Before and very much after Black Tuesday, I have been obsessed with the high degree of correlation between church-goers and Bush voters.
"Why is this so?" I would ask myself ad nauseum. And, "what can I do to make sure it won't happen again?" Being an engineer, I looked incessantly for the root cause that would explain it. Today, I am happy to announce that I have a theory as to the root cause. The solution, I'm afraid, will be extremely difficut to implement, as it will mean challenging your most cherished beliefs, and perhaps being shunned by your friends, families and neighbours in the bargain. It is most certainly something worth striving for, because not doing so will mean forever losing the country we love.
The cause for the voter correlation is profundly simple, namely: anyone who can believe in God can believe in anything. Religious people have an inordinately high capacity to rationalize anything, no matter how absurd, therefore the irreconcilable logic gaps in Bush's rhetoric largely fell on deaf ears.
For those who have not left this diary in a sanctimonius huff... congratulations. There is hope for you (and us).
"Faith" is defined as "belief without proof". I have been perptually perplexed by the fact that otherwise intelligent people, who demand proof for everything else in their lives, can apparently hold unquestioned religious beliefs. My cognitive dissonance invariably created self-doubt (e.g. "How could millions, maybe billions, of people like so-and-so be wrong? Maybe I'M the one who's wrong!"). I finally hit upon an article that resolved the conflict for me. The article was on the topic of logical arguments and fallacies; a "logical argument" being the good old fashioned, learned-it-in-geometry-class proof of a proposition using accepted premises and deductive inference. Each of the logical fallacies in the article had a serious-sounding Latin name; the one I am referring to in particular is known as "argumentum ad numerum".
The fallacy of "argumentum ad numerum" consists of asserting that the more people who support a proposition, the more likely it is that the proposition is correct. Obviously, this is not the case. At one time, "everyone" believed in the proposition that the world was flat, or that the sun orbited the earth, or before they had developed the concept of an "orbit" or even of a planet, held even more mythological notions about the sun (e.g. chariots of fire racing across the sky).
The scale of worldwide belief in deities and/or the supernatural does not negate the fallacy - literally everyone could believe in God without it proving a thing, much in the same way that the Bible proves nothing except that the Bible exists. The last few centuries of scientific thought and experimentation are a spit in the ocean compared to all the mystical explanations that have been floating around for 1000s of years since humans developed the capacity for abstract thought. Give the physicists, geneticists and biologists a thousand years to unravel more of this galactic mystery - I bet it won't be all that mysterious.
So, I challenge those of you who profess to be card-carrying members of the "Reality-Based Community" to two things, initially:
- Take a good hard look at yourselves and your religious beliefs, and perhaps acknowledge for the first time in your lives that you are, in fact, functional atheists, simply holding on to vestigial beliefs in a deity (programmed into you during your childhood) in order to avoid the unpleasantness of "coming out" to your friends and family.
- Actively and routinely challenge the theists around you when they assign supernatural causes or solutions to real-world events and problems. Start with the creationists on the school boards of your very own communities who are demanding "equal time" for their supernatural beliefs in science class.
A good "meme" for our efforts, found
here, is that religion today is as tobacco addiction was in the 1950's, when smokers lit up wherever and whenever they damn well pleased. It took many, many years of scientific research, public censure and legislation to force them to practice their (offensive to some) habits in private.
By the way, I am not delusional; kicking the "religion habit" in America will be next to impossible, but even a small reduction of "faith" could have a profound effect on subsequent elections.