CelticBear’s Musings

OK, I had to purge some of the vitriol that’d built up with my posts Delusional Morality and American Politbureau, and High Crimes and Misdemeanors.

In a second I’m going to comment of some positive stuff, but a few introspective thoughts first:
Why do I get so up in arms about delusional thinking? Religious delusion but pseudoscientific as well? Why don’t I just brush it off and let people believe what they want?
My wife occasionally accuses me of having a neurotic need to prove people wrong. No, that’s not true. I will cop to having a neurotic need for people to be right, including myself, but not prove people wrong. In fact, my paradise, my heaven would be to live on a campus where every professor were brilliant and light-years smarter than me, and I could just be a sponge and soak it all up, just learn 24/7, and never have to try to prove anything or correct anything. Where I can be surrounded by people like Richard Feynman and Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin and Einstein and….

There is a collective social danger to people believing in religious delusion and pseudoscience. I read something earlier today and now for the life of me I can’t find it in order to properly cite it and give credit! I could have sworn it was on either Debunking Christianity or The Secular Outpost, but in any case, the author was commenting on how as much bad comes from religious as there is good. Sure religion has kept some marriages together or kept people from doing harmful or criminal things… but religion also keeps some abusive marriages together when they should separate, gives people reason to spread hate and bigotry and feel justified, and has been the underlying basis for so many wars and genocides.

That missing article goes on to speculate how much richer the lives of secluded monks could have been instead of locked away in abbeys studying lies, or Catholic priests who could have real human relationships with women instead of some having to turn toward abusing boys. And my argument for trying to remove religion is because people suffering under the delusion are people who are in positions that seriously affect me. As I said in a comment on an earlier post, religious people are on school boards and in classrooms making decisions regarding what my daughter leans and how she learns, they’re politicians and voters who make decisions affecting medical research that may help my wife have a life where otherwise she may be crippled before she’s 45. People with religious delusions of imminent 2nd comings and indestructible planets made just for them ignore evidence of ecological disasters and hinder research and information to prevent it. They encourage and support hundreds of billions of our dollars to support wars instead of to science and research that could make our world, lives, understanding of reality better, richer, fuller!

And it’s also an admitted crusade to fight what afflicted me for years. I look back on my own religious delusion with shame, guilt, disgust, anger. Mostly at myself for having held onto the delusion for so long! But also at the religion itself for existing, for being part of the nearly ubiquitous requirement for growing up in America. In a way that’s like being angry at the wind for existing to make tornadoes and hurricanes. But I hate that there are so many Americans who are infected with the delusion at childhood where otherwise they could grow up unfettered by myth and ideological hatred and intolerance. I so want to be able to help rid the country of the delusion, unfortunately, I constantly run into people who have embraced the delusion utterly and have checked their brains at the door. They invest so much of their psyche into the delusion that it goes from being a belief indoctrinated into them as a child into a true clinical delusion that holds onto their ability to reason and think rationally lest their very sense of self and reality crumble if the ideology is shattered.
I don’t know. Maybe I feel I can make up for the shame and embarrassment of having believed utterly false and barbaric Bronze Age myth by trying to break others free. But I think it’s mostly that I’m utterly scared to death over the damage people suffering from the delusion are able to wreck on my family’s lives specifically and the world in general.

And believers in the pseudosciences aren’t much better. But they’re a lot more harmless.

OK, that said, as promised, some positive stuff.
So I just started reading Robert Price’s Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here On Earth For? I’m only a couple chapters into it, but it’s wonderful! It’s part criticism of Warren’s ridiculous, sentimental, brain-dead, and not even really Biblically based as it purports to be Purpose Driven Life, but that’s only a small aspect of the book and you certainly don’t need to have read that to read Price’s book.

Price offers some great, motivating, positive reason based messages regarding ethics, self-actualization, selflessness, celebrating life abundantly and with great joy. And I’m only two chapters in. I can’t wait to read more!

And then there’s Julia Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God.” It’s a two-hour one-woman stage play of hers where she discusses early life as a Catholic and her awakening into skepticism and eventually atheism. It’s funny, heart-warming, emotional, and intellectually stimulating! I really never cared for Julia as a comic, but after I’d heard a segment of this a few years ago, she’s become one of my favorite humorists. She’s so sincere and self-effacing and wonderfully nice. She seems like a really positive, warm person.
You can get her play as a download here: http://www.audible.com/

Well, that’s all for now. I think maybe here soon I’ll do a regular update on what I’m reading in Reason Driven Life. Til then….