Humans are religious animals; in that, we share ideologies with each other and form likeminded groups that clump around them whether of a theistic or secular nature. Since starting this blog, I have been intrigued by our ideas and beliefs; how we came up with them and how they have shaped our understanding of reality and bestow an identity on those who adhere to them.
LEARNING AND REASONING
Our minds have the ability to conceptualize the world in which we live; that is, to develop concepts that identify thoughts about ourselves, our experiences, and what it all means. Reality or our perception of reality is largely ideologically based on both deductive and inductive reasoning processes. Our perceptions have been retained through a collective memory called history that we humans are capable of passing on to each successive generation; allowing us to learn and increase our knowledge.
As a species, humans continually reason and learn. The only thing that stops a human from reasoning and learning is a dysfunction of the brain which is the result of some form of natural defect or some form of trauma that renders the brain incapable of retaining knowledge. An intellectual disorder, by contrast, is a dysfunction of the learning process itself that can be caused by indoctrination or brainwashing.
As perception is geared to sense experience, perception can also be engineered to interpret experience via indoctrination or brainwashing. Ideologies that are presented as absolute truths are easily used to engineer perceptions which then interprets experience that shapes perception. This form of intellectual looping disrupts the learning/ reasoning process which is usually localized around a particular ideology. In other words, a person can reason and learn normally until whatever experience or piece of information comes in contact with an indoctrinated ideology which automatically shapes the person's perception of that experience or information. When the ability to freely reason is interrupted, learning from that experience or information cannot occur or it becomes grossly distorted.
Intelligent reasoning requires room for proof, if proof exists and room for doubt, should proof be lacking. In other words, reason and learning requires intellectual flexibility. A mindset that interferes with intellectual flexibility can be viewed as an intellectual disorder. The essential trademark of fundamentalism is its intellectual inflexibility or its absolutism regarding an ideological belief.
FUNDAMENTALISM
Fundamentalism, in general, does not require proof as a basis for reason. It's major indicator is an unfaltering belief in an ideology's unquestionability. Attempting debate with an ardent fundamentalist will result in circular arguments based on a presumed infallible premise. It is this looping aspect of fundamentalism that defines it as an intellectual disorder.
Fundamentalism is not just the domain of theistic conservatives or scriptural literalist. Fundamentalism is found among conservative, liberal, and progressive ideologies of every type; including, economic, political and theological ideologies. What allows ideologies to become prone towards fundamentalism is that every ideological belief is resistant to proof beyond reasonable doubt.
Consider some examples of the ideological concepts (beliefs) that fit this definition:
In theism, the concept of God.
In politics, the concept that democracy or a strong sense of patriotism and nationalism is essential to good governance and social order.
In economics the concepts of capitalism, communism, or socialism betters the lives of most people.
All of these concepts are ideological beliefs that have functionality in defining our experiences but cannot be proven to be absolute fact or truth by themselves.
The fundamentalist, however, equates belief in an ideology as proof of its absolute truth even when facts and events demonstrates its fallibility. For the ardent fundamentalist, intellectual reasoning is the enemy. There is no room for doubt. Ardent fundamentalists are so convinced of their ideological truths that they cannot entertain doubt or tolerate reasoned opposition to their fundamental ideology and are quick to demonize anyone who attempts to do so.
FEW ARDENT FUNDAMENTALISTS
Fundamentalism has become an ideology in its own right that attaches itself to other types of ideologies. Speculatively speaking, I suspect most who identify as fundamentalist are probably not ardent fundamentalists and personally have no problem entertaining doubt on a personal level. What they probably are subject to is groupthink; of saying they are fundamentalist just to keep the peace. They have learned to say the "right" things and vote the "right" way, but harbor personal doubts and are perfectly capable of reasoning if they "have to." For example, if one is a Christian fundamentalist, one's biggest concern is not how God sees one, but how other members of one's group sees her or him. If fundamentalists say the wrong things, are perceived as doing the wrong things, or voting the wrong way - they fear they'll be labeled as disordered.
