On 30 May 2014, at 06:54, LizR wrote:
On 30 May 2014 16:05, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
The political discourse matters, and explains a good deal. But
there's something beneath it, something we don't want to look in
the face: namely, that in India, as elsewhere in our darkening
world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion
intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating
around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable
language of "respect". What is there to respect in any of this,
or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around
the world in religion's dreaded name? How well, with what fatal
results, religion erects totems, and how willing we are to kill
for them! And when we've done it often enough, the deadening of
affect that results makes it easier to do it again. So India's
problem turns out to be the world's problem. What happened in
India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.
--- Salman Rushdie 2002
Very nicely put.
I appreciate Salman Rushdie a lot for his courage, but I beg to differ
on this.
The problem's name is God's name, not God.
I share his anticlericalism, and his anti-religion when it concerns
religion with secular power.
Religion have to be 100% separated from politics, even health must be.
A minister of religion (health) is possible, but its role should only
consists in regulating the harmony between the different religions
(type of medicinal practice), and not with the content of any religion
(medication), still less on normative content (prescription).
Religion is not a problem. The problem is that some human want to
control other humans, and the best algorithm for doing that is in the
religious credulity manipulation by fears, + exploiting an otherwise
natural aspiration for the transcendent and serenity.
Science without religion is blind, non existing, or soul/person
eliminating.
Religion without science is madness, violence and wars.
You can't separate science from religion, or you make it into a pseudo-
religion and/or pseudo-science.
(No more that you can separate G from G*, but I don't want to be
technical here).
If you try to fight a religion, you will always (in general) make it
more powerful.
The romans tried to eliminate the christians, and we have seen the
result, for example. (well, some genocide or catastrophes might have
eliminated *some* religion by total elimination of the individual
believers, that remains possible in some past, like in South-America,
perhaps).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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