Humanist Association of Orange County - Newsletter for
February 2005
Issue #87 ( HTML format )
Editor: Benito Franqui
Associate Editor: Dave Silva
Send submissions and membership renewals to:
HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
benfranq@earthlink.net
Articles submitted for publication in the newsletter
must
be received no later than 10 days before the
next
HAOC meeting.
The Humanist Association of Orange County ( HAOC) is a
chapter of the American Humanist Association.
Please visit our website at http://www.ochumanists.org
HAOC Board
President: Pete Anderson
Vice President: Dave Silva
Treasurer:.Harry Becker
Secretary: Jerry Parks
Member at large: Carl Mariz
Member at large: Benito Franqui
NEXT
HAOC MEETING
Sunday, February
20,
1:30 P.M.
Charles Rulon:
“The Book That Shook the World”
Of all the brilliant scientific minds of the past, it’s been claimed that no scientist has more drastically modified the average person’s worldview, nor been responsible for proposing more theories that stood in stark conflict with what everybody else knew to be true than did Charles Darwin.
This Darwin Day presentation will examine that claim by summarizing the major relevant religious and philosophical beliefs of the early 1800s, exploring in particular the argument from design, followed by outlining Darwin’s mega-theory of evolution published in 1859. Also summarized will be where we stand today, 145 years later.
Charles Rulon is a professor emeritus of biology at Long Beach City College. He has spent the last 35 years lecturing and writing on the subjects of evolution, science and religion, the Christian Right, pseudoscience and the paranormal, abortion, homosexuality, and environmental issues.
ATHEIST
ALLIANCE CONVENTION
Stars
of Freethought
March 25-27
Los Angeles at the Crowne Plaza Hotel (near LAX)
With Penn and Teller, Michael Newdow, Dr. Bruce Flamm and Andrew Bradley
www.atheistalliance.org
SKEPTICS
SOCIETY LECTURE
When
They Severed Earth From Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth
Sunday,
March 6, 2:00 p.m. Caltech
Baxter
Lecture Hall
Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber
Why
were Prometheus and Loki envisioned as chained to rocks? What was the Golden
Calf? Why are mirrors believed to carry bad luck? How could anyone think that
mortals like Perseus, Beowulf, and St. George actually fought dragons, since
dragons don’t exist? Strange though they sound, however, these “myths” did
not begin as fiction. Barber and Barber show that myths originally transmitted
real information about real events and observations, preserving the information
sometimes for millennia within nonliterate societies. Geologists’
interpretations of how a volcanic cataclysm long ago created Oregon’s Crater
Lake, for example, is echoed point for point in the local myth of its origin.
The Klamath tribe saw it happen and passed down the story—for nearly 8,000
years. We, however, have been literate so long that we’ve forgotten how myths
encode reality. Recent studies of how our brains work, applied to a wide range
of data from the Pacific Northwest to ancient Egypt to modern stories reported
in newspapers, have helped the Barbers deduce the characteristic principles by
which such tales both develop and degrade through time.
Dr.
Elizabeth Wayland Barber is Professor of Linguistics and Archaeology, Occidental
College, and the author of The Mummies of Ürümchi (W. W. Norton), Women’s
Work (W. W. Norton), and Prehistoric Textiles ( Princeton).
ERNST
MAYR, GIANT AMONG EVOLUTIONARY
BIOLOGISTS, DIES AT 100
From
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2005/02/04-mayr.html
Acclaimed advancer of Darwinism had been member of Harvard faculty since 1953
By
Steve Bradt
FAS
Communications
Ernst
Mayr, the Harvard University evolutionary biologist who has been called
"the Darwin of the 20th century," died yesterday morning (Feb. 3) at a
retirement community in Bedford, Mass. A member of the Harvard faculty for more
than half a century, he was 100.
Mayr's
death came after a brief illness, his family said.
Widely
considered the world's most eminent evolutionary biologist and even one of the
100 greatest scientists of all time, Mayr joined Harvard's Faculty of Arts and
Sciences in 1953 as Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and led Harvard's
Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1961 to 1970. He retired in 1975, assuming
the title Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology Emeritus.
"Professor
Mayr's contributions to Harvard University, and to the field of evolutionary
biology, were extraordinary by any measure," said William C. Kirby, Edith
and Benjamin Geisinger Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences at Harvard. "As a professor, museum director, benefactor to our
library of comparative zoology, and leading mind of the 20th century, he shaped
and articulated modern understanding of biodiversity and related fields. With
sadness, we note his passing; with gratitude, we thank him for his legacy."