FUNDAMENTALISM AND VIOLENCE
Fundamentalism, in its most ardent forms, tends towards violence when faced with criticism and doubt. Fundamentalism is easily radicalized, as is seen in fundamentalist Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and even Buddhism. On the political scale, fundamentalism in the form of patriotism and nationalism are equally prone to radicalization and violence. Political ideologies in the United States, for example, have become so polarized between various types of conservative and liberal ideologies to have acquired the patina if not the substance of being fundamentalist in nature.
The bottom line in any fundamental treatment of an ideology is its intransigence, its inability or refusal to reason and learn. This is becoming and perhaps already is the death knell of the human species. We cannot afford to become unreasonable in the face of undeniable facts.
The prophetic field of science is exposing us to the ignored obvious of the human causes of climate changes and species extinction, as are also the fields of economics and social science which are exposing us to the detrimental effects of economic and social inequality. The doubling-down attitude expressed by various ardent theistic and political ideologues is indicative of fundamentalism at the height of unreason. Fundamentalism is a disorder our world no longer can afford to entertain on a global level if we are to co-exist and survive as species.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Friday, June 30, 2017
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
MUTUAL SELF DESTRUCTION AND THE PURSUIT OF PEACE - Part III
"Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds"
J. R. Oppenheimer
quoting from the Bhagavad -Gita
I want to start this post by reposting a paragraph from my last post:
Are certain global populations prone to engage in activities that disturb and disrupt merely to feel stimulated? This may sound like a trite assessment of situations involving suicide bombers and mass killings, but is modern terrorism, for example, in reality a response to global boredom that has been brought about by a relative prolonged period of peace?
THE EMBLEMS OF OBSELESCENCE
Nuclear weapons are and remain weapons of war, but they also serve as potent emblems of war's obsolescence. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have taught us that not only nuclear war is untenable, but all warfare is untenable. The fact that nations who possess and maintain nuclear weapons as a deterrence and other nations who are trying to obtain them as leverage, demonstrates an inability to recognize this glaring truth. Yet, we have ignored the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and war with each other like dare devils who toy with death in order to feel alive. We appear stuck in a world order of our own making and are metaphorically spinning our wheels in the mud and muck of ideologies that have lost their relevance.
Another emblem of war's obsolescence is the suicide bomber; the person or persons who have lost all personal meaning and whose willingness to destroy their own existence and those of others is based on the premise of preserving ideologies rendered irrelevant in a changed understanding of reality. In other words, the suicide bomber is a literal representation of a religious ideology in its death throes.
All religious ideologies, both theistic and secular pale in comparison to the fact that scientific theories are shaping our understanding of reality. We have yet to grasp the significance of this and the fact that what we thought was ideologically true about our world and who we are was made obsolete in the blinding flash of theoretical physics becoming an undeniable fact in 1945.
REALITY REVISITED
In past posts, I stated that reality can be defined as a consensus of perceptions. In the mundane, macro world that largely remains the case. A chair is a chair because everyone agrees it's a chair. In our every day existence reality is defined by our senses and our minds.
The practical application of theoretical science in almost every aspect of daily life, however, has exposed us to the fact that reality is more than our senses can perceive. As such, empirical reality is no longer a matter of sense perception nor is it dependent on consensus because the field of science is itself a field of intellectual fluctuation which tells us theoretically, at the unseen quantum level, reality fluctuates.
Human intelligence appears as a fluke in evolutionary biology. The ambiguous human mind may well have shaped the physical properties of the human brain, shrunk its size and enhancing and streamlining its cognitive abilities as a mysterious self regulating function of the brain itself. The conscious human mind is a phenomenon that remains unexplained. Some might be tempted to conclude that the conscious human mind suggest the working of a God.
Perhaps - but I'm inclined to believe that the concept of God is the by-product of the human mind, as an intuitive insight about its conscious self.
