There is little more dangerous in this world than a person or group blinded by ideological obsession, and few ideologies are more pernicious than religion. By their very nature, religious beliefs must see this life as a means to some other end for the sake of which present sacrifices are not only permitted but sometimes demanded.In the video clip below, Bill Maher shows some of these dangers and talks to seemingly regular people who would rejoice and see a silver lining behind a mushroom cloud because they think that's a sign that vague ancient prophecies are about to be fulfilled.
Now, if you must be a fundamentalist, you should become a member of The Church of the Holy Undecided :)
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I enjoyed that documentary very much; it of course plays the spiel we rationally-minded folk have already said. Bill merely takes things to the next level: getting in the face of the religious with the truth.
ReplyDeleteThe problem however is figuring out how to help people realize they don't need religion to feel good about their existence by not pissing them off in the process. Perhaps we have to start at the beginning. Just like a tobacco company, religion targets the young. Must rationalists take the same tactical measures of persuasion? The child's mind will believe anything it is told, and that "information" will stay with him/her for the rest of their life.
I like Aristotle's approach when it comes to this kind of education: teach through example and practice. One of our problems is that we don't teach children how to reason critically about anything. All they're ever taught in school is how to memorize information and regurgitate it, but not how to synthesize the information and analyze it against a background of other beliefs. By the time kids get to college, when we finally start teaching them the tools of critical thinking, their brains aren't flexible enough to learn these skills. Plus, their personal and emotional investments in the beliefs they've held their entire lives become more sedimented with time.... It's a mess...
ReplyDeleteYou have a very valid point. The educational system that's already very deeply integrated into "the system" (the scheme of things) progressively develops people (from childhood to adulthood) into machines that operate in a machine.
ReplyDeleteSo... with all this mess, how about a little "rage against the machine"?
"Fuck no, I won't do what they tell me!"
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