Achievement Must Be Linked to God

Quote: "Without industry we would be dull and lifeless people. But when industry is not linked to the other virtues, especially a concern for promoting the common good, it deteriorates into greed."

Personally, I do ask questions too. Recently, I read on the Web a question I had asked myself even before the Internet entered this country. Were WWI and WWII divine punishment? That was the question.

I wondered why such a thing happened to people who were behind all the incredible technological development, whose fruits we enjoy in our everyday life. Those people made great inventions, worked in coal mines, struggled for human rights, etc, etc. So why were they rewarded with two bloody wars?

The curious thing is that during these two wars (and the subsequent Cold War) a phenomenal technological development took place––as if our (civilian) planes today couldn’t have been able to fly as far and fast as they do today; as if our mobile phones, Internet connections, televisions, etc, could have remained topics of science-fiction books, hadn’t there been two devastating (world) wars. The United Nations was born only after those wars. Democracy became widespread only after those wars, where died the children and grand-children of great inventors, engineers, teachers, and patient workers who endured life in coal mines.

Would it be superstitious to link that to so-called separation of religion and state (as was the case in France in 1905)? Or would that be explained by people’s increasing immorality? (Some would argue, though, that “real immorality” became even worse in 1968 , more than two decades after the War?) Others would argue that the War(s) had rather come as a result of then big powers’ struggle for supremacy and their rivalry over overseas colonies.

http://kalamoha.blogspot.com/

Journalists Richard Behar of Time Magazine and John Sweeney of Panorama BBC UK wrote about greed in a religious context. Your reflection from a religious standpoint is important.

The Emptiness of Theology

by Richard Dawkins

A dismally unctuous editorial in the British newspaper The Independent recently asked for a reconciliation between science and "theology." It remarked that "People want to know as much as possible about about their origins." I certainly hope they do, but what on earth makes one think that theology has anything useful to say on the subject?

Science is responsible for the following knowledge about our origins. We know approximately when the universe began and why it is largely hydrogen. We know why stars form and what happens in their interiors to convert hydrogen to the other elements and hence give birth to chemistry in a world of physics. We know the fundamental principles of how a world of chemistry can become biology through the arising of self replicating molecules. We know how the principal of self replication gives rise, through Darwinian selection, to all life, including humans.

It is science and science alone that has given us this knowledge and given it, moreover, in fascinating, over-whelming, mutually confirming detail. On every one of these questions theology has held a view that has conclusively been proved wrong.

Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunize against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria.
Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin. Science can predict when a particular comet will reappear and, to the second, when the next eclipse will appear. Science has put men on the moon and hurtled reconnaissance rockets around Saturn and Jupiter. Science can tell you the age of a particular fossil and that the Turin Shroud is a medieval fake. Science knows the precise DNA instructions of several viruses and will, in the lifetime of many present readers, do the same for the human genome.
What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them; I have never heard any of them say anything of the smallest use; anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? The achievements of theologians don't do anything, don't effect anything, don't mean anything. What makes anyone think that "theology" is a subject at all?

"The Emptiness of Theology" by Richard Dawkins published in "Free Inquiry" Spring 1998.

Mr. Mark,

Well put, sir!

JerseyRomer

Ever notice that those "Protestant virtues" are most visible in the nations that are largely atheistic? Who has the greater social programs and the highest savings rates? Countries like Sweden and France, that's who. Which industiralized country has the lowest rates? You guessed it, the good ol' 80% Xian USA.

The elephant in the room? Get god out of the equation and you'll see "industry linked to the other virtues, especially a concern for promoting the common good."