The saying, "Seeing is believing" captures the essence of the problem we humans have with perception in a scientific world where seeing is no longer a matter of the senses as it is a function of the intellectual mind's ability to calculate in theoretical terms a reality that stretches the imagination by its functionality. It does not require an ideological belief to be true for it relies on its provability to be fact.
Seeing and believing have held our common perception of reality together for millennia, but we are in an age where neither what we see nor what we believe matters when it comes to defining what reality really is. Ironically, in the face of a reality that is no longer dependent on general consensus by the masses, the masses are prone to reverse the old saying from seeing is believing to believing is seeing; as in, seeing what we want to believe as opposed to seeing as a mental comprehension of what cannot be perceived by the naked eye.
If such beliefs would lead us to see the value of scientific knowledge and invest faith in the scientific approach in order to comprehend reality, that would be a step in the right direction, but the tendency has been for many is to put their faith in the fossilized ideological beliefs that for centuries defined a reality and a world that no longer exists.
Herein lies a great danger because ideological beliefs, by themselves, are nonfactual. In the light of a fluctuating reality there is a tendency to become obsessed with believing and utilizing ideologies rooted in a past that seemed reliably concrete, but which are quickly exposed as having no basis in reality. That, in itself, is the biggest threat to our existence.
As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, science cannot lead us to make the right decisions. Science can only give us the knowledge by which to do or undo things. By itself, science is morally ambivalent, as all knowledge is. What we do with knowledge, however, is ethically and morally relevant. What we do with knowledge matters.
The perspective of history and science has narrowed to a point that allows us to see that what we do as single people or single nations has an impact on the whole of our planet in a dramatic never before seen way. The age in which we live should awaken us to fact that there exists more than one way in which we are mutually self destructive. The most recent and more urgent concern regarding self destruction is our inadvertent relationship to climate change. This is something that, in relative historical terms, has snuck up on us.
For centuries, climate just happened. There was no studying it in an empirical way. In fact, like most scientific knowledge, it has only been in the last century or so that we are able to understand the workings of climate and how humans and our treatment of the environment effect its fluctuations.
AN EMBARRASSING ACT OF STUPIDITY
It is embarrassing that the United States, of all nations, has through our president's executive action pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement when there is so much empirical evidence pointing to global warming's human origins. The fact that our current president was elected, in part, on an agenda that denied climate change makes it clear that many in this nation are selfishly toying with the death of this planet in order to live in their version of the past by leaving the climatic changes we have caused up to a God of their own making. It is the epitome of willful ignorance to subscribe to the mindless belief there is nothing we can do. Science knows better and so does intuitive theism, in which the workings of God are seen as directly related to our own faithfulness in preserving the world in which we live.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IS EMPIRICALLY BASED, NOT IDEOLOGICALLY BASED; THEREFORE, IT SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS FODDER FOR POLITICAL DEBATE. IT IS NOT MATTER OF OPINION. IT EITHER STANDS OR IT DOESN'T BASED ON EVIDENCE.
The foolishness of political leaders who wish to treat scientific knowledge as ideological belief demonstrates either a willful, negligent disregard for the wellbeing of humanity and this planet or just plain mind-numbing stupidity.
THE IMPULSE OF RELIGION AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE PLANET
If the impulse of religion is the recognition that we need each other in order to save each other, then there is one thing that should bring us together like no other, and that one thing should be preserving our planet - our common home.
If there is one fear that should transcend all other fears, it should be the fear of losing it.
If there is one thing that should motivate us to look past our differences and drive us towards each other in order to accomplish a single purpose it should be our love for it.
There is no reason to be bored, as there can be no peace as the absence of things which disrupt and disturb us, in the pursuit of saving our common home.
If we can work to save our planet, peace as the absence of war, will be accomplished because we will be engaged in avoiding anything that distracts, disrupts, or disturbs us from reaching our common goal of planetary preservation.
That we understand the role we have in preserving our world comes to us as both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that we have reason to set aside our differences and work together to preserve this amazing planet home of ours, the curse is if we do not do so quickly we and our planet will become extinct.
