Saturday, February 25, 2006

the root of all evil.

I'm halfway through the bbc4 documentary with Dawkins, "the root of all evil". It's really fun in some spots, where he's so brazen in the face of religion, less so where he ignores any and all concept of humilty and respect for others. Granted, I side with him in most regards (except for the small issue of tact) but I think Kuhn's got it right when he says that you can't convince people from another paradigm using the language of yours.

If I had a short inteview with religion, I'd like to ask it a couple of questions in particular:

"When 'faith' ceased to mean 'belief despite the cruelty and illogic of the world', and started to mean 'belief contrary to any and all evidence', were you surprised that 'faith' remained so successful?"
and
"Seeing as the entirety of earthly goings on is all smoke and shadow according to the big (angry) 3, do you really think all the hubub about the smoke and shadow is in line with 'the word'?"

(ps, "Can you eat with chopsticks?")

update:

Reading this bit from dewey, I see that the first of my interview questions especially is relevant not just to religion, but philosophy as well. Just swap the word "faith" for "truth" or "knowledge". It's almost precisely the sort of question that Marxism and critical theory level at philosophy (via leveling it at science). This quotation from the above linked chapter sort of puts the problem that Marx tried to address in really clear terms:
As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself.
That is to say, ideal knowledges of all sorts should step down off their pedestals and engage the world they propose to regulate.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i do love what you write. it's a glimmer (dewey) in a dark age (german idealism taught at the german idealism academy).

also: i distinctly remember that you were the first person i met who comfortably asserted that religion was stupid. so liberating.