So, I did a bunch of navel gazing this weekend, about the nature of belief, and of faith.
In between, I watched a bunch of Star Trek episodes and movies.
Don't ask why, I don't even know.
Just what I felt like watching.
Anyhoo, had the impulse to see Star Trek 6 (TUC), and Star Trek 1 (TMP) back to back for a bookend effect, to see in one fell swoop how the movie franchise evolved, and to mentally compare it to the trailer and leaked materials for the new one, and yadda yadda....
Plus, Star Trek has tackled the whole religion & faith deal over the decades, so I was hoping for some insight.
TNG's "who watches the watchers", is as atheist an episode as you're likely to get.
Picard reveals himself to be an unabashed atheist in that one, looks right down his nose at supernatural belief.
"Horrifying... Dr. Barron, your report describes how rational these people are. Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? No!"
- Picard
But, TMP is an odd beast.
Structurally, it's a total knockoff of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
So, the message is somewhat similar.
Something about logic not being enough, so some magic extra human ingredient is needed.
They're fuzzy about nailing down what it is, in one breath, it's "irrational human emotions", in another, it's the imagination needed to postulate other dimensions, and the way it's worded, you get the idea it's also faith.
But faith in what?
Gene Roddenberry was a Bible-bashing secular humanist, so...it certainly wasn't Jesus.
Anyway, that added to my pre-existing state of navel-gazing, and I got to thinking, y'know, that even if the fact claims of religion are total bullshit, maybe this "faith", ingredient is something the human brain needs, that even if the things it has attached to over history are either foolish, or horrible, maybe "faith", is that little oomph in the brain that gets you up over that hill, or whatever.
Maybe.
And if that's true, maybe, just maybe, the human brain is just not ready to be universally secular, and let the babies have their bottles, because who am I to fuck with their little hallucinations if everyone has them?
...and then I see shit like this and these particular people don't just want their beliefs crammed into school, they want to destroy education itself, and I'm like "nahhh, this shit needs to be railed against, and railed against hard".
And it takes me right back to "at what price, this comfort?", and the Batman moment, and at the very least, organized religion is a fucking mess that I wish would go away with a whimper rather than kicking and thrashing and damaging things like it is.
And then I'm right back to faith IS the problem.
Faith is swallowing certain ideas without evidence.
And that's how you end up in these little clubs, and then the clubs go crazy, and do shit like in the linked article.
And Roddenberry knew that, so what was he getting at in TMP?
No fucking idea, and in the 70's I don't think America knew.
I think "faith in faith", and this impulse for a hippie-dippie secular religion, was where we were at at the time.
And wait, when V'Ger makes the leap of faith, it transcends into the higher dimensions.
Well...there you go, physical evidence.
That's what us atheists want.
If there's proof, it's not faith.
V'Ger did that shit, Kirk, Spock, and Mcoy saw it.
*Sigh*...lotta drugs in the 70's, I think I'll leave it at that.
And I'll stick with Picard's take on religion.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Ruminations of the day.
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3 comments:
"Faith is swallowing certain ideas without evidence."
No, faith is the ability to believe in something you don't yet have proof of, or to believe in something too big to understand rationally. To believe that eventually you'll know the Truth. A fine distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless.
"No, faith is the ability to believe in something you don't yet have proof of".
Well, this makes every scientific hypothesis a faith position.
But it's not.
Let's not abuse language here.
"...or to believe in something too big to understand rationally".
Such as?
The universe?
Cosmologists seem to have little trouble mentally encompassing it.
"To believe that eventually you'll know the Truth".
Such as?
No scientist believes this.
They hope they'll find an answer, but it's never assured.
I believe you refer to knowledge after death, yes?
"A fine distinction, to be sure, but a distinction nonetheless".
Seems like a fancy rewording to me.
Every example you displayed was an un-evidenced claim.
That there are things too big to fathom with reason.
That there will be a point, perhaps in the afterlife, where understanding of this unfathomable by reason big something will be understood.
That given that this big unfathomable something is out there, and you don't fathom it yet, that believing in it nonetheless is hunky dory.
These are all faith positions, and they all lack evidence.
Also, the whole "too big to understand rationally", thing is the argument from ignorance fallacy.
"I don't understand how this can be so big and complex, so goddidit!".
That's no answer, and it gets us nowhere.
Retrace the history of scientific inquiry, and there's along chain of things that we understand now that used to have "goddidit!", for an answer.
We probably wouldn't be alive here today if people didn't step past "goddidit!", and found the real answers.
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