Relating to today’s previous post about people trying to misrepresent their religious bigotries (or beliefs) as something other then they are, my state of abode is currently going through a gay marriage battle. Now I know I’ve covered this before. but the current dialogue makes me want to go again. I understand the tricky spot that the anti gay marriage folks are in. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no reason to not support gay marriage unless you have some religious beliefs that oppose homosexuality. Now since you can’t really (in this days and age at least) maintain a large public dialogue using reasoning like that, they have to come up with some other excuse.

That excuse being Tradition. I’m not sure when that because a valid excuse… Traditions change, if they didn’t black people would still be able to be bought and sold at market with no say in their lives and women wouldn’t be able to vote. Neither of them could own land and, of course, your wife should be burned when you die and your servants should be killed and buried with you. Strangely, those were changed.

So if one throws out the tradition excuse as just a red herring (or any tradition excuse that doesn’t claim an origin in religious belief), then what are you stuck with?

I don’t think that this is a gay marriage debate at all. The debate is still over homosexuality. The people who do not support gay marriage are the people who believe that homosexuality is a sin or some other kind of abomination and they probably think that gay people should be killed or sent to Siberia so they they don’t infect “our grandchildren” with their filth. God forbid one of your children become gay… How can we prevent it since we can’t just kill gay people anymore and make them hide? I know! The only opposition that is left to us in this country is to say that “real” marriage is too good for them. Let’s do it “No gay marriage, no gay marriage”.

It’s just easier to say in public than “kill the fags”.

Okay, let me get this straight… Traditionally, religion (or at least the standard old Christian kind) follows a general belief of Mankind is a special thing created specifically by some all powerful intelligence and the cosmos was created for him to live within. The bible contains all that one really needs to know about such things and any more knowledge of Man or the universe is unnecessary… In fact, at some points even trying to learn more about them was considered blasphemous. I assume because the untruths that were being brought up by these people were works of the devil, rather then because the authorities were afraid of being proved wrong.

On the other hand most people recognize that there are many, many things that we don’t know or understand and science is nothing but a group of methods to try and figure them out. Being that a lot of these things were originally quite basic and were things that religion had tried to explain in their own way (what are those dots of light in the night sky, how does rain come, why does the sun move around in the sky), much of standard religious teaching has been shown to be untrue through the discoveries of science (or the devil’s works have blinded the scientist enough to make it appear as such).

In short, in religion you do not need to study anything aside from what is stated by your religion. In science, you need to study everything (or generally everything that can be studied under the guise of the Scientific Method, “gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence”).

Due to this, and religions historical animosity towards science there has always been a hostility between the two due to a feeling (correct, I believe) that either school of thought would in some way become irrelevant in the case that the other school was valid.

While this is fine and dandy if religion keeps to itself and just sticks to its own little devices… A good example being the garden of eden thing that Abraham cribbed from the Babylonians, it is so unscientific, illogical and fantasy-like that I figure, “go ahead, believe it all that you want”. What bugs me is when the religious folks go beyond their own boundaries and try to subvert the scientific ways. You know, intelligent design. Which I am thinking about again today due to coming across a bit about a movie (“The Case for a Creator”) made by a scientist who, is seems, was looking to convince himself that “god” was real after his wife converted to Christianity. It seems that he ends up falling for the intelligent design credo of “Irreducible complexity”.

I’m not going to go on and on but what I think is funny is that folks pass this stuff off as science when the foundation of the theory seems to be: Some things are so complex that we don’t understand how they could have been made unless someone made them.

That’s it. It is antithesis of science and I find it insulting that any person with any logical faculties at all wouldn’t see that quite clearly. I figure this… “Believe in Jehovah Prime the Great Watchmaker of Man, Creator of Worlds, Sire of Saviors… He who the seas are none but his spittle and the earth naught but a Fabergé egg made to house a trillion little folks he made in his image” and believe in Virgin births, and a worlds 5,000 years old which he has filled with old fossils to embarrass the fool scientists, and the heavenly dreamland where once your down with your life career you will be reunited in heavenly bliss with everyone that you wants to see, forever young wise and happy… But Christ, don’t ever try to pretend that any of that shit is science or has any connection with any method of logical deduction. Intelligent design is a wimpy way out that counterfeits blatant non-science as science when it is really just more of that arrogant “Human’s are the kings of the universe” mind frame that thinks it is better to just make up stories then to admit that there is something that we don’t know.

Face it folks, we’re just people and we’re are still quite new to the practice of figuring out how the universe works. There are still many, may things that we don’t understand out there, and I’m sure that many of the things that we do “understand” we probably understand incorrectly… Learning about the universe is a never ending job and to just say, “how’s this for science… I don’t understand something, so it must have been made by a magician, enough said”.

That is the standard old foolish basis for religion. It has nothing to do with anything else.

I thought this was an interesting tidbit. Considering how much we hear of “the wonders of the afterlife”: sitting at God/Allah/whomever’s throneside, seeing loved ones, joy for all eternity… But I am also thinking, admittedly, mainly of what I hear from watching Big Love every week with all of their “Family’s are together in heaven forever” talk. I thought it was both strange and funny (both kinds of funny to read this article:
Pious fight death the hardest

Seemingly, according to a recent study in the U.S., people who bnelieve in an afterlife are more eager to stay in this life than to move on…

Those who regularly prayed were more than three times more likely to receive intensive life-prolonging care than those who relied least on religion… The researchers from the Dana-Faber Cancer Institute found these people were the least likely to have filled in a “do not resuscitate” order… As well as receiving resuscitation, they were much more likely to be placed on mechanical ventilation in the last few days of life.

Who knows. It may go (I like to think) with two of my theories…

1) People who attest to religous belief do so out of a fear of death

and…

2) People of faith, deep inside (or maybe not so deep) don’t really have that faith anyway. Meaning that, at some level, they know that it is all wishful thinking and BS.

People of unfaith are more apt to accept life and the world for what it truly is, making the inevitability of the nothingness of death soemthing that they are more willing to confront.