Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

[William T Goodall]

http://tinyurl.com/3nv68p

"Prof Daniel Dennett and Lord Winston present their arguments ahead of  
tonight's public debate
Daniel Dennett and Robert Winston
Tuesday April 22, 2008
Guardian

Yes, says Prof Daniel Dennett
If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific  
progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video  
games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact  
- has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical  
faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it  
doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered  
for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds  
from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by  
consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals  
designed to intoxicate them.

It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when  
they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their  
faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment,  
holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that  
irresponsible position in the first place. It is high time we inverted  
the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially  
destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and  
holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for  
religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who  
usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be:  
Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.

Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, resides on death  
row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy.  
Imagine! We're living in the 21st century, and in "liberated"  
Afghanistan (not Taliban Afghanistan) blasphemy is still a capital  
crime. Most of the rest of the world is tongue-tied, unwilling to tell  
those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply  
wrong, and should not thus humiliate themselves and their traditions.  
Where are the peaceful demonstrations of protest? Are people unwilling  
to hurt the feelings of Muslims? We are quick to condemn other  
outrages, but religious passion, genuine or feigned, shields people  
from the moral judgments of their fellow human beings, judgments to  
which we should all alike be subject.

There is an unbalance in the framing of this resolution, and Robert  
Winston has the worst of it. He must try to allay a host of concerns,  
an unending task, while - as everyone knows all too well - in a single  
cataclysmic day my side could be proven by one fanatical act, not that  
anyone would be left to cheer my victory. Not just rationality and  
scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could  
be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True,  
you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if  
you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically  
certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is  
the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic  
confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a  
mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be  
unthinkable.

This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should  
most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage  
a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is  
often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a  
sacred duty. This might not matter if the activities that composed  
religion were somewhat insulated from the rest of the world the way  
they are in sports and art. Then we could treat religious allegiances  
the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick  
boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Knock yourself out,  
as we say, it's only a game. Not so with religion. Its arena includes  
not just the participants but all of life on the planet. Given that,  
it's troubling to note how avidly some people engage in deliberate  
make-believe in order to execute the prescribed duties.

The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better,  
but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only  
we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from  
an imaginary being - God - to something real: the wonderful world of  
goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the  
stewards.

· Professor Daniel Dennett is director of the Centre for Cognitive  
Studies, Tufts University"

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William T Goodall
Mail : wtg at wtgab.demon.co.uk
Web  : http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
Blog : http://radio.weblogs.com/0111221/

Debunking bullshit is a thankless task.