More from Dimitri.
Underlining and bold is my emphasis.
Intro:
"A great divide runs through the world. On one side you have people who insist that they love Jesus and that you should too, or who prostrate themselves toward of Mecca several times daily, wear a hijab and/or grow out their beards and mustaches. The bearded and mustachioed women among them generally prefer to wear a burqa instead, and who can blame them. On the other side you have those who consider themselves educated, and therefore enlightened, and who look down upon the Jesus-lovers. They generally decline to do the same for the Muslims, at least in public, out of political correctness. Instead of finding succor and solace in their faith, this latter group seeks to achieve the same effect by popping pills.
I believe that I am in a position to help bridge this gap because I have spent a lifetime on both sides of it without experiencing any cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I am an engineer by training and had a career in high energy physics designing equipment for experiments that tried to find out whether protons decay, why there is so much more matter than antimatter in the universe, and just how precisely can we measure a certain physical constant before the project runs out of money. On the other hand, I am ordained as Reader in the Orthodox Church, know how to chant in Church Slavonic and am generally conversant with the culture and the rituals of Orthodox Christianity. In the interest of helping people understand each other better, I want to try to bridge this gap by posing and answering a few probing questions"
Close:
"Do you believe in Santa Klaus? Silly question! Only little children believe in Santa Klaus. But then lots of people who are too old to believe in Santa Klaus nevertheless volunteer annually to become possessed by the spirit of Santa Klaus. This causes them to don red, white-trimmed outfits, paste on large fake beards, say “Ho-ho-ho!” a lot and hand out presents. They don’t believe in Santa Klaus, but they do apparently believe in his ability to make children happy. This is an important point: faith does not require spirit. Do you believe in the Post Office? If you do, what you believe in is the Post Office’s ability to deliver mail. My faith in the Post Office was sorely tested in the course of my recent book-mailing campaign.
Whatever it is you believe in, be it a spirit or a government service, you believe in its effectiveness in achieving a certain objective, be it making children happy, making adults feel better about themselves or achieving your own peace of mind, you are a believer. When the Beatitudes are read and the meek in the audience hear “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” [Matthew 5:5] you may observe for yourself that the meek perk up a bit. This may lead you to believe in the ability of the spirit of Jesus to make people feel better, and a spirit that can do that is not one to turn up your nose at.
By now you may be thinking that belief in spirits may be useful after all, but then what about the use of reason? Isn’t reason the supreme human achievement, replacing many centuries of atavistic belief in spirits and things invisible? Shouldn’t all of us advanced, educated people be data-driven and rely on the scientific method?
Before I answer this question, let me add another element: belief in spirits can be viewed as an end in itself because it opens up one’s senses in unexpected ways. Here is a trivial example: if I look at a page of Church Slavonic on a web page while listening to it sung on Youtube, I can actually smell incense—an instance of synesthetic perception. But it goes much deeper than that and becomes an immersive experience. Most people are born being able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. But with a bit of practice they can also learn to directly sense spirit—a sense that is inaccessible to the scientific method and therefore disregarded by the skeptical mind, but that is nevertheless intensely real to those who possess it.
Unscientific though this is, directly sensing spirit is very potent medicine for whatever ails you—far beyond anything science can offer. In a word, it gives people joy. But in all my years working in hard science I have never witnessed joy. Not a single scientist was seen transported with scientific rapture. On the level of emotions and sensations, the scientific pursuit is all about ambition and pride on the one hand and fear of failure and humiliation on the other, adding a bit of stress to spice up a great deal of tedium. And then there is an important irrational factor: the huge amount of ego invested in their game motivates scientists, engineers and technologists to push the only tool they have—reason—with wild abandon.
And then there are the abysmal results from exercising their reasoning faculties with wild abandon. The Age of Reason is said to have dawned around 1800, thanks to Thomas Paine. In the two centuries since then we have used reason to despoil our one and only planet so severely that species are now going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 faster than before and our own survival as a species is seriously threatened. Our vaunted reason has allowed us to create a planetary-scale machine that is blindly burning through the entire accessible store of fossilized carbon, severely disrupting the climate, and has led us to create a military machine that has destroyed country after country and that may end up killing us all. But reason is impotent in helping us shut down any of these machines.
Here we come to the crux of the matter: by now lots people around the world have little to no faith in reason left—specifically, in the ability of human reason to achieve anything other than more mindless destruction of their society and of our planetary habitat. Instead of trusting reason, they would prefer to put their faith in the spirits that have guided humanity through many millennia. Note that throughout that time we posed no existential threat to our own survival or to the planet’s ability to sustain a diversity of life. If you tell those who have become skeptical of your abilities to exercise reason that they are ignorant, uneducated, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive era, why should they listen? After all, many of the facts—which is all that you are allowed to reason with—are not on your side. And if they do listen and throw it back at you that your faith in reason is blind faith, how will you convince them otherwise?
