We will bury you!

Here's another churchless guest post from regular commenter "cc." I titled this post as he named his short essay.

Hope he's right... that science and evidence-based rationality will supplant religiosity. It's a slow process, though.

The United States is highly developed in many regards. But we have a seemingly never-ending supply of religious nutheads.

Under certain conditions, science undermines religion and eventually supplants it.

This is demonstrated in the developed world  where the scientific method is held in higher esteem than religious faith. In the most highly developed countries, only a minority of knuckleheads revere and refer to holy scriptures, the mumbo-jumbo of a spiritual leader, and anecdotal evidence. 

But,  despite this trend in some places, what we're seeing world-wide is more faith-based religious nuts and maniacs than ever before. 

As a species, we're reproducing faster than we can reduce the number of numbskulls we're tossing into the gene pool. It seems that if we can't develop faster than we can reproduce, our development is bound to be overtaken by the very brutishness it is fleeing. 

This is not to say that I have no hope, but to say that I have no faith, and, if I may say, it's a tremendous relief. You can't believe what a burden belief is until you lose your faith.

Comments

[cc]

The phrase "We will bury you!" is a quote from Nikita Kruschev referring to what communism would do to capitalism, and I meant it in reference to what religion is apparently doing to reason.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you

[Brian Hines]

Well, in my optimistic mind I reversed the burying. You might be right. But on the whole, I see science and reason as making gains over dogmatic religiosity. A lot more people nowadays call themselves "spiritual but not religious," which is a step in the right direction.

[cc]

Yes, I agree that science and reason are making gains over dogmatic religiosity, but because religious nuts make more babies than reasonable people, an ever increasing number of numbskulls ranting, chanting, churning and burning, could conceivably "bury" what reason there is...though access to the internet may be the crucial factor. It's difficult to be a religious nut when you have access to information your leaders and keepers don't want you to have.

[IloveDrAnn]

As long as there is death there will be religion. Religion is postmortem a promise, life everlasting.

Of course RS issues its version of the postmortem promise. It is a complete religion; Eastern variation, same basic theme. Theme: you have a soul that is eternal, and deathless that needs help getting past the Kal/Devil or some such. In RS one has to mine the psyche/brain/mind (whatever) for it, open the door to a mysterious command center via 5 magic incantations. Salvation through a Jewish Messiah sounds just as likely to be true.

[cc]

"As long as there is death there will be religion. Religion is postmortem a promise, life everlasting."

Science is making this increasingly untrue. It's more accurate to say that as long as people can't think for themselves, they'll turn to others to do their thinking for them. When they see that they're better off turning to scientists than to religionists, a whole lotta nuttiness gets flushed.

Of course it's only a conversion from one authority to another, but with science, nothing is sacred or everything is sacred, and that's a significant step out of religious swill.