Crap Thinking
Anthony Grayling talks about pretty much the same thing, also taking off from the survey that found all those creationists and IDers.
…a significant proportion of university entrants today are…less literate, less numerate, less broadly knowledgeable, and less reflective. At the same time education has been infected by post-modern relativism and the less desirable effects of “political correctness”, whose combined effect is to encourage teachers to accept, and even promote as valid alternatives, the various superstitions and antique belief-systems constituting the multiplicity of different and generally competing religions represented in our multicultural society…The key to the weakening of intellectual rigour that all this represents is that enquiry is no longer premised on the requirement that belief must be proportional to carefully gathered and assessed evidence. The fact that “faith” is enough to legitimate anything from superstition to mass murder is not one whit troubling to “people of faith” themselves…
Because they take faith to be a virtue. They take the ability to maintain one’s ‘faith’ and ‘beliefs’ in spite of conflicting evidence to be a sign of strength, and laudable strength at that. And that’s your problem right there – it gets you crap thinking. Thinking that makes a virtue of ignoring evidence is crap thinking.
“With faith anything goes”: here is why the claim that the resurgence of non-rational superstitious belief is a danger to the world. Fundamentalism in all the major religions (and some are fundamentalist by nature) can be and too often is politically infantilising, and in its typical radicalised forms provides utter certainty of being in the right, immunises against tolerance and pluralism, justifies the most atrocious behaviour to the apostate and the infidel, is blind to the appeals of justice let alone mercy or reason, and is intrinsically fascistic and monolithic.
It’s hard to argue right now that fundamentalism is not dangerous. So I won’t bother trying.
More regrettable still, though, is the fact that the civilised quarters of the world are not taking seriously the connection between the world’s current problems and failure to uphold intellectual rigour in education, and not demanding that religious belief be a private and personal matter for indulgence only in the home…As part of the strategy for countering the pernicious effects that faith and dogma can produce, we need to return religious commitment to the private sphere, stop the folly of promoting superstitions and religious segregation in education, demand that standards of intellectual rigour be upheld at all educational levels, and find major ways of reversing the current trend of falling enrolment in science courses. The alternative is a return to the Dark Ages, the tips of whose shadows are coldly falling upon us even now.
Well, that’s what I think. But I don’t have much faith it’s going to happen any time soon.
Go OB!
Nearly off topic, I thought you would enjoy this article in The Australian. http://theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20126665-7583,00.html
“The truth is that it is now too dangerous for religion to be given the special status it has always had. When large numbers of people, some of them living among us, want to kill us and our innocent children (surely “innocent children” is a tautology) for no other reason than that we do not believe in their God, we can no longer afford to tiptoe around religious sensitivities. It is time to get rid of the taboo that says religious beliefs have to be quarantined from criticism. It is time to hold some religious beliefs up to ridicule.
God may or may not exist; I don’t presume to know. But I am fairly certain that a god does not exist who wants everyone killed who does not believe in a certain book; or a god who takes an obsessive interest in what women wear; or a god who cares about whether we eat pork rather than lamb (though if I were god I’d be pretty annoyed at human beings eating any other animals); or a god who wants little bits of babies’ genitals cut off.
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What proportion of suicide bombers are convinced that they will be instantly transformed into some kind of angel in another world? 99.9%? 100?
In my studies of contagion effect and mass shooters, there was no ‘afterlife’ motivation, but they still went for death in the package, to escape consequences.
I believe that the afterlife part in Western construction of suicide bombing is somewhat overplayed; a bit of a stalking horse. They are doing it for social approval, now, in this life, in this minute. Like a ‘darers go first’ kid with a skateboard and a big hill, the consequences of backing away are the biggest driver to completion. Social standing or ‘honor’ are the motivation; the virgins are just an excuse to not think about being dead.
ChrisPer,
I suspect you’re right that the idea that suicide bombers just want to get on the guest list to heaven is over-simplified and unhelpful.
Once someone has accepted the groupthink that suicide bombing is a legitimate and praiseworthy act, the actual trigger that makes that person strap on the belt will be a lot more complex and varied.
ChrisPer, Don.
Perhaps the afterlife-as-fantasy is overplayed and stereotypical, but let’s not forget how important a part it plays in the indoctrination process. It is a crucial element to pusuading bored young males with esteem issues.
Hitler Youth teenagers were regularly shown very persusaively filmed Nazi progagnda about how true Aryans woould and should be living sometimes quite bachanalistic lifestyles in the Black Forest, handsome men, gorgeous girls, all bathing and playing hardly clothed; the connotations in some secenes were quite orgiastic. Sure that isn’t what the Nazis were actually thinking when they were organising train timetables to Poland, but it was part of the induction. The same goes for young jihadists, but more so…
Well, how about the converse? It seems safe to say that only a tiny minority of suicide bombers are convinced that by perpetrating the deed they’ll be ending their existences forever.
Doug, so right! But that doesn’t only apply to suicide bombers. Daredevil acts are called that for a reason; death is defied for the sake of honor, and self-death is a blind spot for most humans.
Daredevil… Interesting. Is it called that because suicide is a sin, and if one dies in some reckless adventure, one goes straight to hell?