OK, it's been a week or so, and was thinking this is excusable. It has to be. I'm back home, and have been spending time with friends. And Louisa. You see how this leaves little time to blog. In the meantime, I have all these thoughts and discussions (many of which are with Billy, another key one with Nick J) during which I think "I should blog about this when I get around to blogging." Of course I forget some of this beforehand, and I'm reminded that part of this blog is to sort out these ideas as they happen. And bug you with them. That way I don't forget to bug you with them before.
Let's start with the 'right about now', shall we? What am I doing up at this hour? I've been telling meself to get to sleep earlier for days. Answer: Reading up on the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Yep. I've heard so damn much about it, gotta figure out the back story now. I was surprised to find it more than an internet phenomenon amongst atheists. Apparently, for the most part it is an attack on "Intelligent Design" rather than on religion as a whole (though it works as a demonstration of burden of proof lying with believers.) Bobby Henderson, the creator of this and the famous graph Global Temp. Vs. # of Pirates, started all of these things in a simple letter to the Kansas school board. They had made the unconstitutional (yep, that's my opinion) decision to teach ID in their classrooms, and Henderson (a self-described out-of-work science major) wrote a letter to the school board advocating that they have every reason to teach the Pastafarian theory (every bit as scientific as ID) alongside evolution and their recently-ruled teachable ID. I must say, this is a very Swiftian satire on the political concerning education. If there is any political issue I'm on about it's education. That'll be explained in another post, but I digress. I'll do that from time to time. For example...
I love wikipedia. It's true. Fuck the criticisms. It's not meant to be something you cite in a paper, necessarily, but I'll tell you it's good at what it does. If you want to know generally about a subject, there's wikipedia. It's my first stop for a low-down on most things. It's quite an accomplishment of human knowledge and free information. Something that's governed by the people themselves, works, and benefits all. Everything should work like this. Another great thing is the use of links. You wind up going to read about one thing, and read about tens of others. If you want something you're sure is reliable links to sources are available. Lemme sum up a couple of thoughts I had during such a process.
Richard Dawkins is a champion to many atheists. I need to look at his stuff more closely to decide if his ideas are any good. From what I can tell, a difference between his approach and mine is that he looks at things scientifically, I philosophically. I'm not even sure if we have the same conclusion, but I like his view that God is not impossible, just not likely. (Same with the FSM, I suppose.) Another idea he has had which is very controversial, is that the world would be better without religion. I don't know if I agree, but it certainly seems that way sometimes. What do you think? Would the world be better without religion? Hell, what would the world be without religion? Forget if religion is valid or not, it's just how things would be without it. Now. In today's world. Respond, I'd love to hear it. Back up what you say, I'll be responding. Not sure this'll be anything more than supposition though.
Then, I decided to figure out if I really know what it is I criticized in the first part of this post. Intelligent Design, I've concluded, cannot be rationally seen as anything more than an attempt to teach creationism in public schools. If you weren't aware, that's been officially established as unconstitutional after the Edwards v. Aguillard case of 1987. The idea is that there was some designer behind much of what we see and specifically to the presence of humans. There was an attempt to say this was not necessarily theistic (thereby creationist or religious) which allowed for a designer to be "intelligent but not god," but this will easily lead to the infinite regression of who designs the designers. It points as evidence to gaps of things that can't be explained. Michael Behe, Christian author of Darwin's Black Box (yes, I read it) does this well, but he admitted it was no logical proof, nor a scientific one. Let me go the extra step for him: it also gives no logical conclusion. The ID supporters talk about things in the world, particularly with humans, to have required direction in it's process, which brings me to a philosophical topic...
The problem, roughly, as I see it.
I talked about this briefly with Billy. If you want to improve the world, you have to remove the imperfections... are there any? Stupid question, right? Now if there exists a creator or designer of the like that these ID fellas think, making things better and more perfect, and this, as I showed, requires something like god... then what's with all the imperfections and suffering? There's the premise for the problem of evil. Go ahead and post if you'd like.
Damn, you must be tired of reading this stuff in extended blog posts, I might have to start a book instead.
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First off, I must agree that I love Wikipedia. It's a great resource for when you want to get an overview of something. The links are addictive, too. It just shows the beauty of the Internet and how things should ideally work as far as things being controlled and regulated by the people rather than those who supposedly represent them. It's an example of how a real democracy should would, in my opinion.
The FSM delivers. With sauce. I agree that Henderson's creation parallels Swift's satire in many ways by proposing an absurd situation that mirrors perfectly a situation that's actually happening in a humourous tone. Using babies as food? Worshipping an italian pasta dish? Why, that's no more absurd than worshipping a guy nailed to a stick, in my opinion.
Now, whether the world would be wonderful without religion is a good question. I'll assert that without it, we wouldn't have most of the problems we face now in terms of world conflicts. On top of this, without religion many of the genocides that have marred mankind's history would not have happened. Religion has also been the largest obstacle to scientific and technological development for as long as humanity has been in existance.
Without religion, I make the claim that we would be much further along in many aspects of medicine, electronics and space exploration if we did not have churches (especially in the 1400s-1600s) constantly cock-blocking the geniuses who set the foundation for what is now modern science and research.
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