Mayr's
work in the 1930s and 1940s, while a curator at the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, quickly established him as a central figure in the
neo-Darwinist evolutionary synthesis, the resurgence of evolutionary biology
widely regarded as one of the most important scientific developments of the 20th
century. He almost single-handedly made the origin of species diversity the
central question of evolutionary biology that it is today. He also pioneered the
currently accepted definition of a biological species: an interbreeding
population that cannot breed with other groups.
Throughout
his nearly 80-year career, as his research ranged throughout ornithology,
taxonomy, zoogeography, evolution, systematics, and the history and philosophy
of biology, Mayr maintained an unshakable faith in Darwin's theory of evolution.
"I'm
an old-time fighter for Darwinism," he told the Harvard Gazette in a 1991
interview. "I say, 'Please tell me what is wrong with Darwinism. I can't
see anything wrong with Darwinism.'"
Born
July 5, 1904, in Kempten, Germany, Mayr earned a medical degree from the
University of Greifswald in 1925. Descended from generations of doctors, he
broke off his medical career and turned his attention to zoology, earning a
Ph.D. from the University of Berlin just 16 months later.
"I
was curious about far places," he told the Harvard Alumni Bulletin in 1961,
"and decided that as an M.D, I should have but small chance of
traveling."
His
chance to do so came in 1927, at the International Zoological Congress in
Budapest, when he met Lord Rothschild, who had been seeking someone to travel to
New Guinea to collect birds of paradise. Mayr jumped at the chance, and spent
the next two and a half years in the South Seas, seeking out populations of
birds that, isolated from fellow members of their species, had accumulated
genetic differences.
"I
did one thing after another that I had no business of doing, but I was confident
I could do it and, by God, I was able to do it," Mayr told the New York
Times in 1997, describing his "appalling self-confidence" as a young
scientist.
In
his travels in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Mayr showed what Darwin had
never quite succeeded in establishing: that new species arise from isolated
populations. He published his findings in the 1942 book "Systematics and
the Origin of Species." Mayr eventually authored or co-authored more than
20 books, including the seminal texts "Animal Species and Evolution"
(1963) and "The Growth of Biological Thought" (1982), and contributed
to well over 600 papers published in peer-reviewed journals.
Throughout
his career, Mayr fought tirelessly to ensure biology's place in the pantheon of
"true sciences," alongside physics, astronomy, and chemistry — a
view not shared by many scientists as late as the 1960s. Driven by a lifelong
interest in the "why" of evolutionary biology, he also pioneered the
study of the philosophy and history of biology.
"Much
as we know about the 'how' of human evolution, the 'why' is still a great
puzzle," he wrote in 1963, a theme still very much in evidence in his most
recent books.
Among
his many honors, Mayr captured the three prizes widely regarded as the
"triple crown" of biology: the Balzan Prize in 1983, the International
Prize for Biology in 1994, and the Crafoord Prize in 1999. In accepting these
awards, Mayr donated the hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money to such
organizations as Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and the Nature
Conservancy. "The money is the least important part of the prize," he
told the Harvard Gazette upon winning the Balzan Prize.
Mayr
was also awarded the National Medal of Science in 1970.
Mayr's
wife Margarete died in 1990 after 55 years of marriage. He is survived by two
daughters, Christa Menzel of Simsbury, Conn., and Susanne Harrison of Bedford,
Mass., five grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. Plans for a memorial
service on the Harvard campus will be announced at a later date.
H.
Bentley Glass, 98; Offered Sweeping View of the Future for Nonscientists
From
Los Angeles Times January
25, 2005
By
Myrna Oliver, Times Staff Writer
H.
Bentley Glass, a biologist and geneticist who bluntly shared his views on major
societal issues, including the blending of genetic traits among races, mandatory
testing of prospective parents to prevent birth defects and licenses to bear
children, has died. He was 98.
Glass
died Jan. 16 in Boulder, Colo., of pneumonia.
A
distinguished professor, Glass made his strong opinions known outside academia
through a column in the Baltimore Sun, speeches, testimony before Congress and
in consulting work with government and private agencies around the world.
"If
we are going to build a civilization based on science," he said in
explaining his wide-ranging efforts for Newsday in 1967, "then the man in
the street is going to have to learn what science is."