Any salvation theology or philosophy that distracts us from saving our planet is a heresy that must be shelved for the sake of survival.
Pursuing peace as a goal in and by itself will not preserve our planet. It is in the recognition that war is an obsolescence we can't afford and recognizing that the fear of the other is nothing more than a predatory, instinctual behavior that leads to self destruction.
Peace, as the absence of war and fear can only be accomplished by a conscious, reasoned, and hands on approach by the whole of humanity in a purposeful effort to save our planet.
Until next time, stay faithful.
Are certain global populations prone to engage in activities that disturb and disrupt merely to feel stimulated? This may sound like a trite assessment of situations involving suicide bombers and mass killings, but is modern terrorism, for example, in reality a response to global boredom that has been brought about by a relative prolonged period of peace?
* * * * * * * * * *
With the detonation of the first atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 at 5:29 AM, we discovered that our fate and the fate of this planet lies in our hands. We, as a whole, have yet to recognize the ideological fallout that began at that moment. We have yet to grasp its implications as Oppenheimer did on that fateful morning; that we are the masters of our fate.THE EMBLEMS OF OBSELESCENCE
Nuclear weapons are and remain weapons of war, but they also serve as potent emblems of war's obsolescence. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should have taught us that not only nuclear war is untenable, but all warfare is untenable. The fact that nations who possess and maintain nuclear weapons as a deterrence and other nations who are trying to obtain them as leverage, demonstrates an inability to recognize this glaring truth. Yet, we have ignored the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and war with each other like dare devils who toy with death in order to feel alive. We appear stuck in a world order of our own making and are metaphorically spinning our wheels in the mud and muck of ideologies that have lost their relevance.
Another emblem of war's obsolescence is the suicide bomber; the person or persons who have lost all personal meaning and whose willingness to destroy their own existence and those of others is based on the premise of preserving ideologies rendered irrelevant in a changed understanding of reality. In other words, the suicide bomber is a literal representation of a religious ideology in its death throes.
All religious ideologies, both theistic and secular pale in comparison to the fact that scientific theories are shaping our understanding of reality. We have yet to grasp the significance of this and the fact that what we thought was ideologically true about our world and who we are was made obsolete in the blinding flash of theoretical physics becoming an undeniable fact in 1945.
REALITY REVISITED
In past posts, I stated that reality can be defined as a consensus of perceptions. In the mundane, macro world that largely remains the case. A chair is a chair because everyone agrees it's a chair. In our every day existence reality is defined by our senses and our minds.
The practical application of theoretical science in almost every aspect of daily life, however, has exposed us to the fact that reality is more than our senses can perceive. As such, empirical reality is no longer a matter of sense perception nor is it dependent on consensus because the field of science is itself a field of intellectual fluctuation which tells us theoretically, at the unseen quantum level, reality fluctuates.
Human intelligence appears as a fluke in evolutionary biology. The ambiguous human mind may well have shaped the physical properties of the human brain, shrunk its size and enhancing and streamlining its cognitive abilities as a mysterious self regulating function of the brain itself. The conscious human mind is a phenomenon that remains unexplained. Some might be tempted to conclude that the conscious human mind suggest the working of a God.
Perhaps - but I'm inclined to believe that the concept of God is the by-product of the human mind, as an intuitive insight about its conscious self.
The saying, "Seeing is believing" captures the essence of the problem we humans have with perception in a scientific world where seeing is no longer a matter of the senses as it is a function of the intellectual mind's ability to calculate in theoretical terms a reality that stretches the imagination by its functionality. It does not require an ideological belief to be true for it relies on its provability to be fact.
Seeing and believing have held our common perception of reality together for millennia, but we are in an age where neither what we see nor what we believe matters when it comes to defining what reality really is. Ironically, in the face of a reality that is no longer dependent on general consensus by the masses, the masses are prone to reverse the old saying from seeing is believing to believing is seeing; as in, seeing what we want to believe as opposed to seeing as a mental comprehension of what cannot be perceived by the naked eye.
