1. A bit of Fry & Laurie - Sex talk in class

Comment #185373 by cpiasminc on May 27, 2008 at 4:38 pm

This was probably not the best of sketches on the show, but it is good one nonetheless. It does display the typical sort of willful ignorance you see from most idiots out there.

I think a fairly good one (also in the pseudo-science realm) is the one where Hugh Laurie portrays a sort of Uri Geller type of character claiming to bend spoons with his psychic energies --
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSk2GWWWCJs

2. Science owes its origins to Christianity or Religion

Comment #180658 by cpiasminc on May 15, 2008 at 1:09 pm

There's a level of wrongness in here that is just beyond words. First of all, specifically Christianity?!? Whatever happened to the ancient Egyptians who clearly managed to derive enough about mathematics to be able to build the pyramids? What ever happened to the ancient Hindus and Mayans and Chinese? Even for all the discoveries they might have made after the time of Christ, there isn't a single one they made aided and spurred on by Christian doctrine. You could say the same of the Islamic scientists of the 9-12th century who were quite explicit in cutting themselves off from the "infidels" of the Christian world, and still managed to do so much for mathematics, astronomy, etc. To take the fact that Western civilization and Christian-ruled empires ultimately became dominant through the course of history is not the same as saying that it is because of this that we have science.

Extending to religion in general, there may be hundreds of examples where religious institutions got in the way of scientific progress, but that's the least of it. The fact is that there has never been a single scientific discovery that originated out of religious doctrine first. This is a classic case of the fallacy where correlation == causality. You can't tell me for a second that Darwin, who was originally aiming for the priesthood, came across natural selection because of his Christianity, as opposed to saying that he came across this insight because of his travels and studies and the expressly non-religious works of other scientists of his day. You can't say that Mendel derived his laws because he was a monk, as opposed to because he was tending to a garden. Nowhere in the Bible does it say "the Lord, thy God created the living substance with alleles. And of the alleles, He created dominant and recessive sorts." How can you possibly say, with any sort of inkling of having brain cells that humanity found out that 1 plus 1=2 because "God said so"?! Did Eratosthenes compute the circumference of the Earth by praying to Zeus? Was Archimedes pondering on the minds of the gods when developing his screw? It's just utterly absurd to say that.

I've heard some argue that in Hinduism, there are examples of "scientific" notes in the scripture, but these are all examples where the science happened before the religious text contained them -- the Vedas, after all, are pretty much a compilation of previously existing essays written in a different form (and it had obviously been amended and added to over generations). The basic point is that just because there are people who happened to be both religious and progenitors of scientific discoveries at the same time, doesn't mean that one gives rise to the other. These people had inquisitive minds and sought answers by their own efforts. With religion, the attitude is always "You don't need to know. Just say 'God'." Scientific discovery happens because people did not accept the idea of "you don't need to know." If we ever find that something to which you can ultimately say "God did it" at some point in time, it only raises the question "How and Why did God do it?" The religious institutions would just shrug and say "God works in mysterious ways. Don't ask questions like that." How about this proposition, then... If I don't ask, then you don't tell. Sound fair? Science happens in spite of religion, not because of it.

3. Hinduism and Buddhism offer much more sophisticated worldviews (or philosophies) and I see nothing wrong with these religions.

Comment #179435 by cpiasminc on May 13, 2008 at 8:44 am

A phrase I've often used to describe Hinduism is that it is not an organized religion. It is fundamentally a disorganized religion. It doesn't have any sort of fundamental rules unto itself insofar as "this encompasses all of the forms of Hinduism." Sure, the words like Dharma and Karma and so on exist everywhere, but they aren't very explicitly defined in any sort of universal way. Because it's an introspective and reflective type of approach, it really opens itself up to just about anything from the mild to the completely insane. And there are communities who form all sorts of new sects and new castes based on the philosophies of some particular leader/philosopher simply because they don't want to have to sort it out for themselves. There is indeed less likelihood of finding a Hindu for whom The God Delusion was highly offensive as there is to find a Hindu who agrees with every word in the book. Well, I suppose if the book had come out 50 years ago or so, the story would be quite the opposite.

