Where are the new religions?

Feb 18, 2014 //
0

This is just a brief thought that randomly occurred to me, but I think it’s thought-provoking enough to merit a quick blogging.

Religions evolve to suit the needs of the people who worship in them. They change over time and location to offer something to the people that the regular, material realm cannot.

When religion started out, it was pretty barbaric. It boiled down to my god can beat up your god, and I’ll kill you if you say otherwise. It was a time of sacrifice and tribal warfare, and it wasn’t really all that pretty. This is the case for early Judaism and Hinduism, where there was a whole lot of focus on killing.

Later, during the axial age. (which is a few hundred year period when all religions pretty much had an overhaul, independent of one another) things began to change. The Hindu Upanishads were published, calling for a ban on animal sacrifices, Buddhism was founded, Judaism went through its own revolution, and although it was a couple hundred years after the official Axial age, Jesus was born. This period of religion was basically, hey, maybe instead of all this killing, we should be nice to one another?

Even later than that, Islam came along. Islam is a religion of social justice that was founded on the belief that maybe there was more to religion than being nice to one another, and maybe society as a whole should actually take care of its people. And though it happened a thousand years later, I would call the Protestant Reformation similar to this, as though it focused more on the individual, it did call into question the power dynamics of authoritarian regimes. These would be the revolutionary religions (that have since stopped being so revolutionary, but isn’t that always the case?)

These days, the new religions offer nothing so revolutionary. The newest being the super scam-y Scientology which is obviously just a disaster, but Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and all the recent, weird Christianity sects don’t offer anything new to the world either. They’re just slightly different stories, with slightly different rules and regulations, but there is nothing actually new being offered.

However, we do have an abundance of grass-roots organizations today fighting for social justice and equality. Not just the belief that we need to take care of those less fortunate, but that the less fortunate also have a voice and need to be seen as equals. Could we be in the middle of a new religious reformation, but with society’s general disenfranchisement towards religious institutions making it a secular one? All of the previous religious revolutions happened during times when religion was simply a part of the worldly paradigm. However, that paradigm has drastically shifted towards a much more secular version, and perhaps that means that our methods of revolutionizing the way people think has taken that turn as well?

I have no evidence for this and it would be impossible to prove anyway, but it’s certainly something interesting to think about.

This is obviously a very bare-bones retelling of the history of religion, and if you’re interested I’d recommend reading A History of God by Karen Armstrong.

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Categories Religion

I Fucking Hate Science

Feb 4, 2014 //
4

I don’t actually hate science. I mean, some of my friends are scientists, so believe me when I say I have nothing against it. However, there is a Facebook page that keeps popping up on my newsfeed called, “I Fucking Love Science” that always makes me cringe.

Don’t get me wrong; science can be a great tool. We have longer, more comfortable lives because of it, and for that I am grateful. However, the amount of mindless knob-slobbering that goes on whenever Science is mentioned irritates me to no end.

My biggest gripe with the salivation over science is how it always goes hand in hand with the dismissal of religious thought. Like they are somehow incompatible, and that only science and reason can save us from the certain doom that the path of faith, hope, and love would certainly lead us.

Yes, there are certainly those who believe that religion and ideology are our only possible salvation while science will lead us down the path of sin and degradation, so those choosing science could just be fostering a bit of petty rivalry which I guess is certainly one reason to blindly worship at the tabernacle of reason. But which is the more destructive practice? I’ve mentioned some reasons that science is dumb in a previous blog that I will go over again, so if you are an ardent follower of my every word, there might be some overlap.

First let’s look at how science probably isn’t actually going to save us.

You remember how SimCity 2000 promised us fusion power by the year 2050? Maybe that’s just me. Anyway, extraordinary amounts of clean, wasteless energy would go a long way to solving a good number of worldwide issues. How many folks do you think are working on it? How many do you think are working on an ever-so-slightly faster microchip? Or a more efficient means of extracting crude oil? Or specific kind of bomb that only kills people who have a subconscious distaste for Freedom?

We live in Capitalism Land, ladies and gentlemen. And those scientists are working on things that will make money, because they’re only going to get grants from companies or governments that see some kind of profit behind it. And apparently scientists need to eat too.

