On Jan 5, 2006, at 9:39 AM, William T Goodall wrote:
">Why do you think religion is dangerous?
The way it encourages a knd of childlike slavish obedience is very
negative. It teaches people to be satisfied with inadequate answers
to profound questions. Thanks to science, we now have such an
exciting grasp of the answers to such questions, it's a kind of
blasphemy not to embrace them.
First of all, the Bible got that saying all wrong. "The love of money
is the *square root* of all evil" was the original version, but, as
it is well established that mathematics and religion don't mix, we
now only have the shortened, perverted version that is so often
quoted. It may also have been "the love of money is the root of
Oliver", but nobody can prove that Oliver even existed, so there you go.
Seriously, though, I came across a new idea (for me, anyway) a couple
of weeks ago. Marcus Borg, a leading member of the Jesus Seminar (and
therefore much hated by the religious right) talks about a three-
stage development in thought among people who want to have faith in
God, but don't want to turn off their minds...
Stage 1, typical of childhood, is "pre-critical naivete" -- the
uncritical acceptance of whatever is told to you by authority
figures, usually parents. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the
obvious connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda are the kinds
of unprovable "truths" accepted in this stage. It is a useful and
healthy tool for helping little ones survive in the world. In this
stage, the developing mind is simply incapable of conceiving of the
notion that things that come "from above" shouldn't be taken as fact.
(It just occurred to me that the idea that God is "above" us,
physically, probably originates in the fact that parents are much,
much taller than children.)
Stage 2, typical of young adulthood, is "critical thinking", in which
the growing mind begins to question the things that it had accepted
as fact 'til then -- it is a winnowing process, during which
obviously false stuff is laid aside and possibly true stuff is
retained. It is not a wholesale rejection of everything given to us
by our parents, teachers and leaders, but the development of
intentional acceptance or rejection of ideas received from others.
Apparently, in this stage in Western cultures, an equivalence of
"truth" and "factuality" comes to dominate: if it isn't factual, it
mustn't be true.
Stage 3, posited by Borg (although it may exist elsewhere) is
something he calls "post-critical naivete": the ability to accept
something as *true* without requiring that it be *factual*. So, for
example, George Washington may or may not actually have cut down a
cherry tree and not told a lie about it. It is not necessarily
factual, but the story tells us something about George Washington (or
what we want to think about him), or if the story functions as a
founder's myth, something about America (or what we want to think
about it) -- namely that he (or it) is honest (the irony of using an
"unfactual" story to promote honesty notwithstanding).
I think that Dawkins' fear of religion is sourced in his
understanding that religions promote pre-critical naivete, which, for
the vast number of believers, is quite true.
I'm happy to report that there is a progressive movement in
Christianity (and, no doubt, other religions, but I don't know
anything about them except that the Jewish movement that surrounds
Tikkun magazine seems quite progressive). That movement is trying
(without necessarily using Borg's language) to view the Bible and
religious ideas as being *true*, regardless of their factuality. The
sun didn't *really* stand still in the sky for three hours (nor did
the earth stand still in its rotation for those same hours), but the
_story_ tells us something about what the writer of the story wanted
us to think about Joshua's God.
A lot of this progressive Christianity rests on the understanding
that the Bible is a human product, not a divine one, and that it
tells us what the people who wrote it thought about God, not
necessarily what God thinks.
I'm also happy to argue the relative merits of post-critical naivete
-- it's kind of a slippery slope: just how much "unfactuality" are we
supposed to allow before something is simply bullsnit?
Anyway, thanks for an interesting post and an opportunity to post a
much-too-long message of my own.
Peace,
Dave
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