Now if we were to get into the specifics of Vaishnavam, Shaivam, etc... Now you start getting into a little bit more uniformity. Now when you get down even further and look at specific castes under these, it really gets to that point. When you get down to the subcaste level, there's fundamentalism like any other religion. I have an aunt who would qualify as a pretty extreme example of a Vaishnavite fundamentalist. And things like "God of the gaps" arguments are old hat for her. It's actually quite funny how she can concede things like how rainfall works on a scientific level, but then ultimately fall on "oh, but somebody had to make the water molecule such that it is a highly self-cohesive solvent!" But one thing that you do find in there is also a certain underlying prejudice. And it's the condescending kind of "oh, you worship Vinayak! You're one of those lost and confused people!" type of prejudice. The sad part is, that I can't completely argue that she would be the worst among people I've seen. Depending on the generation from which people come, you can find some who are much worse. When you get down to that level of Hindu philosophies, I find that the argument that it presents a more sophisticated world view falls apart.

Where you might see it is at a broad overview of the populace. The thing is that most people aren't really super-religious and they sort of practice the stuff they grew up on as a sort of identify themselves with their prior culture. The sciences and mathematics (and the teachers) are things we revere as a sort of general rule of thumb. For most people, their religion contains only certain rules of life that they happen to agree with and the rest are kind of unimportant. One point that Prof. Dawkins made was that the moderate and not-too-deeply religious people are statistically insignificant. If we were talking strictly about raw populations, I don't think I'd totally agree with him on that. But if we were talking about (at least in the Western world) political power, wealth, etc., and even more importantly, the people who actually have a voice of sorts and actually talk about things which relate in some way to morals, then there's little doubting where it all comes from. But then, that's the big difference in India, where almost everybody is politically active, and almost everybody puts their opinions on paper, and so it ends up looking like the religions themselves are inherently moderate and non-intrusive because the rhetoric reflects something closer to the voices of the masses, and also, we see the effects of this. Look at how long it took the US to get to even the possibility of a female president as opposed to India. We see schools like IIT producing some of the top engineers in the land. We see things like the caste system slowly crumbling because of the modern generation of youngsters who largely don't care about it anymore. We see that science and mathematics are huge deals in the education system in India, and the religious are highly supportive of that. An odd sort of joke about Hinduism in general is that where the Western religions face up to scientific discoveries with an attitude of "That's blasphemy! You're going to Hell!", Hinduism faces up to them with an attitude of "See? I told you so! We knew it centuries before you did!" Sure, this gives you a positive overall picture, but then the brighter the image, the darker the negative, and that's where things like the dropping babies onto a sheet thing come up.

Although, I'm certainly less qualified to talk as explicitly on Buddhism, I would add I wouldn't completely agree with the notion that Buddhism isn't as "missionary" as the Abrahamic religions. It just spread in a direction which the the Western world had no contact with for so long. People have fought wars and killed in the name of Buddha, and it did spread rather forcefully at one time. Today, people try to spread it in a more seemingly gentle way through all sorts of lofty spiritual discussions and speeches wafting in all sorts of artful poetry and metaphors making the listener see it with an air of profundity. But in the end, the goal is still to spread it.

4. Pascal's Wager

Comment #176335 by cpiasminc on May 7, 2008 at 7:30 am

This is more than a bit ill-posed. For one, I don't think that according to Christian doctrine, that simply "being" a Christian is enough to grant passage to Heaven. Moreover, doesn't this amount to little more than trying to fool God? If he's a supreme being, do you really think he's going to fall for that? And if you do go so far as the doctrine suggests you should, then you have wasted a great deal of time on prayer and evangelizing the so-called "Word of God" that could have been spent doing something constructive.

Secondly, if you were to really play the odds, wouldn't you want to belong to every religion part-time? What happens if you've got the wrong God? Why not pray to Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Shiva, or Ishtar, or the "Great Juju at the bottom of the sea"?

There's the counterpoint of what are you going to do in this life? You have an impact on people, whether positive or negative, by doing something during the time you're on Earth. Whether you go to Heaven, Hell, or nowhere, once you're dead, you're gone. Whatever happened to the idea of doing something in this life as opposed to dedicating the whole thing to the next life where you can only do nothing and for nobody?