Among
Glass' attention-grabbing pronouncements were:
"Genetic drift," or a
shifting of genes among races, makes any theory of pure race, or segregation
based on it, moot.
Nuclear testing can cause serious
genetic defects, and the only creatures to survive a nuclear holocaust would be
insects and bacteria, with the cockroach, which he termed "a venerable and
hardy species," reigning supreme.
Babies could be produced in test tubes
by 1985, and parents should be tested for potential genetic defects before they
are allowed to have children.
To curb world overpopulation, children
should be licensed — the first permitted, with a tax exemption; the second
approved with no tax exemption; and a tax added for any additional child.
"The right to have children can't remain unlimited," he said in a 1964
Los Angeles speech. "This is because the increase in world population is
the second most serious threat to mankind. The most serious is nuclear
war."
A
self-described old-fashioned liberal, Glass was also known for his staunch
defense of civil liberties. In 1960, he rejected an appointment to Maryland's
Radiation Control Advisory Board because the post required a loyalty oath.
"To
be forced to swear that one is not disloyal or subversive to one's
country," he wrote to Gov. J. Millard Tawes, "is like being forced to
swear that one is not disloyal in marriage. For that, the loyal need no oath;
the disloyal swear anyway."
Similarly,
he used his own and other scientific studies about race relations in 1955, when
he was a member of Baltimore's board of school commissioners, to press for quick
compliance with the historic 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision.
Glass
was born Jan. 17, 1906, in what is now Yehsien, China, the son of American
Baptist missionaries from Texas. He was educated in China until the age of 17,
then went to Texas to enroll in Decatur Baptist College. Two years later, he
transferred to Baylor University in Waco, where he received a bachelor's degree
in biology. After teaching for several years in Timpson, Texas, he earned a
master's degree at Baylor and a doctorate at the University of Texas in Austin.
Glass
did postdoctoral research at the University of Oslo in 1932 and the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute in Berlin in 1933. But after Albert Einstein and other
scientists left Germany during the Nazi rise to power, Glass returned to the
U.S. to complete his postdoctoral work at the University of Missouri.
He
began his teaching career at Stephens College in Columbia, Mo., and taught
biology at Goucher College in Baltimore. In 1948, he moved to Johns Hopkins
University, where he did much of his genetic drift research.
In
1965, he was hired as vice president of academic affairs and biology professor
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, helping create what some
dubbed an "instant Caltech."
Glass
wrote several books, including "Genes and the Man" in 1943,
"Science and Liberal Education" in 1959 and "Science and Ethical
Values" in 1965, and many articles. He edited the Quarterly Review of
Biology and was acting editor of Science as well as Scientific Monthly.
He
was president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American
Society of Naturalists, the American Society of Human Genetics, Phi Beta Kappa
academic honor society and the National Assn. of Biology Teachers.
"Yes,
I suppose I am diffusing my energies," he once told Saturday Review.
"I may as a consequence know less about drosophila [fruit flies] than I
should, but rather more, I hope, about life. I consider my activities different
means to the same goal — educating laymen in the questing spirit of science
and reminding science of its social responsibility."
Glass'
wife of 59 years, Suzanne, died in 1993, and their son, Alan, died in 1991. He
is survived by a daughter, Lois Edgar, of Boulder; a brother; a sister; five
grandsons; and two great-grandsons.
NATURE’S
WAY
From
The Guardian January
4, 2005 http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_science&Number=293238949#Post293238949
For
Education and Discussion Only. Not
for Commercial Use.
The
eruption of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 not only caused a
catastrophic tsunami that killed tens of thousands, it also helped to spark a
revolution. Twenty-three years later, a huge earthquake destroyed San Francisco,
with equally far-reaching consequences. Simon Winchester on how natural
disasters can change the world
It
was an early summer's morning in 19th-century Zanzibar, and the boys from the
mission school were out on their customary Sunday walk along the beach when one
of them spotted something peculiar and sinister: a large, oddly shaped object,
stranded at the tidemark. Their teacher, cautioning the children to stay well
back, walked over to investigate: the object, she later wrote in a report to the
Royal Society, turned out to be one of scores that had been washed up overnight
from the Indian Ocean by the previous night's storm.
