Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Sedecrem
I would like to hear peoples thoughts on this subject. I am inclined to think that Theism persists in those who haven't had their consciousness raised to consider what it is they are truly doing, in those who are too undereducated to know better or in those who persist in the face of this adversity because they have been taught since birth that blind faith is a virtue and are in too much of a child like mindset (or trapped in their societal upbringing) to consider reason.
What do you think?
|
I think that the answer is probably no. For one I know plenty of intelligent people, that is people who have some natural talent in their ability to think, that are religious and sometimes very much so. On that front at least anecdotally I would say that being intelligent does not necessarily preclude one from being religious.
However, I think more convincing is the argument that religion is a living type of thought. One that evolves and some ways resembles an organism; this idea is directly related to the very popular(well at least among some circles) concept coined by Richard Dawkins called a
meme. Just by the sheer number of people that believe in religion, it should be clear that only an ideological revolutionary event comparable to a 10km wide asteroid hitting the earth could wipe out religion. The truth is the scientific revolution has had it’s chance to completely wipe out religion but the best it could do was carve a niche out and coincide with it. As an aside France is a really interesting case for this; see the French revolution and the policies associated with religion and look how a couple of hundred years later the religion meme makes it’s way back in the different form of Muslim immigrants. There is a really interesting discussion of what this entails by Daniel Dennett(I believe I’ve already advertised him back in one of the threads about atheism). Anyway I don’t recall how much he discusses religion as an evolving phenomena in this video, but he does try to introduce discussion on how religion could be shaped(from an evolutionary standpoint) just like a farm animal to meet our needs. It's long and I think he builds up to the things that are relevant to the discussion. IMO, it's worth the look, plus, I think he has a really interesting point to make about skyhooks(idk if it’s a term he coined) which is somewhat tangentially related to this:
<embed style="width:400px; height:326px;" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=2393547403945995297&hl=en" flashvars=""> </embed>