13 Comments »

1. Hifi:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 12:20 pm

   Odd! The astronomer doesn’t seem to be able to see his “heavens” for the stars (you know, forest for the trees). All religions are pagan in that way: nature spirit worship, combined with a healthy dose of ancestor worship, death cultism and magical thinking. Throw that all out and what exactly is it that the Catholic church or any other is still offering?

2. Jill:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 3:29 pm

   That’s funny.

3. jason mashak:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 3:46 pm

   Strange how the word ‘pagan’ has such a different context than what it originally meant: peasant.

   Nietzsche’s studies, in either Genealogy of Morals or Beyond Good and Evil (I can’t recall which), point to the twisting and attribution of certain words to the lower classes by those in power, creating and thus reinforcing that whatever is ‘pagan’ (of the peasant classes) is evil.

   FYI, I found you through a http://www.humaniststudies.org link.

4. Skysinger:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 7:32 pm

   I would really appreciate it if you didn’t do that. We’re already being blamed for the Holocaust and 9/11 to say nothing of the old baby sacrifice canard. The Boy Scouts don’t want our kids in their troops and the government would prefer we stay out of the military.I could go on for days. Please don’t dump this on us as well.
   At any rate thank you for hearing me out and I really enjoy reading the website.

5. Skysinger:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 7:35 pm

   P.S. I forgot to mention – all of the Pagans I know accept evolution. We’re a little more science minded than you might think

6. Noell:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 7:45 pm

   Skysinger–good to know you’re still around. I meant no harm to pagans. While I do not agree with the supernatural aspects of pagan religion, I do appreciate the emphasis on nature. My reference to negativity with paganism was the negativity that Christians refer to it, not from my own point of view. It’s the same for atheism.

   But then, I guess from your point of view, I see where you are coming from. I’m playing on the prejudice against you.

   Darn! It’s just so funny.

7. Gregg100:
   May 10th, 2006 @ 9:13 pm

   I’d like to address HiFi’s interesting question “…what exactly is it that the Catholic Church or any other is still offering?” There are those that take a hard line and claim that the function of science is to provide comprehension of the physical world and the function of religion is to tell people how they ought to live and practitioners within the two kingdoms of science and religion ought to stay out of each other’s shop. I quote the famous and much honored scientist and anthropologist, Stephen Jay Gould, “That is, science must insist that, whatever the factual state of nature, our yearnings and quest for morality and meaning belong to the different domains of the humanities, the arts, philosophy, and theology – and cannot be adjudicated by the findings of science.”
   At the same time it is interesting to note that the group that successfully joined the plaintiffs to challenge the Arkansas creationism law in the early 1980’s (McKean v. Arkansas) culminated in a Supreme Court victory (for the evolutionists) in 1987, included more theologians that scientists.
   My view is that there is a gray area between the two kingdoms of sufficient magnitude that it is necessary to consider both the humanities and science when attempting to make a “wise” ethical or moral decision. There is more to religion than dogma. I can assure you there are legions of religious philosophers that through math-like syllogisms have deduced many general guidelines for living that have permeated the modern Western culture to our benefit.
   I recently attended a showing of “Interplanetary Art” in which very skilled artists created paintings based on the best scientific information available to show what it might look like to stand on the various planets and moons of the Solar System. Was I looking at art or science? It is a gray area not unlike my previous point. It was an integration of science and humanities to the benefit of the observer. I tend to evaluate art with a three step process. Was the artist’s message communicated? Was the work technically well done? Was it aesthetically pleasing? I answered “Yes” to all.
   As I said before, I think an integration of humanities and science has the best chance of facilitating “wise” decisions. I can easily see the possibility of an equivalent three step process to evaluate the “wisdom” of any moral or ethical decision. Noell has posed one question already in her entry to the latest Humanist Network News.

8. Terry S.:
   May 11th, 2006 @ 11:50 am

   I posted a response here a couple of hours ago, but I guess it didn’t take. Maybe it was a math problem. It was good stuff, too. Don’t know if I can dredge it out of my stagnant mind again. I’ll give it another go later.

   TLS

9. Noell:
   May 11th, 2006 @ 1:00 pm

   Woops, sorry, Terry. I never saw it. You can ask Hifi, that’s happened at least once before.

10. fran:
    May 11th, 2006 @ 3:19 pm

    It could be sabatoge you know …It happened to me too a couple of days ago . Think about it …… Your message may be floating around the halls of the Vatican and yet another portrayal of fictional supernaturalism may be coming into existance . Agnostimom the goddess of the future past ………..he he he he he he

11. Hifi:
    May 11th, 2006 @ 3:24 pm

    Gregg100, What does humanities, or even theology have to do with religion? Fictional writing?

