The Dangers of Magical Thinking
Religious faith would not be such a negative force in society if it
were just about religion. However, the magical thinking that becomes
deeply ingrained when faith rules over facts warps all areas of life.
It produces a frame of mind in which concepts are formulated with
deep passion but without the slightest attention being paid to the
evidence that bears on the concept. We have seen that throughout
history, with the wars over religion. Nowhere has the danger of
magical thinking become more exemplified in modern times than in
America, where we have seen a steady but sure decline since the
greatness exhibited by the nation in World War II.
Since then the United States has squandered its vast wealth,
natural resources, and moral capital in a series of misguided
conflicts based on ideology rather than a rational analysis of the
actual facts. We engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union
believing them to be this great “evil empire” when in fact they were
a bankrupt nation with a bankrupt system that eventually fell of its
own weight. Of course they were a threat with their nuclear weapons,
but we hardly needed to spend trillions of dollars building enough
bombs of our own to destroy the world many times over, and send
trillions more on establishing a military that far exceeds in size
and power that of the sum total of all the nations in the world.
And then, with the demise of the Soviet Union we engaged in two
further costly wars, one in Iraq that was totally unjustified, and
one in Afghanistan that could have been over quickly if we hadn’t
decided we had to remake the country in our own ideological image. In
this, our leaders betrayed their ignorance of history. Afghanistan
has resisted being remade by outsiders since Alexander the Great,
with more recent attempts by England and Russia meeting with the same
dismal failure that America is destined to experience. (As I write
this, the headlines tell of 30 Americans and 8 Afghans being killed
when their helicopter was shot down).
As we have seen, the more religious a person, the more likely he
or she will support notions that are contradicted by the evidence.
Examples: tax cuts create jobs, abstinence works as a birth control
method, vaccines cause autism, abortions cause cancer, there is no
global warming, humans did not evolve, psychic powers exist, we can
make out own reality, we have enough energy, water, and food to
continue our present lifestyle indefinitely (at least until the
Second Coming), and so on. This is the magical thinking that is
giving us a dysfunctional nation, indeed, a dysfunctional world.
from the upcoming God and the Folly of Faith by Victor Stenger
DRAFT
