A Religion of Peace

No religion remains peaceful for long when it can manage to get political power for itself. It's like an 8 year old who steals the car keys or finds a loaded gun.

Islam differs from Christianity only in the fine details of its doctrines. But those details are entirely irrelevant. It's all the product of human invention from stem to stern.

The salient point - the only point, really - is that the adherents of religion remove Reason and Empiricism from their rightful throne and replace them with something else. It does not matter whether that something else is reverence for the mythological stories of illiterate nomadic goat herders, belief in the healing power of crystals, blind obedience to Chairman Mao, or the worship of an invisible Chameleon who poops Reese's Pieces.

Any ideology, however well-intentioned, that uses something other than observable, testable, falsifiable reality as the basis for its epistemology can be hijacked and used by the unscrupulous to gain power over the ignorant or the unwary. And when that happens, there is no knowing how bad the outcome will be. It can be mild and localized badness like a shunning, or it can be widespread and deadly badness, like the formation of the Soviet Union.

If a religion does manage to accomplish something good, it's only because of some amazing bit of good luck. But notice that, for every religion, the best one can ever hope for is that the good will outweigh the bad by some narrow margin.

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The Walls that Divide

Someone in a Facebook group I follow recently said that a family member posted this quote on their wall:

This person was wondering how to respond. I replied as follows:

I've rarely seen a more perfect example of how people's worldview filters can make it extremely difficult to communicate. In the Believer's worldview, 'faith' is a word that has only positive connotations. It is the epitome of goodness, righteousness, and what to strive for. 'Doubt', as the opposite of faith and its destroyer, is naturally vilified.

In the Skeptic's or the Non-believer's worldview, 'faith' is the epitome of all that is wrong with the world and 'doubt', as expressed in Robert Weston's famous poem quoted above, is a cherished virtue.

With this in mind, one can easily see how Elder Holland's quote is a perfect illustration of how clashing worldviews can present an obstacle to communication. When believers read this message, they see it as an affirmation of what is good and right. When non-believers read it, they see it as the worst sort of demagoguery.

So, my advice is to consider the source. The bigger person will respond to the intention behind the message and not to the message itself. I think this message might have had a positive intent before being encrypted by the sender's 'believing worldview' key. Then when you received the message and decrypted it with your 'non-believer worldview' key, the message came out garbled and its original good intent was obscured. To put it another way, passive-aggressive is often only in the eye of the beholder. To put it yet another way, "never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" (Hanlon's razor).

With all that said, the bigger person can easily wind up being the doormat. The key to avoiding this is for all participants to transcend their respective worldviews and realize that a worldview is not the world. Giving the benefit of the doubt can help this. Putting yourself in the other's shoes can help also. But these are things only you can do. You can't force the other person to do this, especially if they're convinced they're right and you're wrong.

Sometimes it's possible to find a way to help the other person be more 'meta'. That is to say, help them realize that (1) a worldview is not the world, (2) they're stuck in their own worldview, (3) you have a different worldview, and (4) communication will go more smoothly if you both can rise up from behind the walls of your respective worldviews and converse directly. This is so much easier said than done, but sometimes it is enough to point out the existence the worldview walls to make the other person see them for the trap that they are.

 

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The Really Big Picture

This fascinating video about galactic superclusters recently came to my attention and the person who posted the link said it made him more than ever convinced that intelligent design must be involved in the organization of the universe.

I had to respond thus:

Everywhere I look with my mind and imagination, from the subatomic to the cosmic supercluster of galaxies, I perceive the incomparable power of the interaction of physical laws, each operating blindly, relentlessly, and with unerring precision in its sphere of influence. The end result is an impossibly grand yet mind-bogglingly intricate self-organizing dance of Newtonian cause and effect, Heisenbergian uncertainty, and Einsteinian relativity (among any number of other things I'm sure I'm not aware of).

In the infancy of our species, we conjured up an unending menagerie of omnipowerful beings in an effort to explain what we had not yet developed the tools to understand. This need to understand and to find the reasons things happen, part of our genetic endowment, conferred an important survival advantage and was part of how and why we evolved consciousness. It explains why we invented endless different gods. Now, thanks to hundreds of transformative inventions like the scientific method, books, microscopes, and telescopes, we are able to understand more things, more thoroughly than we ever have. In case after case -- every case, actually -- things we had long thought were the result of supernatural power were really only the result of the mundane interaction of discoverable, testable laws that arise naturally from the fundamental properties of energy/matter and space/time.

Now we understand that our world, that seems so big in comparison with us, is just one of a hundred billion, being pulled along by gravity around the center of our average-sized galaxy, also just one of the hundred billion of its sibling galaxies whose light has had time to reach us. We have no way of knowing how many others lie outside our light cone. We are as tiny to the universe as hydrogen atoms are tiny to us.

It is now time for us to let go of the insecurity and immaturity that keeps us from understanding and accepting our true place in the cosmos. Inventing deities no longer becomes us. They ceased to serve a valid purpose many centuries ago and now the mindset that created them has become the greatest impediment to our physical, moral, and ethical development as a species. When we impose the narrow limits of our minds, our customs, our imperfect notions of justice and mercy and morality on the cosmos through the intermediary of deities we invent, we only hamper and do ourselves a grave disservice. The sooner we see this, the better off we will be.

For the first four and a half decades of my life, Mormon theology did indeed shape my understanding of many things, cosmology included. I have outgrown that theology and now the cosmos has become incomparably more beautiful, more interesting, and more awe-inspiring since I stopped imagining I held a privileged place in it. To lose that terrible misconception was the greatest awakening and the premier transformative event of my life.

 

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