If you are actively working against somebody who is making money, there is a good chance that people will actively work against you. Here in Canada we have an epidemic of scientists being muzzled by the government for the environmental work that they are doing in regards to the tar sands in Alberta. There are global warming deniers everywhere, simply because of how people with money paid off their own scientists to claim that it isn’t man-made, or that it is a figment of Al Gore’s imagination.

But Dan, you might say, This isn’t our beloved Science fucking up the planet, it’s people bastardizing the use of science for their own personal gains! Yes, I might say, Just like how one might bastardize the use of religion for their own greedy purposes, perhaps?

But now to shut you up even further, let’s look at how science is basically going to murder our faces. Yeah, I said it.

Everyone seems to think that 9/11 was religion’s fault because the people that did it happened to believe that America was fucking up their homeland, and their religion saw that as a bad thing, and then were persuaded by somebody to do something pretty extreme about it. But it never would have happened if science hadn’t invented airplanes and high rises in the first place.

Gun reform gets brought up every time a school is redecorated with bullet holes from an unruly youth, and the heated topic always mentions that if the student tried doing something with a knife then he would be stopped with much fewer casualties. How is the progression of weaponry not a huge black eye on the smug face of science? I mean, the atomic bombs in Japan killed 150 000 – 246 000 people. That was 70 years ago. Progress has been made on that front as well, and to think that no one would ever use such a deadly scientific discovery (again) is naive.

People will always disagree. Sometimes violently. If that violence becomes excessive, blaming it on the disagreement rather than the unchecked progress of weaponry is myopic.

Hey remember that global warming thing I mentioned earlier? You know what’s causing that? Oh yeah baby, it’s science. The great industrialization of the world, the high mark of scientific progress, the evolution from the uncivilized medieval period to the age of glorious reason, has basically bent over the planet for imminent penetration. I don’t want to turn this into a climate change blog because that’s not my ranting forte, but we’re screwed. Dumping into our oceans, smogging up our skies, ripping out our forests: all of these things in the name of scientific progress. Not just the pollution that comes from science is destroying the planet, but everything we need to fuel our addiction we have to rip out of the earth. We’re using up all our finite resources in such a way that we are causing untold damage to our planet. Which sustains us, by the way, so when it is irreparably fucked, it’s not like we can whistle a jaunty tune and carry on with our lives. We dead, folks, we dead.

Know how else science is going to kill us? You like eating? Science has “improved” on food by a substantial margin over the last few decades. No longer content to let our food not have poisonous chemicals on it, we now let our agriculture be sprayed with toxic pesticides among other fun and zany chemicals in order to make sure that there is an abundant enough crop to sell. Or a cow is pumped full of hormones in order to make it bigger, so you can sell more steaks off of it. This isn’t “improving” food; it’s making more money off of it. And if a few people get sick along the way, well, fine. We have too many people on this planet anyway, right? (I’m adding an interjection here: I work in a butcher shop, and I know what dead animal parts are supposed to look like. Looking at processed foods that have been scienced all to hell, I can assure you that they look nothing like the original pieces. At all. Just sayin’.)

So science is murdering us and our planet, and guess what? It’s murdering us economically as well.

The progress of information technology has accelerated greatly since the invention of the computer lo those many years ago. And the price has plummeted, with its computing power growing exponentially. That’s pretty swell, right? Except with technology being able to do more and more, that leaves less and less for humans to do. Instagram was recently purchased for about a billion dollars and it employs 13 people, whereas Kodak went bankrupt and employed 17 000 people, down from 63 000 just a few years earlier.

There is a Taiwanese company called Foxconn that is coming to America, and it is bringing along with it one million robots to put together its products.

Big companies will crush smaller ones with their access to expensive technologies that can predict consumer habits based on collected data, leaving the mom and pop shops to fall to the wayside of obsoletion.

This trend will continue for decades, with manufacturing prices plummeting along with the need of human workers maintaining the factories.

