Posts by Neil Morrison
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...wandering round Rome with placards making a bloody nuisance of themselves.
I think it was more those friendly pagan sun and moon worshipers the Romans making a spectacle of them at the Coliseum.
Nature worship wasn't such a great idea either.
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While the chicken cooks I had a read of the Sam Bowles paper discussed in The Guardian above, towards the beginning Bowles quotes Darwin from The Descent of Man -
Darwin thought that the "moral faculties" had proliferated among early humans because a tribe of "courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who were always ready to...aid and defend each other... would spread and be victorious over other tribes"
It's a bitter irony that our better nature might have evolved to aid us do our worst. A pity there isn't a God, we might have stood a chance against Nature.
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God might be dead and therefore no good as a source of morality but science is doing a good job of letting us know that our genes are alive and well and up to all sorts of things in the realm of values -
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I haven't read the book so maybe Dawkins deals with this but I have 2 questions -
1. Is the Problem With Religion really that much of a problem any more? (compared to other problems)
2. Where religion does seem to be a problem is it more a symptom than cause?
From Giacomo Leopardi -
"A certain wise man, when someone said to him, 'I love you', replied, "Why not, if you are not of my religion, or a relative of mine, or a neighbour, or someone who looks after me?"
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Demanding that it have meaning beyond whatever you manage to imbue it with seems more than a little greedy.
I prefer the Buddhist term "attachment" over "greedy", makes it all sound less venal. But it seems to be something difficult to overcome. Letting go of everything one had, relationships etc.
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Another Einstein quote -
The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear at an early stage of development, e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learned especially from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer, contains a much stronger element of this.
What tends to get lost in the debate about (organised) religion is that religion does meet some very deep human needs. If God is dead then so are we - we live a short and often brutal life and to top it off it's all for nothing. That's a pretty hard thing to come to terms with and it's little wonder people want something to provide meaning, to deal with death.
Philosophically, Einstein had an affinity with the pantheistic views of Spinoza and he also appears to have been sympathetic to Buddhism. Most religions have had a mystical side not far removed from Buddhism - Islam has Sufism for example. I can't quite bring myself to believe in reincarnation but I can see the attraction.
I think it's possible to seperate those sorts of issues out from the darker side of religion. It seems to me that the problems caused by religion are really instances of in-group out-group discrimination. That dynamic can also be based on non-religious differences such as nationalism and ethnicity. People don't need religion to act badly, although it can help.
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Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality and intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a higher order. The firm belief, which is bound up with deep feeling, in a superior mind revealing himself in the world of experience, represents my conception of God, which may, therefore be described in common parlance as `pantheistic' (Spinoza).
Albert Einstein (__Einstein, The World as I See It__), engaging in the apparently foolish philosophical debate about God.
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I'm not a big fan of organised religion but I think it's worth remembering that the biggest crimes of the 20th century were done in the name of various forms of secular materialism, not religion.
Not believing in God is no guarantee of goodness.
There's also no need to throw the baby out with the bath water, there's more mystery now, since the advent of modern science, about the universe and the nature of consciousness than there ever was. All those philosiphical questions about existance, moraityl etc that religious thinkers pondered are still up for grabs.
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Is the John McCain piece by the same Paul Joseph Watson who thinks that 911 was an inside job?
The infowars site has an interesing resource page
on 911 including the obligatory THEY knew. -
Manakura, you may feel that Pakeha is the right word for the ethnicity of white NZers but I don't believe that you can make that decsion on behalf of others. I accept the label in certain circumstances and not others. I would not use it to decsribe my ethnicity since, like for a lot of peope, its a bit mixed up. But I am happy to accept the term when talking about treaty issues.
I think calling people who tick the New Zealander box racist is a debasement of the term. I prefer to save it for actual instances of racist attitudes or behaviour.