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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (18335)	12/2/2003 11:43:12 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793671

Just listening to the maker of a film about 11 lessons from Robert McNamara. #11 - you can't change human nature. What a bitter lesson. This was the hunanists' most cherished dream. First the war to end all wars will change human nature, the New Deal will change it, then education can do it, urban renewal, more education, phychoactive drugs. The theme of the 20th century was changing human nature. Every attempt led to a dead end, some very bloody. Religion had something to say on the subject. Some of it very hopefull.

To: LindyBill who wrote (18335)	12/4/2003 10:55:32 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 793671

Why do people embrace Religion? Because they are looking for answers, and their secular society has failed to give them answers. Secular society has accepted the reality that there are things we don’t know, and questions we can’t answer. Some of us admit those realities, others would rather resort to superstition to provide “answers” to the unanswerable. I don’t really understand that, but there’s no denying that many people would prefer a fabricated answer to the admission that we don’t know. What is our Philosophy? Post Modernism, an approach that says Reason is of little use, man cannot know. I don’t know anything about Post Modernism, but I completely reject the notion that Reason is of little use. Reason has allowed us to cure the sick, predict natural disasters, expand food production to meet the needs of a growing population. Reason has given us freedoms and luxuries unimaginable a century ago. I don’t think that’s “of little use”, not by a long shot, and I would like to hear anyone argue to the contrary, especially on the Internet. Reason has also posed huge challenges, and provided the means to meet them. Yes, there are questions reason can’t answer. Reason won’t tell us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and it won’t tell us what happens to us after we’re dead – not yet, anyway. I don’t see those gaps as flaws. There are things we don’t know yet. There are things we may never know. So it goes. Better to admit the gaps in your knowledge than to fill them with superstition. America runs on reason and spends it's spare time engaging in superstition. Yes, and that’s scary. It’s not just the Christians, either. We have fundamentalist Muslims. We have Californians pretending to be Tibetan Buddhists (funny, they don’t LOOK Tibetan). We have Wiccans, and Gaia-worshipers, and the young people who invade my territory in streams, looking for a shaman to worship. We’ve become a nation where astrologers outnumber astronomers by about a hundred to one. That’s not good.