| Your last line gives me cause to consider that I am neither a good citizen of the scientific world view, nor of a spiritual one LMAO. My thinking is shoddy in the one, and obscure and obfuscated in the other. That is too good. My take on religious intolerance, leaving aside ideological intolerance for the moment, is that it does not stem from belief per se, but from insufficient belief, on the one hand. Take Judeo-Christianity, and probably Islam, and Hinduism, though not Buddhism, which offer two basic summary ideas: love God (whom you don't see), love your neighbor (whom you do see). I do not for the life of me understand how one ascribes to this simple formula while blowing up buildings--WTC, abortion clinics--or killing people. If one believes even in God's equal and unilateral even-handedness toward all creation, one cannot harm another. In fact, we proclaim God's unabashed favor, interest, and concern for all creation. As Barth and many others have said, God's "yes" certainly supercedes mankind's "no." Freud and CS Lewis cover much the same data on the question of conscience (which may relate somehow here) by agreeing it is a universal phenomena, and universally violated. Lewis says we find much agreement in cultures that things are right and wrong, and even large agreement on what those things are. Equally we find them universally violating those principles. "First, human beings all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it. Secondly, they do not in fact behave in that way... These two facts are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in." Freud is largely in agreement about the observable data, but says if God did provide the starry heavens above and the moral law within (Kant's formulation), God did an especially poor job with the moral law (LOL). "The stars are indeed magnificent, but as regards conscience God has done an uneven and careless piece of work." But I think what he means is that people are not following their conscience. He was publicly disappointed in fellow psychoanalysts, particularly those in his own school of thought, who were no better and sometimes worse than average people. Freud proposed that the "dictatorship of reason" was the only solution to man's inhumanity and immorality, and would eventually be achieved through education. But he was disappointed in the results almost everywhere except in his own immediate family, and himself. (Along with Nicholi's book I'll mention again Brown, Life Against Death, The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, and Becker's Denial of Death as hugely interesting reads.) Lewis and Freud agree that we have internalized morality, but fail at it universally. Interestingly Freud was quite open about feeling himself morally superior to almost everyone he came in contact with. |
