May the Force be with you, Lord May.
Nov. 30th, 2005 03:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oneirophreniaAnd by Force, I don't mean that pseudomystical Buddhistic Star Wars claptrap--I mean the sheer Force of the Enlightenment, which saved our species' collective asses from the church-sponsored idiocies of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Lord May, the current President of the Royal Society, has spoken out warning of the dangers of religious fundamentalism in both East and West.
Quoth the Lord of Oxford: "All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding."
However, "for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason."
Got that, people? Not the Light of Christ or Muhammed, the darkness of unreason. Few people today seem to remember that many of the Enlightenment thinkers, founders of the Royal Society, and the great philosophers of the vanished Arab world were all men of faith--but they were not men blinded by faith. Anyone who will hide from reality behind self-imposed burqas of faith or within monasteries of his/her own illusions is a fucking coward. Period. Good for nothing but kindling.
It is high time for a new worldwide anti-fundamentalist witch hunt. Root them all out, burn them or throw them to lions. But seriously...it's the 21st Century and there are still people who think this planet was built in 7 days by some invisible faerie-tale creator, who think that if they die in glorious battle against the infidel they'll have a bevy of heavenly ho's waiting for them on The Other Side, who think--dear Machine Gods of the Deep Future! THIS SPECIES NEEDS AN ENEMA!
At least there's still the good ol' RS.
Lord May, the current President of the Royal Society, has spoken out warning of the dangers of religious fundamentalism in both East and West.
Quoth the Lord of Oxford: "All ideas should be open to questioning, and the merit of ideas should be assessed on the strength of the evidence that supports them and not on the credentials or affiliations of the individuals proposing them. It is not a recipe for a comfortable life, but it is demonstrably a powerful engine for understanding how the world actually works and for applying this understanding."
However, "for many, the response is to retreat from complexity and difficulty by embracing the darkness of fundamentalist unreason."
Got that, people? Not the Light of Christ or Muhammed, the darkness of unreason. Few people today seem to remember that many of the Enlightenment thinkers, founders of the Royal Society, and the great philosophers of the vanished Arab world were all men of faith--but they were not men blinded by faith. Anyone who will hide from reality behind self-imposed burqas of faith or within monasteries of his/her own illusions is a fucking coward. Period. Good for nothing but kindling.
It is high time for a new worldwide anti-fundamentalist witch hunt. Root them all out, burn them or throw them to lions. But seriously...it's the 21st Century and there are still people who think this planet was built in 7 days by some invisible faerie-tale creator, who think that if they die in glorious battle against the infidel they'll have a bevy of heavenly ho's waiting for them on The Other Side, who think--dear Machine Gods of the Deep Future! THIS SPECIES NEEDS AN ENEMA!
At least there's still the good ol' RS.