Big businesses will profit massively from this. The income disparity across the globe is already at staggering proportions, and will only continue to increase as science progresses and those on top will be able to produce massive amounts of product with minimal costs and extraordinary profits, while those at the bottom will no longer have any sort of employment. All thanks to science.

I honestly could go on. There are privacy and spying issues that science has enabled authoritarian governments to use on their populace; there is the decline of face to face social bonding which has been shown to help people psychologically; there’s that damned auto-tune ruining music…

When you think of things most likely to actually kill us, religion is so far down the list it doesn’t even register. It’s a scapegoat that is so easy to point a finger at because it doesn’t agree with our current cultural paradigm. But what if it’s our cultural paradigm of relying on science for everything that is actually the problem? We are already on the tipping point of absolute destruction, and we’ve already fallen so far, and you know what’s to blame? That’s right. Science.

Part of this was inspired by a lecture given by Dr. William Raduchel, titled “Will Technology Save Us or Doom Us?” as well as: https://www.facebook.com/IFeakingLoveScience

Also here are some links:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/muzzling-of-federal-scientists-widespread-survey-suggests-1.2128859

http://nypost.com/2013/12/05/global-warming-proof-is-evaporating/

compared to this part of the Telegraph dedicated solely to the effects of man-made global warming:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/houston-stabbing-rampage-students-tackle-knifewielding-campus-slasher-8567296.html

2 critically injured compared to 32 dead in the Virginia Tech Massacre: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/16/AR2007041600533.html

You can look up Foxconn and Kodak and Instagram on your own if you like if you want to check my numbers.

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Categories Politics, Religion, Science

Why label yourself?

Jan 14, 2014 //
6

We live in a world where everyone wants to label everything. Far from it for us to admit to shades of grey, things all have to be black or white. A thing is either this, or it is that. At best we can concede that this has a bit of that tendencies, but for the most part, when we define something, we have a pretty good notion that the words in the English language do a suitable enough job of defining what it is we’re looking at, and we stick to them.

To define, from the Latin, literally means to limit something. When you start to assign attributes to things, you’re saying that this can’t be that, it can only be this. When you say grass is green, you’re saying that grass cannot be blue, or red, or black, etc. But some grass is yellow, and if you spill paint on it, that grass could have a tasteful, subtle off-white colouring. So you could say some grass is green, some grass is yellow, and some grass is soft eggshell white. There are few enough strains of grass and paint colours that to define the colour of grass isn’t that strenuous.

However, when you get to people, to define becomes impossible. There are far too many of us, with all of our own individual quirks that make each and every one of us unique. And that’s just those of us alive now. Think of the billions that have already died, and the trillions yet to be born.

Even to bring it down to one person is impossible. Jean-Paul Sartre describes the human condition as two fold: one part set and finite (the sum of our experiences) and the infinite potential we have in front of us. As a free creature capable of doing pretty close to anything humanly possible, to set a limit on our infinite freedom is (as Sartre would call it) living in bad faith. If you claim to be, say, a good waiter, and then live your life as a good waiter, serving people their water before even they themselves know they want it, sure you’re a good waiter, but you’re denying yourself your freedom of being anything beyond a good waiter. You’re not a good waiter; you’re not any label, because you can be anything.

This would apply to every aspect of yourself you might be defined as: happy person, sad person, funny person, handsome, ugly, straight, gay…

So why do we label people when it is impossible to do so accurately?

Because we have to. Our brain works by understanding labels. We think in definable concepts, not impossible to nail down abstract ones. If someone asks you about yourself, and you say, “oh, I don’t believe in labels” what you are telling this person is that the grass isn’t green, nor is it yellow or blue; the grass is a colour that doesn’t exist. In your mind, try to imagine a colour that doesn’t exist. You may give up after you get to the sort of murky brown one.

So pick something. Anything. If you want the grass to be fuchsia, that’s perfectly fine. If you can find a way to explain the history of how that grass became fuchsia, and what that means to the world around it, then you can be relatable instead of alienating. If you’re trying to explain to someone about something they have never heard of before, remember that it’s not their fault that it’s difficult, they’re just trying to imagine a colour they’ve never come across.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality, Philosophy
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