If such beliefs would lead us to see the value of scientific knowledge and invest faith in the scientific approach in order to comprehend reality, that would be a step in the right direction, but the tendency has been for many is to put their faith in the fossilized ideological beliefs that for centuries defined a reality and a world that no longer exists.
Herein lies a great danger because ideological beliefs, by themselves, are nonfactual. In the light of a fluctuating reality there is a tendency to become obsessed with believing and utilizing ideologies rooted in a past that seemed reliably concrete, but which are quickly exposed as having no basis in reality. That, in itself, is the biggest threat to our existence.
As I mentioned in my first post on this topic, science cannot lead us to make the right decisions. Science can only give us the knowledge by which to do or undo things. By itself, science is morally ambivalent, as all knowledge is. What we do with knowledge, however, is ethically and morally relevant. What we do with knowledge matters.
The perspective of history and science has narrowed to a point that allows us to see that what we do as single people or single nations has an impact on the whole of our planet in a dramatic never before seen way. The age in which we live should awaken us to fact that there exists more than one way in which we are mutually self destructive. The most recent and more urgent concern regarding self destruction is our inadvertent relationship to climate change. This is something that, in relative historical terms, has snuck up on us.
For centuries, climate just happened. There was no studying it in an empirical way. In fact, like most scientific knowledge, it has only been in the last century or so that we are able to understand the workings of climate and how humans and our treatment of the environment effect its fluctuations.
AN EMBARRASSING ACT OF STUPIDITY
It is embarrassing that the United States, of all nations, has through our president's executive action pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement when there is so much empirical evidence pointing to global warming's human origins. The fact that our current president was elected, in part, on an agenda that denied climate change makes it clear that many in this nation are selfishly toying with the death of this planet in order to live in their version of the past by leaving the climatic changes we have caused up to a God of their own making. It is the epitome of willful ignorance to subscribe to the mindless belief there is nothing we can do. Science knows better and so does intuitive theism, in which the workings of God are seen as directly related to our own faithfulness in preserving the world in which we live.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE IS EMPIRICALLY BASED, NOT IDEOLOGICALLY BASED; THEREFORE, IT SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS FODDER FOR POLITICAL DEBATE. IT IS NOT MATTER OF OPINION. IT EITHER STANDS OR IT DOESN'T BASED ON EVIDENCE.
The foolishness of political leaders who wish to treat scientific knowledge as ideological belief demonstrates either a willful, negligent disregard for the wellbeing of humanity and this planet or just plain mind-numbing stupidity.
THE IMPULSE OF RELIGION AND THE PRESERVATION OF THE PLANET
If the impulse of religion is the recognition that we need each other in order to save each other, then there is one thing that should bring us together like no other, and that one thing should be preserving our planet - our common home.
If there is one fear that should transcend all other fears, it should be the fear of losing it.
If there is one thing that should motivate us to look past our differences and drive us towards each other in order to accomplish a single purpose it should be our love for it.
There is no reason to be bored, as there can be no peace as the absence of things which disrupt and disturb us, in the pursuit of saving our common home.
If we can work to save our planet, peace as the absence of war, will be accomplished because we will be engaged in avoiding anything that distracts, disrupts, or disturbs us from reaching our common goal of planetary preservation.
That we understand the role we have in preserving our world comes to us as both a blessing and a curse.
The blessing is that we have reason to set aside our differences and work together to preserve this amazing planet home of ours, the curse is if we do not do so quickly we and our planet will become extinct.
Any salvation theology or philosophy that distracts us from saving our planet is a heresy that must be shelved for the sake of survival.
Pursuing peace as a goal in and by itself will not preserve our planet. It is in the recognition that war is an obsolescence we can't afford and recognizing that the fear of the other is nothing more than a predatory, instinctual behavior that leads to self destruction.
Peace, as the absence of war and fear can only be accomplished by a conscious, reasoned, and hands on approach by the whole of humanity in a purposeful effort to save our planet.
Until next time, stay faithful.
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