Sunday, July 15, 2007

The Problem with Religion

The one, universal tenet of all religions, regardless of flavor, is they don't think. Could it be put any more eloquently than this...



Religion is based on unquestioning acceptance, and for that reason, it never progresses beyond where it is... Sad, but true.

The great reformers, from Moses through to Christ, Paul and Luther, all shared one thing in common, the courage to question the status quo. You would think we would have learned from that...

6 comments:

Lord Nazh said...

Religion never progresses... that must be why the inquisition is still going on and all that, no progress.

It's amazing what you can find about civilization advancements AND religion, no?

The problem with anti-religionists is that they can't get over religion.

Anonymous said...

Belittle the inquisition if you will, it may have died out in England in the 1500s, it continued in places like Spain up until the late 1800s. That's not that long ago, really.

And the current Pope is about as tolerant as a fox in a hen house.

http://europe.courrierinternational.com/eurotopics/article.asp?langue=uk&publication=13/07/2007&cat=POLITICS&pi=0

Is it that anti-religionists can't get over religion or that they can't stand continual stupidity?

James Higham said...

Religion - I agree. Practical Christianity like helping others and questioning what we're doing - that's the real stuff. Compleely different thing.

_ said...

Now, I never paid enough attention in chemistry to tell you why phosphorus trichloride is polar. But lets say for the sake of argument that the answer is:

Because the bi-zonal quinkerzeks exhibit preferential horizonality.

Then one might ask, why do quinkerzeks do that? If it is due to the left-handed spin of their sub-atomic chirzons... then why is nature like that at a sub-atomic level?

I'd love to know the answer, but it will always lead to another question about why nature should be so.

Perhaps the person answering the question was just a better philosopher or theologian than a chemist. Perhaps we need philosophers and we need chemists. Perhaps the philosopher is not preventing the chemist from advancing his knowledge - and yet the philosopher can see the world in a different light that the chemist does not.

Probably, it will be the chemist that brings us better medicines, better fuels to explore the galaxy. The chemist will certainly get better science exam results - and he deserves it. Probably, the philosopher knows he will get zero for his exam answer - but he was going to get zero anyway. Perhaps an old chemist having studied all his life was marking this exam and was given pause for thought.

But ultimately, for pure truth, it will be hard for the chemist to match the philosopher. God made it that way.

Peter said...

I'll take thinking over blind acceptance any day of the week.

My son asked me to help him with his trig. I had to look up his textbook. We found the answer, but I wasn't satisfied.

I was curious why TAN @ resolved to values greater than 1 when over 45 degrees. So I got out some graph paper and drew it out and saw that for every one square on the adjacent the hypotenuse went up by 1.x (or whatever that angle related to) then it made sense. Then I understood it.

For me, it isn't enough to see the answer in a book, I want to understand. I want to think.

I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed. I'm not the quickest kid on the block. I'm the tortoise. I'll keep going until I get it...

Anonymous said...

Much progress in civilization was
not achieved by religion but against
the active or passive resistance of
religion and the churches.
It wasn't Christianity that ended slavery, it was the fact that more and more people became aware of it being wrong, Christians or not.
Now you might say that religion shapes our way of thinking, that religion
tells us what is right or wrong.
But in fact the opposite is just as
true: our perception of what is right and wrong determines what kind of religion we find acceptable. Or,for example, which of the stories from the
bible we dare to tell the kids at
sunday school without scaring them
to death...