God Could Be An Opinion: A Response To Jim's Take On Science And Religion
Oct 26 '03
The Bottom Line Humble humans go further in their search than the rigid, dogmatic ones who already "know."
(This is not the first time I have written an epinion as a response to one by Da 29th, but what the heck.)
http://www.epinions.com/content_3549274244
I got into this epinion by the 29th with a suspicion: is this a sorry apology for creationism? Or what? Because, often times, when politics comes into science in this country, it is either the intractable abortion debate, or the whole Darwin or creationism issue, especially the Deep South, both geographical and mental. And there might be a few other things, like the environment. Global Warming Denied. Record Budget Deficits Fuzzy Maths. But we can branch on to those later.
I am someone who sees a certain beauty in Darwin's theory of evolution. The certitude of the Jesus-And-Jesus-Alone people (if you don't believe in religious diversity, you disqualify your membership of this country, and so that belief comes way before whether or not you believe Jesus is the s.o.g., as in son of god) that gets a few lines in the Bible -- "And God created everything in six days" -- some other religion has the count on seven days, Islam, so go wonder -- competing with evolution is absurd.
I am a Buddhist, as in Buddhism within the framework of religious diversity. You could be a Christian, and that is okay, you could be a Jew or a Christian, and that is okay, or a Hindu, which I used to be, and my family still is. I have never felt the need to "save" any Christian. (Wait a minute, let me take that back. I have. Quite a few. From themselves. From their fixations, from their membership of the flat earth society. But then every religion seems to have that "right wing" extremism. Can Osama be labelled the KKK of Islam? I mean.)
It is like the "moderate" homophobes who are capable of saying "I love you" to gays. They are not up in arms. But that attitude matters. Big time. Forget the extremists. It is those main street attitudes that shape the most engulfing prejudices. The right wing extremism, when acted upon, might make news. But the widespread prejudice is like background radiation, like "reality." Unquestioned. With much seething momentum, inertia rather. The will to not budge. The oh so certain belief. Belief. Ah. Belief. Is believing being? Is to believe to be? To say it is is to catapult the human ego to stratospheric heights, where it does not belong. Come to think of it, science has constantly worked against the human ego. Oops, sorry fella, the earth is not the center of the universe. You are an insignificant species on what amounts to a speck of dust in a huge, huge universe. And it is not even flat. Oops. Darwin. Freud. And during all those arguments, God has often been labelled that dark, the misunderstood. The ignorant zone. And so when someone envokes the name of God, the first question ought be, Define God. For if it is your ignorance, Da Zone, then I would like to know. For then, the subsequent questions become oh so easy to answer.
Just because I believe, it is so. Do you believe Jesus is the son of God? Like someone said once of Marx, by the time he died, he could not recognize all the Marxists that had sprouted around him. Could Jesus - were he to come back -- "Jesus is coming, look busy" -- recognize all those who claim to "believe" in him. And that is a huge tent for the slave owners, the apartheid practitioners, the segregationists, just to name a few.
Not to be hard on just the right wingers under the Christian umbrella, feel the need to bring in their brethren from the Hindu India. India, a country that has more Muslims than any other country. A right wing Shiva Sena holds political sway over Bombay, which is the New York City and Los Angeles in India put together. I recently read of this "triangle" somewhere in Latin America, a lawless zone, where the Al Qaeda, the white supremacists from North America, and other similar groups huddle, share secrets, teach each others methods! Hello. Common ground? You would think the white supremacists would want to eat alive the Al Qaeda, and vice versa, because the Aryan Nation might be a loud infidel to those Al Qaeda eyes, you would think. But I guess not.
Looks like instead, it is the moderates, those of us doing our boring jobs, living our humdrum lives, paying our bills, harnessing our petty, for the most part, of little consequence prejudices, that they together target. Soft targets?
There is acid. And there is concentrated acid. High school science. There are moderates and the concentrated moderates, the extremists. And evolution is high school science too. But not so. Distance will be measured in miles, and it is all God's creation. Poor fella.
Where I stand is I see no conflict. A man can be a father and a son and a husband at the same time. As a woman a mother a wife a sister. I believe the same applies to the Darwin version of what happened, the Bible version of what happened, the Koran version of how it all came about. The Hindu, the Buddhist stories. If only we had the humility to acknowledge our human limits that should always warn us of certainties.
Diversity is in-built, like unique fingerprints, differing opinions, individual and collective.
As for the left and right brain talk. I believe, literally, that we see things through six sense. The five, and imagination. Mathematics is the most "useful" form of imagination, but not the only one. Sometimes that imagination can be fuelled by our myriad complex feelings. So the left-right dichotomy is not helpful all the way. There has not been any worthwhile science without "leaps of faith." I would call them leaps of imagination, but then that is wordplay.
"...as the religious extremists and zealots who claim to believe in an infinite God, yet who insist on defining and representing that God in their own finite terms and flawed images..."
Revealing.
The exit link! Ha.
"Neither Science nor religion hold all the answers, yet both seem quick to discount the possibility and/or viability of the innumerable examples of unexplained/unexplainable mysteries and potentially-unrevealed truths that fall outside the purview of their jealously-defended rituals and narrowly-construed dogma, or which they perceive as potentially conflicting with their own inflexible set of core beliefs."
Not everyone who claims to be a Christian is, and the same can be said of the tribe of scientists.
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paramendra
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Member: Paramendra Bhagat
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