It
was a great mass of pumice stone, some dozens of tonnes of floating rock. It had
evidently been in the sea for a very long time: its bottom was crusted with
barnacles and weed. But more bizarre still was what she found on looking more
closely: welded thickly on to the rock's upper surface and giving it the most
macabre appearance were dozens of human skeletons, together with the bones of
monkeys and, distinguishable only later in the day when the school biology
teacher had appeared, the skeletons of a pair of big cats, most probably
Sumatran tigers.
It
took little detective-work to ascertain that these rafts of pumice had floated
to Zanzibar - and, it turned out, to dozens of other places along the east
African coast - from where they had been created, 4,000 miles away to the east,
by the devastating eruption of the Dutch East Indian island of Krakatoa. This
entire island - 11 cubic miles of it - had been blasted into oblivion in one of
the planet's most titanic volcanic displays, on August 27 1883. Now, nine months
later, the floating pumice islands that had fallen from it, laden with their
ghastly cargo of creatures killed in the blast, had found their way across an
enormous ocean, a stark reminder of an event that the world was wanting to
forget.
For
most of the world back then knew about Krakatoa, just as almost everyone now
knows of the recent Sumatran tragedy. There had been spectacular volcanic
eruptions before - Toba and Tambora, both in the East Indies, as well as
Santorini, Hekla and Mazama - but Krakatoa became an icon, remembered to this
day, for the same reason that underpins the probably eternal notoriety of the
Boxing Day earthquake: electricity.
Krakatoa
was the first catastrophe of the age of communication. When President Lincoln
was assassinated in 1865, it took 12 days for the news to get from Washington to
London. When Krakatoa erupted, however, three new factors were in play: morse
code had been invented; Julius Reuter had set up a news agency; and the
submarine telegraph cable had been developed. All were to play their part.
The
first terse signal - "Strong volcanic eruption, Krakatowa Island" -
from the Lloyd's agent who saw the flames spout from the volcano's summit, was
carried over lines that were almost immediately broken by the tsunami that
killed 36,000 people a few seconds later. But the message managed to get through
to Batavia, the Dutch East Indian capital. From there it passed under the sea,
to Singapore. It was then amplified, retransmitted on to Madras, passed to
stations at Trincomalee, Colombo and Bombay, then travelled via the newly built
Suez Canal to Port Said, thence sped by way of Malta and Gibraltar across Biscay
to Porthcurno in Cornwall, and across the Atlantic to the Reuters receiving
stations in Newfoundland and Boston.
The
Boston Globe had the story on its front page not 12 days, but just four hours
later. The next morning, horse-drawn commuters in Boston and New York would read
of places such as Krakatoa and Sumatra and the Sunda Strait and the tragedy that
had engulfed them, and would accord the names the same kind of familiarity as
Baltimore and Cape Cod. The world suddenly became much smaller: the global
village, one might say, became that August morning a distant reality.
But
although the 19th-century world now knew what had happened, it still had no real
understanding of why - and this highlights one very real contrast between the
way that mankind once tended to react to the major, world-girdling calamities,
those that occurred during what we might call early-modern times, and the
immensely more rational way that the world reacts today, in what we believe to
be our properly modern scientific environment.
There
is a generally accepted and consequently universal understanding of just why
last Boxing Day's events occurred. The Indian Plate, subducting with immense
force against the Burmese Plate, overcame a long, pre-existing resistance, and
snapped upwards under the seabed off Sumatra; the sudden upthrust triggered
tsunamis that caused an enormous loss of life around the Indian Ocean. The
world's reaction has, as a consequence of the explanation, been measured and
appropriate: there have been widespread appeals, generous outpourings of aid,
promises of future prevention measures, and worldwide demands for new research.
Seismology, not always the most favoured of sciences, will probably gain new
funding. And mankind dispassionately accepts - to a certain degree - that what
took place was some kind of cruel cull.
At
the time of Krakatoa, however, although the cable-connected world was fairly
well informed about the event, it was also lacking any explanation and was
terribly bewildered by what had taken place. For most people, something
inexplicably strange had occurred on the other side of the world - something
that caused the tides to rise as far away as Biarritz and Devonport, something
that made the evening skies all over the world burn with a lurid fire (Edvard
Munch's vividly coloured painting, The Scream, recently stolen, was painted at
the time of those Krakatoa-affected skies), something that caused an explosion
so loud it could be heard 3,000 miles away. But as to why it had happened, no
one - no scientist at least - could be found to offer any comforting nostrums.
For all the world knew, the end of life itself could be at hand.