    I recently replied on just this subject to Rabbi Lerner and his criticism of so-called “scientism” in America. Bringing God Into It

    I reproduce it here:

    Dear Rabbi, I appreciate your liberalism. But I think you get off base in your argument proposing that rationalism in America is “scientism”. You say,

    “As a religious person, I don’t rely on science to tell me what is right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important. I understand that such questions cannot be answered through empirical observations. Claims about God, ethics, beauty and any other face of human experience that is not subject to empirical verification.”

    First off, you provide no evidence, whatsoever, to back up the claim that such questions cannot be answered empirically. To the contrary, your statements are flat-out contradicted by what we do know about cognition. I don’t see that you have read much neuroscience – which I won’t go into – but as an anthropologist, to me it seems that you have little understanding about how “spirituality” and “meaning” actually function in any given society.

    If you compare spiritual and aesthetic concepts across cultures, the only way to make any sense at all out of “right and wrong or what love means or why my life is important”, as you say, is to view it as entirely relative to the the culture the person is embedded in. We can find no cross-cultural commonalities in those things at all. In each culture, these kinds of intuitive notions – if they exist at all – are built purely on a baseline of local human survival needs. These environmental constraints directly impart the specific meanings which the culture then conjures up and emotionally weights for itself in symbology (icons, art, myth). The actual universals aren’t spiritual at all, they are survival, reproduction and that my way is right and others are wrong.

    Yes, people are motivated by aesthetic and spiritual interests, but if highlighted rather than played down in secular society it tears it apart, at best stratifying it, and repressing non-doctrinaire expression, at worst, resorting to force to decide whose cultural mode shall prevail (for a current example, think Darfur).

    On the other hand, when we look at modern secular nations where religion has faded, we find that they exceed religious societies on every concrete measure of a healthy society. Religious belief, it has been shown, contributes towards high murder rates, abortion, sexual promiscuity and suicide, according to research published. Ironically, every measure espoused by conventional religious morality.

    Journal of Religion and Society: Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies
    http://moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2005/2005-11.html

    Excerpt: “The data examined in this study demonstrates that only the more secular, pro-evolution democracies have, for the first time in history, come closest to achieving practical “cultures of life” that feature low rates of lethal crime, juvenile-adult mortality, sex related dysfunction, and even abortion. The least theistic secular developing democracies such as Japan, France, and Scandinavia have been most successful in these regards. The non-religious, pro-evolution democracies contradict the dictum that a society cannot enjoy good conditions unless most citizens ardently believe in a moral creator.”

    “The widely held fear that a Godless citizenry must experience societal disaster is therefore refuted.”

    According to the study, belief in and worship of God are not only unnecessary for a healthy society but may actually contribute to social problems.

12. Gregg100:
    May 11th, 2006 @ 6:55 pm

    HiFi, Once again it seems I completely agree with your presentation and as an Atheist of long standing I could point to many other instances wherein the more religious nations seem to have a preponderance of problems. A glance at South and Central America is only one example.

    However, my point seems to have been lost and I want to try once again. My point is that there are instances in which the source of guidance for moral and ethical decisions get sufficiently blurred that it is worthwhile considering (in one case) both religious and scientific sources. Let me pose an ethical situation. Suppose you have a very rich friend that is dying and he asks that upon his death you to take a million dollars to his favorite ball team (let’s say the Dodgers) so they can buy better players. He dies and you start off for the office of the Dodgers with a million dollars. On the way there you see a newspaper headline that genocide is taking place in an African nation and a million dollars will save 400,000 people. What do you do? One the one hand, religious guidelines (The Ten Commandments) demand that you should not steal the money and send it to Africa. Science might suggest that survival of the human species might be enhanced by the saving of 400,000 people that might have a gene pool with a gene that results in immunity to some terrible disease or it could conclude that 400,000 less people would have the effect of more resources for the survivors; neither study has not been done. Does the inclusion of the religious consideration help to cause disarray as you suggest or is it a worthwhile consideration? Should the considerations be limited to the survival/reproductive considerations alone?

    I think my position is consistent with yours in that I don’t give religion any credit for coming up with any guidelines that were not just logical rules that had survival benefits, (including the Ten Commandments). Unfortunately, in today’s society, religion is given credit for such guidelines. If you give religion any credit for coming up with some common sense guidelines independent of the yet to be developed kingdom of science, then I suggest that some of these guidelines are worthy of consideration when making moral or ethical decisions. If on the other hand, you consider such guidelines as suspect until validated by scientific studies (if possible) then we have much work to do.

13. Terry S.:
    May 12th, 2006 @ 9:03 pm

    Yeah! What they said! Yeah! That’s the ticket!

    TLS

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