CAN HUMANS AFFORD RELIGION?
The NY Times Magazine last Sunday offered a scholarly piece, by Noah Feldman, on Islam and the Bomb. In the chilling article various historical justifications for the mass-killing of innocents were profiled. What I took from the article is that both rogue theocratic states and stateless suicide bombers armed with nuclear weapons pose an almost impossible challenge for deterrence experts.
At the heart of all mass-killing of civilians (women, children, non-combatants), lies the belief systems of the combatants. Justifiable war has always drawn its roots from the Believers' interpretation of the holy word. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most gods permit their subjects to retaliate in kind.
Some Muslims feel justified in killing as many Americans as they believe have killed them over recent years (they generously estimate 10 million or so). And since Americans elect their leaders, they are all considered accomplices in the murder of Muslims.
The apocalypse, in some Christian beliefs, is pre-ordained. Certain Muslim sects believe in their own versions of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic thinking is fine if it scares one from brinkmanship, but its cleansing connotation makes the unthinkable, desirable -- even inevitable.
What it all comes down to is this: can humans afford the luxury of religion? It's nice to think that we'll live on in a better place, and it’s nice to have a merciful caretaker looking over us. But will that belief system send us to that non-place, earlier? That's a question!
After all, when we've killed off our planet and all its inhabitants, religion will die as well. Afterlife is nothing without Life. Would a God with no subjects still be God? When we've killed off all the Earth's Homo sapiens, religion will die as well. Would a God with no human subjects still be God, or simply lord of the flies?
A central tenet of most religions -- the belief in an afterlife -- while comforting in its day-to-day solace, is most certainly mankind's most dangerous delusion. If one believes he or she gets another chance, all destructive human tendencies are free to surface. Human nature is then easily exploited by those in power.
There is nothing that can't be justified when you get a second chance. Conversely, very little can be justified when you don't. A vote for atheism, then, is a vote for the death penalty, but in the nice sense. A belief in everlasting death may be the only real deterrence to finding yourself prematurely dead.
For tens of thousands of years, humans have survived natural disasters, sickness and privation. They've taken everything our planet can dish out and here we still are. Unfortunately, The Bomb can ruin that impressive record. Throughout recorded history, morality has been imposed by doling out afterlife. In a world of portable H-bombs, morality will need to be imposed by a new belief system: that life is good, and dead is dead.
Some would argue that nuclear development is Darwinian, and therefore necessary for survival. Successfully defending oneself through offensive capability is, after all, a mainstay of Natural Selection. But Natural Selection also warns us of the destabilizing effects of huge imbalances. The imbalance now is we have too many people rushing towards their afterlife.
Can we let the mystical and social "sciences" trump what we've learned from the physical and biological sciences: that survival itself depends on the pre-condition that all plants and animals desire not to be inert, like a rock.
The NY Times Magazine last Sunday offered a scholarly piece, by Noah Feldman, on Islam and the Bomb. In the chilling article various historical justifications for the mass-killing of innocents were profiled. What I took from the article is that both rogue theocratic states and stateless suicide bombers armed with nuclear weapons pose an almost impossible challenge for deterrence experts.
At the heart of all mass-killing of civilians (women, children, non-combatants), lies the belief systems of the combatants. Justifiable war has always drawn its roots from the Believers' interpretation of the holy word. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most gods permit their subjects to retaliate in kind.
Some Muslims feel justified in killing as many Americans as they believe have killed them over recent years (they generously estimate 10 million or so). And since Americans elect their leaders, they are all considered accomplices in the murder of Muslims.
The apocalypse, in some Christian beliefs, is pre-ordained. Certain Muslim sects believe in their own versions of the apocalypse. Apocalyptic thinking is fine if it scares one from brinkmanship, but its cleansing connotation makes the unthinkable, desirable -- even inevitable.
What it all comes down to is this: can humans afford the luxury of religion? It's nice to think that we'll live on in a better place, and it’s nice to have a merciful caretaker looking over us. But will that belief system send us to that non-place, earlier? That's a question!
After all, when we've killed off our planet and all its inhabitants, religion will die as well. Afterlife is nothing without Life. Would a God with no subjects still be God? When we've killed off all the Earth's Homo sapiens, religion will die as well. Would a God with no human subjects still be God, or simply lord of the flies?
A central tenet of most religions -- the belief in an afterlife -- while comforting in its day-to-day solace, is most certainly mankind's most dangerous delusion. If one believes he or she gets another chance, all destructive human tendencies are free to surface. Human nature is then easily exploited by those in power.
There is nothing that can't be justified when you get a second chance. Conversely, very little can be justified when you don't. A vote for atheism, then, is a vote for the death penalty, but in the nice sense. A belief in everlasting death may be the only real deterrence to finding yourself prematurely dead.
For tens of thousands of years, humans have survived natural disasters, sickness and privation. They've taken everything our planet can dish out and here we still are. Unfortunately, The Bomb can ruin that impressive record. Throughout recorded history, morality has been imposed by doling out afterlife. In a world of portable H-bombs, morality will need to be imposed by a new belief system: that life is good, and dead is dead.
Some would argue that nuclear development is Darwinian, and therefore necessary for survival. Successfully defending oneself through offensive capability is, after all, a mainstay of Natural Selection. But Natural Selection also warns us of the destabilizing effects of huge imbalances. The imbalance now is we have too many people rushing towards their afterlife.
Can we let the mystical and social "sciences" trump what we've learned from the physical and biological sciences: that survival itself depends on the pre-condition that all plants and animals desire not to be inert, like a rock.
posted by R. Reynolds at 11:15 AM
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