A Christian People Created a Secular Government

TO COLINNICHOLAS:

Yesterday, I wrote you extensively, but my comment has not appeared. (I'm still hoping it does.)

I have time now only to repeat the first paragraph:

"I talk (through my fingers) with many who imagine that they are using their minds in the service of reason. My counter-claim - which here I detail - is that they (like everybody else)) are using reason to serve their mind's COHERENCE (i.e., comprehensive sense-making). Their claim of being more-rational-than-thou is self-congratulatory delusion."

Talking about Mencken, here's his take on a few dead gods.

"Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their
mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was king of the gods, and any man
who doubted his puissance was ipso-facto a barbarian and an ignoramus.
But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - fifty thousand youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him.
Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father;
his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried on with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still.
When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted
he was watered with ten thousand gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Alien G Thurman.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatilpoca. Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful ; he consumed twenty five thousand virgins a year.
Lead me to his tomb; I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is?"

Edbyronadams;

you say;

"Perhaps the most common of all follies is to believe that anything can be proven untrue."

me;

Hi Ed. Not quite sure what you mean. Lots of things can be proved to be untrue. 2+2=5 is untrue. I can prove it.

Maybe what your saying is that nobody can prove that there is NO god.
OK, I'm with you there. So what conclusion do you draw from that? It says nothing to me. Nobody can prove that there is no Tinkerbell either. You can't prove there are no invisible fairies at the bottom of my garden if I claim there are.

The proof lies with the person making the claim. If I say I have fairies at the bottom of my garden - then you have every right to say "prove it". If I make the claim I should be able to back it up with evidence.

Carl Sagan said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that there is a skygod is an extraordinary claim, and there is no evidence.

That's really what Mencken is driving at; the palpably not true; but folks believe it anyway.

"The most common of all follies," wrote H.L.Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

Perhaps the most common of all follies is to believe that anything can be proven untrue. Some controlled situations can be falsified, but the existence of the transcendent does not fit this category.

Jared Diamond on the "Evolution of Religion".http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th7CFye03gQ . An interesting view although he misses Buddhism. I can't see that it has much of a tribal advantage.

"The most common of all follies," wrote H.L.Mencken, "is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

In culture after culture, people believe that the soul lives on after death, that rituals can change the physical world and divine the truth, and that illness and misfortune are caused and alleviated by spirits, ghosts, saints, fairies, angels, demons, cherubims, djinns, devils and gods.
According to polls, more than a quarter of today's (1997) Americans believe in witches, almost half believe in ghosts, half believe in the devil, half believe that the book of Genesis is literally true, sixty-nine percent believe in angels, eighty-seven percent believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, and ninety-six percent believe in a god or a universal spirit. How does religion fit into a mind that one might have thought was designed to reject the palpably not true?"

The common answer - that people take comfort in the thought of a benevolent shepherd, a universal plan, or an afterlife -- is unsatisfying, because it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.

What is religion? Like the psychology of the arts, the psychology of religion has been muddied by scholars' attempts to exalt it while understanding it. Religion cannot be equated with our higher, spiritual, humane, ethical yearnings ( though it sometimes overlaps with them).
The Bible contains instructions for genocide, rape, and the destruction of families, and even the Ten Commandments, read in context, prohibit murder, lying, and theft only within the tribe, not against outsiders. Religions have given us stonings, witch burnings, crusades, inquisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so that they can be happily reunited in Heaven.

As Blaise Pascal wrote;"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

"How The Mind Works" by Steven Pinker. pub.WWNorton & Co. 1997. p554-555.

As far as we know there are no gods and never were. We can celebrate the wonder of existence without recourse to infantile superstitions. Sam Harris says it best;

"Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. The universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being , and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call "spiritual." No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fiction need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish. The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend , rather too much, on how soon we realize this."

Sam Harris. "The End of Faith" p.227.

However, a war against the godless by the faithful is not inconceivable.