The
world thus turned to its old standby: religion. It ascribed the event's ultimate
cause to God. It ascribed its proximate cause to some act of man that had made
God angry. And it acted to expunge the cause of that anger - and did so very
quickly indeed.
In
the case of Krakatoa, the Muslim prelates of Java first made this connection.
The eruption that had killed so many and had ruined so much was clearly, they
said, the work of Allah - a divine who was, so the mullahs told their Javanese
congregations of the day, supremely irritated that so many of their number were
passively allowing themselves to be ruled by white infidel outsiders, the Dutch.
To appease the sorely tried Allah, the mullahs said, the Dutch had to be killed
and their influence expunged. Rise up, they advised.
And
so they did - in a piecemeal fashion at first, in an organised rebellion five
years later, and in a measured and defiant way in the decades that followed. The
Dutch were eventually forced to leave; Indonesia, born out of the Hollanders'
imperial fiefdom, remains today the world's most populous Islamic nation.
Krakatoa was not the cause of the birth of Indonesia, far from it; but it was a
sign, a trigger, and it remains a significant moment in Indonesian political
history for that very reason.
Twenty
years later, on the other side of the world, there was another seismic event
that is now being seen as having had similar consequences. On April 18 1906, San
Francisco was levelled by an enormous earthquake caused by a rupture of the San
Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plate press against each
another. The physical consequences of the event were profound and immediate:
death, destruction, appeals, aid, promises of better building codes, more funds
for science.
But
the social and political consequences have only recently been realised - and
religion played its part here also. For less than a week before the event, a
meeting took place in a church in a Los Angeles slum, a meeting in which
manic-seeming priests, all of them speaking in tongues and waving limbs, used
any dramatic technique possible to win over the winnable - and promised that a
sign from the Lord would come any day.
That
was Sunday. The promised sign came, just before dawn on the following Wednesday,
when San Francisco and most of the north of the state was ripped apart by the
earthquake. The results were immediate. The following Sunday, the new-born
church was filled to bursting - and the American evangelical organisation, now
broadly known as the Pentecostalist movement, was, in essence, born.
And
the effect? It may strain belief a little, but this same Pentecostalist movement
is the church that has, in recent times, given us such grotesqueries as Tammy
Faye Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Pat Robertson, all of them the spiritual
keystones of the hitherto unrecognised religious structure that Karl Rove
utilised last autumn to help win President Bush the election.
This,
many will say, is going too far. Joining the dots can be a dangerous and
foolhardy temptation to which to succumb. And yet to those who believe that
Krakatoa led in part to Indonesian independence, the notion that the destruction
of San Francisco may have played an unwitting historical role in the creation
and sustenance of American conservative politics a century later is not as
outlandish as it may seem.
When
mankind was incapable of explaining major calamities, there was a tradition of
turning to the skies for understanding and comfort. These days, believing that
science answers all, we are less tempted to reach to religion and superstition
to answer our needs.
Given
the political consequences of our having done that in the past - some of these
consequences good, some arguably less so, but all of them very long-lasting
indeed - it is perhaps better for us all that we now claim to know the answers:
to know why the plates collide, why the waves rush out so far, and why skeletons
appeared on those beaches in Zanzibar on a peaceful Sunday morning more than a
century ago.
·
Simon Winchester is the author of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded,
published by Penguin at £7.99. His latest book on the San Francisco earthquake
will be published in October.
[Editor:
Polichinello] Excerpt: "When mankind was incapable of explaining major
calamities, there was a tradition of turning to the skies for understanding and
comfort. These days, believing that science answers all, we are less tempted to
reach to religion and superstition to answer our needs."
A
BIBLE FOR SECULAR SOCIETIES?
By
Jerry Parks
Believers
have their Bibles. Christians have the Old and New Testaments in various
versions that have been rewritten and retranslated many times and many ways,
Jews have the Torah, Islam has the Koran, although the original version by
Mohammed was supposedly destroyed and the current version recreated at a much
later date by others, so there is no proof that it is even close to the
original. But, no matter, for the true believer everything in these books just
has to be true, even when they contradict themselves. Logic and reason are not
necessary for the true believer. Faith only is required. To make a point the
true believer simply has to pick the appropriate lines from his Bible, quote it,
and obviously that settles it, even though the same book has other lines that
are clearly in disagreement. But the quoted lines take precedence simply because
they are being quoted.