It may well turn out that reason is an evolutionary dead end for our species and that putting all of our faith in reason is a suicidal move. Reason’s practitioners have turned out to be a bunch of sorcerer’s apprentices, setting in motion machines that they don’t know how to shut down because their reason is too feeble. Yet many of them still see it fit to opine on all the things that exist and to declare that because spirit is not a thing it therefore doesn’t matter. To an outside observer they themselves appear possessed by a certain spirit. I will leave it to you to work out what that spirit is."
Whatever it is you believe in, be it a spirit or a government service, you believe in its effectiveness in achieving a certain objective, be it making children happy, making adults feel better about themselves or achieving your own peace of mind, you are a believer. When the Beatitudes are read and the meek in the audience hear “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” [Matthew 5:5] you may observe for yourself that the meek perk up a bit. This may lead you to believe in the ability of the spirit of Jesus to make people feel better, and a spirit that can do that is not one to turn up your nose at.
By now you may be thinking that belief in spirits may be useful after all, but then what about the use of reason? Isn’t reason the supreme human achievement, replacing many centuries of atavistic belief in spirits and things invisible? Shouldn’t all of us advanced, educated people be data-driven and rely on the scientific method?
Before I answer this question, let me add another element: belief in spirits can be viewed as an end in itself because it opens up one’s senses in unexpected ways. Here is a trivial example: if I look at a page of Church Slavonic on a web page while listening to it sung on Youtube, I can actually smell incense—an instance of synesthetic perception. But it goes much deeper than that and becomes an immersive experience. Most people are born being able to see, hear, smell, taste and touch. But with a bit of practice they can also learn to directly sense spirit—a sense that is inaccessible to the scientific method and therefore disregarded by the skeptical mind, but that is nevertheless intensely real to those who possess it.
Unscientific though this is, directly sensing spirit is very potent medicine for whatever ails you—far beyond anything science can offer. In a word, it gives people joy. But in all my years working in hard science I have never witnessed joy. Not a single scientist was seen transported with scientific rapture. On the level of emotions and sensations, the scientific pursuit is all about ambition and pride on the one hand and fear of failure and humiliation on the other, adding a bit of stress to spice up a great deal of tedium. And then there is an important irrational factor: the huge amount of ego invested in their game motivates scientists, engineers and technologists to push the only tool they have—reason—with wild abandon.
And then there are the abysmal results from exercising their reasoning faculties with wild abandon. The Age of Reason is said to have dawned around 1800, thanks to Thomas Paine. In the two centuries since then we have used reason to despoil our one and only planet so severely that species are now going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 faster than before and our own survival as a species is seriously threatened. Our vaunted reason has allowed us to create a planetary-scale machine that is blindly burning through the entire accessible store of fossilized carbon, severely disrupting the climate, and has led us to create a military machine that has destroyed country after country and that may end up killing us all. But reason is impotent in helping us shut down any of these machines.
Here we come to the crux of the matter: by now lots people around the world have little to no faith in reason left—specifically, in the ability of human reason to achieve anything other than more mindless destruction of their society and of our planetary habitat. Instead of trusting reason, they would prefer to put their faith in the spirits that have guided humanity through many millennia. Note that throughout that time we posed no existential threat to our own survival or to the planet’s ability to sustain a diversity of life. If you tell those who have become skeptical of your abilities to exercise reason that they are ignorant, uneducated, atavistic throwbacks to a primitive era, why should they listen? After all, many of the facts—which is all that you are allowed to reason with—are not on your side. And if they do listen and throw it back at you that your faith in reason is blind faith, how will you convince them otherwise?
It may well turn out that reason is an evolutionary dead end for our species and that putting all of our faith in reason is a suicidal move. Reason’s practitioners have turned out to be a bunch of sorcerer’s apprentices, setting in motion machines that they don’t know how to shut down because their reason is too feeble. Yet many of them still see it fit to opine on all the things that exist and to declare that because spirit is not a thing it therefore doesn’t matter. To an outside observer they themselves appear possessed by a certain spirit. I will leave it to you to work out what that spirit is."
Powerful and interesting stuff I expect that you will agree. Anyone who has been in a large football crowd will understand what he means by spirit.
And it is very difficult to argue with his point that we have been destroying the planet at an ever increasing rate since the dawn of the Age of Reason. See my last post for just one example.
More human spirit and less relentless economic, and most other forms of, "growth" seems appropriate to our current circumstances wouldn't you say?
I cheated and just gave you the intro and the punchlines. His argument builds as the article progresses.
Here is the link to the full article:
And it is very difficult to argue with his point that we have been destroying the planet at an ever increasing rate since the dawn of the Age of Reason. See my last post for just one example.
More human spirit and less relentless economic, and most other forms of, "growth" seems appropriate to our current circumstances wouldn't you say?
I cheated and just gave you the intro and the punchlines. His argument builds as the article progresses.
Here is the link to the full article:
