Here’s my thing: Everyone should be free to believe what they want. I choose the Catholic faith. I have friends who are Muslim, Jewish and Atheist.
I only judge you by whether you’re a kind soul or an asshole.
Mood music:
http://youtu.be/KEeFNvvR-ng
But there’s always someone who thinks they’re better than everyone else — someone who is so certain their belief is the only right answer that they’ll go to extremes to put down people who feel a different way.
That’s when we get slogans like this:
This is apparently the brainchild of Victor Stenger — a slogan idea for the so-called Atheist Bus Campaign.
The message to me is this: Those who put all their faith in science never commit evil and always live for the greater good. Muslims, on the other hand, are twisted and evil and fly planes into buildings.
I think someone out there has gotten too sensitive about all those “evil scientist” stereotypes from the movies.
The bigger truth is that human beings twist everything: science, religion, systems of government. To suggest it never happens in your corner of the woods is to be fooling yourself.
You’re also dishonoring all the good people who died on Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorists had twisted Islam into some evil thing it’s not meant to be, and they killed Atheists, Christians, Jews and other Muslims that day.
You can say religion flies us into buildings, but science gives us potential mass killers as the nuclear bomb.
Take your stupid talk and go screw.
That’s the nature of propaganda: Provocative, uncomfortable and neither entirely correct or incorrect.
To me this bus advertisement is as affective as the equivalent religious claim, that denial of (whichever) true faith is inherently a denial of good things: That acquiescence to Zeus, Yahweh, Jehovah or Christ is somehow demanded; that a proper assessment of the terms of those demands would lead to righteousness; that piety trumps worldly wisdom and knowledge.
I wouldn’t hazard to claim, without careful review, the dichotomous statement in the bus advertisement. Yet, “follow us or burn in Hell,” is an equivalent statement, equally abhorrent, and marketing (whether for objects or ideas) rarely submits itself to careful review. I classify the bus advertisement as an equal and opposite reaction.
I love false dilemmas in propaganda. As if science and religion are incompatible. I wonder if Victor recalls that science came to be out of a desire to better understand the world God created? To ultimately be better stewards of the resources given to us by the Creator?
Silly folks with their silly logic.
Your post is spot on Bill – can’t find anything to disagree with you on this one.
Perhaps the religious thinker will themself ascribe their desire for inquiry to that religious thinking, yet I would argue that it is incidental to their thinking. It is the fact that both the drives for science and religion exist in the same mind which offers that condition where the two must be reconciled. Religion itself leads to science as much as agriculture leads to eating. It doesn’t.
In fact, religion is far more likely to stifle science, as the Mesopotamians discovered millennia ago, the Christians centuries ago, and us again today.