it out over the motion "This House Believes That Religion is the Opiate of the Masses".
Other speakers included Gurpreet Bhatti, author of the play Behzti, which depicts murder and rape in a Sikh temple. It sparked violence and was dropped by Birmingham's Repertory Theatre in 2004.
In opposition, Prof Blackburn said: "Religion stupefies your understanding. There is nothing beyond man's interpretation of religion. I am an equal opportunities atheist. I find it implausible the whole design of the universe would conspire to create George Bush."
Gurpreet Bhatti said: "People use many things to avoid reality, religion is not the only one. It's not the message that is at fault, it's the messenger."
The motion failed.
RELIGION was branded "stupefying" by a professor during a fierce debate at the Cambridge Union.
Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens and Cambridge philosopher and author Prof Simon Blackburn battled it out over the motion "This House Believes That Religion is the Opiate of the Masses".
Other speakers included Gurpreet Bhatti, author of the play Behzti, which depicts murder and rape in a Sikh temple. It sparked violence and was dropped by Birmingham's Repertory Theatre in 2004.
In opposition, Prof Blackburn said: "Religion stupefies your understanding. There is nothing beyond man's interpretation of religion. I am an equal opportunities atheist. I find it implausible the whole design of the universe would conspire to create George Bush."
Gurpreet Bhatti said: "People use many things to avoid reality, religion is not the only one. It's not the message that is at fault, it's the messenger."
The motion failed.
posted by Philipa at 2:51 AM
3 Comments:
Based on observation, particularly of the crazy $#!7 that goes on south of the 49th parallel, it seems that most people don't actually have faith. They have religion.
They proffess faith, but preach religious certainty, for which there is no basis. Faith must rely on the argument that there is a possibility that I am wrong.
Such people use religion as a substitute for the brains they claim a god gave them. Who needs reasoning when we have a god on our side?
In the sense that it circumvents reason, religion is actually the meth of the masses. It galvanizes them to regrettable and terrible actions perpetrated against their fellow human beings with neither thought nor care for the suffering they cause.
Metro - I like that comment very much. If I advertise that I sometimes question not only my faith but the Bible/scriptures and Christian doctrine then I often feel um.. indulged. But I'm convinced that if they were voiced in any other Church I'd be met with 'stone the heretic'.
We the people often mention the big religions like Christianity or Islam but forget the others. (and some would argue that celebrity or certainly football are religions in themselves but I'm talking the accepted term here) And, when I was a student, I attended a friends Pentecostal Church one sunday. I like to follow the lesson and used to take my own King James Bible but couldn't find it, so I took the book of the Jehovas Witnesses I had which had been given to me as a gift. As I left the Pentecostal Church I thanked the Vicar/man in charge, who noticed my book, grabbed my hand and took it from me. He then protested loudly as to the evils of this Church of which I was not a member but clarification of this fact had not been sought.
I suppose, at the end of the day, people are people and perhaps, I wonder if religion does not just "galvanizes them to regrettable and terrible actions perpetrated against their fellow human beings with neither thought nor care for the suffering they cause" as you say, but provides a convenient excuse to exercise behaviour their consciences would not otherwise allow?
Absolutely.
I was raised Catholic myself. People these days seem to see it as a weird, quaint and curious holdover from some dark past, but it's where the cutting-edge thinking of Western history was done for centuries, if not now.
The "Catholic guilt" some speak of--the conviction that there is somewhere, just beyond sight, your own personal nun with a ruler--is one legacy. It adds spice to life. After all, as I think Woody Allen (who certainly should know) said: "Sex only feels dirty if you're doing it right". And it's also a product of being aware that you could be wrong, I think.
But another legacy is more serious. Catholicism demands faith through intellect as much as anything else. With the caveat that there are, as in any religion, wrong and right ways of addressing things.
Catholicism is not neccessarily inconsistent with evolution, for example, because Catholicism does not demand total acceptance of Bishop Usher's 6,000 year chronology.
When the Bible says Creation took "seven days", the literal and the fanatic (with respect, if you're one of them) are required to believe that the enterprise took 148 hours exactly.
This belief flies in the face of all scientific achievement. This is why the battle to teach creationism as science is so bitter and so foully misplaced.
To the "faithful", to yield on any point of this literal Bible is to cut one of the roots of this belief system, and when enough roots are weakened, sees the believer, this tree must fall.
For example: Catholicism holds that the terms "seven days" or "forty days and forty nights" are largely poetry. The latter refers to "some longish time, probably longer than a week but shorter than a season". The former means that however many millions or billions of years the universe took to make, it was a far smaller time to the Creator.
In the face of carbon-14 dating demonstrating that the Earth is billions of years old, the fanatic claims it's a lie (to what purpose?) or a trick of the Devil. Because to admit that he is wrong on this one point is to knock down his rigid tower of faith.
The Catholic can nod and cruise on thinking "what a wonder that there exists a God who did such stupendous things and is still around today"!
To protect that rigidity of belief, it's amazing how far fundamentalism of any faith can excuse behaviour that flies in the face of (using a Christian example for illustration) "This above all, love all men as I have loved thee".
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