For the secularists a Bible is needed occasionally to quote some truth based on
logic, fact and reason to counteract the distortions resulting from faith based
biases and unfounded opinions. Tom Paine¹s The
Age of Reason
and other books by other authors over the years certainly make some points.
Jefferson, who referred to God in the sense of Mother Nature and not as some
inter-active deity up in the sky, wrote his own version of the Christian Bible
to make some sense of it, and clearly disparaged the belief in such things as
virgin birth and other supposed miracles.
Now there is a new book that is extremely clear and precise and so well written
that it is a joy to read, but that clearly shows that unless beliefs based on
faith alone can be modified and corrected by logic, reason and science in this
otherwise highly technological age, it is quite possible that civilization could
quickly destroy itself. Religious fanaticism and the makings of WMD is a really
dangerous mix, both of which are in abundance world-wide.
The book The
End of Faith
by
Sam Harris clearly shows that religious fanaticism, in all its versions, has
never been more of a threat to society than it is now.
Since this book is so well written, here is a series of short selections from
the book, put together to indicate an abbreviated version of what can be found
therein, mostly in the author¹s own words, but with emphasis added here and
there:
The ideal of religious tolerance - born of the notion that every human being
should be free to believe whatever he wants about God - is one of the principal
forces driving us to the abyss. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into
question - that we know
there is a God,
and that we know what he wants from us
- even religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.
Religious faith represents so uncompromising a misuse of the power of our minds
that it forms a kind of perverse cultural singularity - a vanishing point beyond
which rational discourse proves impossible. When foisted upon each generation
anew, it renders us incapable of realizing just how much of our world has been
unnecessarily ceded to a dark and barbarous past.
Religion has been the explicit
cause of literally millions of deaths in just
the last ten years.
[Palestine, Balkans, Ireland, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri
Lanka, Indonesia, Caucasus, etc.]
Muslims claim that Islam is a religion of peace, but one only need read the
Koran itself to see that this is untrue:
Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with
them. [Koran 9:73] Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you.
[Koran 9:123] The believers who stay home are not the equal of those who fight
for the cause of God. He that leaves his dwelling to fight for God and his
apostles and is then overtaken by death shall be rewarded. The unbelievers are
your inveterate enemies. [Koran 4:95-101]
Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can
be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit
the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors.
Given the power of our technology, we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs
will not make good neighbors. As the physicist Martin Rees points out, we are
entering an era where a single person can, by one clandestine act, cause
millions of deaths or render a city uninhabitable for years. Much of the world¹s
population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the
same shelf with Batman, the philosophers stone, and unicorns.
Perhaps it is time we demanded that our fellow human beings had better reasons
for maintaining their religious differences, if such reasons even exist. A study
of the bible and most other religious books demonstrates that there is no act of
cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse
to their pages. The fact that belief has motivated many people to do good things
does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary, or even good, motivation for
goodness. Many have risked their lives to save others without believing any
incredible ideas about the nature of the universe. But the most monstrous crimes
against humanity have invariably been inspired by unjustified belief. As Will
Durant said, Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; certainty
is murderous. Just think of the Crusades and the Inquisition. Currently, Jewish
settlers, by proposing their beliefs as the rightful, and unquestionable,
determination for the use of contested lands, are now one of the principal
obstacles to peace in the Middle East.
There is no doubt that war against the infidels is a central feature of the
Islamic faith. Armed conflict in defense of Islam is a religious obligation for
every Muslim man. And we are misled if we believe the phrase in
defense of Islam
suggests that all Muslim fighting must be done in self defense. On the contrary,
the duty of jihad is an unambiguous call to world conquest. The presumption is
that the duty of jihad will continue until all the world adopts the Muslim
faith. Almost any act of violence against infidels is plausibly construed as an
action in defense of the faith. They consider that simply having a common border
with a neighbor that is non-Muslim is a direct threat to Islam and therefore
that neighbor must be eliminated as
an act of self defense.
Islam is a great threat to us, but certainly there is a problem with
Christianity and Judaism as well. It is time that we recognize that all
reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near to us, so
deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to destroy the very
possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself.
Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is
now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with
wings.
It
would seem that achieving The
End of Faith
is the only salvation for mankind and civilization, as we know it.
ON
THE LIGHT SIDE
NOTICE :
The Irvine Ranch Water District neither supports nor endorses the
causes and activities or organizations which use the District’s meeting rooms, which are made available
as a public service.
HAOC
2609 Fernside St.
Orange, CA 92865
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