THANKS TO ALL WHO CHIMED IN! GRACIAS!
Letter sent to San Francisco Chronicle about "Finding My Religion" a series of interviews: (link in first comment)
To: David Ian Miller:
Your interview with Dr. Francis S. Collins was a big disappointment. He merely remade the points more successfully made by Sam Harris and Dennett in their recent books, that human sociology evolves, and that success in such a world involves creatures that cooperate and self-deceive, as Robert Trivers notes in his forward to the Selfish Gene by Dawkins:
" if ... deceit is fundamental to animal communication, then there must be strong selection to spot deception and this ought, in turn, to select for a degree of self-deception, rendering some facts and motives unconscious so as not to betray -- by the subtle signs of self-knowledge -- the deception being practised. Thus the conventional view that natural selection favors nervous systems which produce ever more accurate images of the world must be a very naïve view of mental evolution."
Dr. Collins' understanding of evolution is naïve, I think, and self-deceivingly so, as is the case with so many "scientists" who find it psychologically and socially necessary to declare themselves not among the god-free so freely demonized by the would-be theocrats among us. Agnostics don't burn crosses. They're nicer by definition, willing to believe real evidence, not metatheorizing.
Perhaps you should do a column on the impossibility of justifying personal religion to others. I'd be glad to help. If you wish, I'd be glad to carefully point out the flaws in Dr. Collins' viewpoint, which aren't logical flaws, but misuse of logic to the point of rhetoric.
All Dr. Collins is saying is that society functions better with morality, so the members of society will be more successful if they generate morality. In order to authoritize morality, and prevent its constant destabilizing revision, institutional religions form themselves from the psychological resonance of the members of society, aided by the programming of the young into the stabilizing religion.
Unfortunately, when cultures meet, religions also meet, and compete for the minds and power in the other culture. Add more cultures, and war ensues, because war is also present in humans because it makes culture more stable.
None of the above statements imply in any way the existence of "another plane" or any need for god(s). Occam's Razor suffices
Feel free to question the statements above. I think they are intuitively obvious, and completely in accord with current thinking in evolutionary biology, which I think the best way to think about human genetically determined behavior, at the family, tribal and national levels, both personally and interactionally.
Thanks for listening, Ormond Otvos
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I post this letter here as a diary because 1) Church State separation is a lively topic here, as it should be 2) Science and religion is a lively topic here, since wars of religious fundamentalism occupy much of our time, and 3) to point out the poor quality of the mainstream media (MSM) when it undertakes sociology and theology as subjects.
I have strong feelings on this subject because I think that the widespread inability to think clearly is traceable to early brainwashing of children to accept faith instead of fact as their operating system, leading to a population that accepts impulse advertising and political repetitive propaganda as their reality, as evidenced by the rising tide of belief that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Do you think we can successfully derail this trend, and is the blogosphere becoming the target of a misinformation campaign about misinformation because those in power can't stay in power if the populace thinks clearly. Isn't that our core belief here?