If you read much of my stuff, you might get the impression that I’m a bit down on organized religion…
and “the church.”
You’d be right about that impression.
Why is that you ask?
Doesn’t the church do a lot of good?
Yes it does. Many lives are rescued from the brink by the loving and nurturing environment of the church.
As long as, once indoctrinated, they faithfully tow the dogmatic line.
But that belies a more insidious problem.
For example, I posted something to the Facebook wall the other day about evolution. A close family member, who is an evangelical church-going christian, vehemently protested…
saying that he was in fact, disturbed.
Folks, evolution is science. Science is not something we believe in…science gives us facts about our world that were previously unknown. To deny those facts based on religion…or based on the idea that the facts contradict what your religious text of choice might say, is both absurd and…
perilous.
Take the more current example of climate change.
It seems the most staunch deniers continue to be evangelicals…
or big business republicans with a financial stake in perpetuating denial.
Even while the scientific fact of global warming is already wreaking havoc before our very eyes.
What do they need Noah to reappear before they can “believe in it?”
So, in the sense that the church helps hurting people…
I’m all for it.
In the sense that it creates mindless dogmatic robots…
whose chief concern is what happens in the afterlife…
as opposed to improving the condition of people and planet in this reality that all of humanity confronts…
I’m dead-set against it.
I wish I’d studied science, but I went for business (and law) instead.
Here’s my advice to young people…DON’T (please don’t) study business…
study science.
Why?
Because it helps us understand the world as it is…it helps us to find the truth.
Business, on the other hand, teaches us to make or manage money (and law to keep possession of it)…and money is at the root of most of our current problems.
Money and religion, that is…
Now, having said that, do I believe science explains everything?
NO!
I believe it does, or potentially can, explain things such as the origin of the universe from a physical perspective.
I saw an interesting video on YouTube in which Neil DeGrasse Tyson described the folly in the idea that anything unexplained by science is proof of religion, or the existence of god.
NDT says folks that want to play that game are backing themselves into a smaller and smaller corner since the realm of the scientifically unexplained is shrinking rapidly.
Nevertheless science cannot explain, at least I haven’t heard a satisfactory explanation as of yet…
as to why GOOD exists.
There seems to be some force beyond ourselves that “sometimes” compels us to do that…
and it is a mysterious force indeed.
One that, I will even go so far as to say, is, or emanates from,…
god.
So, if I were to start a church (don’t worry I have no plans to do so)…
it would be along the following simple lines:
The congregation would meet, maybe once a week, and figure out how to do some good.
How to have some impact.
How to make life better for someone else, probably with a focus on those less fortunate than we.
And then we would go about doing those things.
A church of impact…
The church of universal connection…
One that recognizes our sameness and strives to actually improve the overall human condition.
With no dogmatic beliefs or rules whatsoever.
Now there’s a church I could readily join the ranks of.
image credit: saxonfenken via Compfight cc
Good afternoon Scott.
When I read your article it took me back to my university days in my early struggles with some of these questions. Your observations about science (and it limits –i.e. establishing good) reminded me of something I read a long time ago by Allan Bloom. He was discussing the university and its structure. Here is what he said:
How are they today, the big three that rule the academic roost and determines what is knowledge? Natural science is doing just fine. Living alone, but happily, running along like a well-wound clock, successful and useful as ever. There have been great things lately, physicists with their black holes and biologists with their genetic code. Its objects and methods are agreed upon. It offers exciting lives to persons of very high intelligence and provides immeasurable benefits to mankind at large. Our way of life is utterly dependent on the natural scientists, and they have more than fulfilled their every promise. Only at the margins are there questions that might threaten their theoretical equanimity – doubts about whether America produces synoptic scientific geniuses, doubts about the use of the results of science, such as nuclear weapons, doubts that lead to biology’s need for “ethicists” in its experiments and its applications when, as scientists, they know that there are no such knowers as ethicists. In general, however, all is well.
But where natural science ends, trouble begins. It ends at man, the one being outside of its purview, or to be exact, it ends at that part or aspect of man that is not body, whatever that may be. Scientists as scientists can be grasped only under that aspect, as is the case with politicians, artists and prophets. All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies outside of natural science. That should be a problem for natural science, but it is not. It is certainly a problem for us that we do not know what this thing is, that we cannot even agree on a name for this irreducible bit of man that is not body. Somehow this fugitive thing or aspect is the cause of science and society and culture and politics and economics and poetry and music. We know what these latter are. But can we really, if we do not know their cause, know what its status is, whether it even exists?
Scott
Thanks for the comment and the quote…I don’t really see a problem with religion stepping in where science falls short…I see a problem when religion steps in where science doesn’t…