5 October 2000, 810 words
Religions are built on the rock of ignorance. That is why, whenever the adherents of a particular religion become educated and tolerant, the social and political influence of that religion declines.
It is therefore to the advantage of religious leaders to keep their adherents ignorant. Trouble is, the secular world often insists on educating people, so religions' apologists find it necessary to foster ignorance in order to counteract the uncomfortable facts that their followers may learn.
People's ignorance of history is their preferred weapon. In every religious tradition, apologists promote the myth that in the past society was more stable and individuals happier than in the modern world. Christians talk about the Garden of Eden, Muslims about Arab unity under Muhammad, Hindus about India's perfect ancient society.
Anyone who is familiar with world history, however, knows that humanity's lot in this century is far better than the lot of nearly all our ancestors who, no matter what their strength of religious belief, suffered far more from disease, overwork, oppression and poverty than most people today.
Ignorance of science also helps the apologists' agenda. Science is a major target because it explains reality far better than religion. The apologists therefore argue that science has not helped solve moral problems, or that their religious texts contain scientific knowledge long in advance of modern Western civilization.
The first claim is mostly true, although the apologists conveniently ignore the fact that scientists have never claimed to be solving moral problems. The second claim is, invariably, nonsensical. Either the apologists misrepresent the scientific facts or, almost as frequently, misrepresent their own scriptures.
Biological ignorance allows them to deny Darwin's well-proven theory of evolution. One prominent Seventh-Day Adventist calls it a "Satanic theory", no doubt because evolution shows that the design and orderliness of Nature is not necessarily the work of some Supreme Being, but is necessarily the outcome of natural selection and random genetic mutation.
All the arguments of the religious apologists on this topic are entirely without foundation, once you understand the elegant simplicity of Darwin's idea: that small changes over thousands and millions of years are responsible for all life forms on Earth, including humans. There is, in fact, no empirical evidence against evolutionary theory, which is why Christian fundamentalists even go so far to argue that God (or the Devil) created fossils specifically as a test of faith.
The more pseudo-intellectual apologists are aided by an ignorance of physics. One of their favourite arguments is that the four forces of the universe - gravity, electromagnetism, the weak force and the nuclear force - are so finely-tuned that life would not be possible if any one were different by the slightest degree. Ergo, there must be a Supreme Intelligence which did the fine-tuning.
This argument is specious. Obviously, since we have evolved in this universe, the constants of nature must have the values that allowed us to evolve in the first place. This is known as the anthropic principle.
Ignorance of both physics and linguistics facilitates even more esoteric arguments. One Hindu spokesman quotes a physicist as saying that the universe began from a "cosmic egg", and then quotes the Vedic texts describing a "golden egg which contained all the worlds".
From this, he concludes that ancient Hindu sages knew all about the Big Bang. Of course, the coincidence of terms means nothing of the sort. Human language, you see, is shaped by metaphors. Linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, authors of Philosophy in the Flesh, write, "Philosophers engaged in making metaphysical claims are choosing from the unconscious a set of existing metaphors that have a consistent ontology. That is, using unconscious everyday metaphors, they seek to make a non-contradictory choice of conceptual entities defined by those metaphors."
If, therefore, a scientist is using normal language instead of mathematics to describe the origin of the universe, what could be more natural than the metaphor of an egg? Ditto for whoever wrote the story of the universe's origin in the Vedas.
These may all seem to be academic issues, but the ignorance behind them does have an impact on the real world: from the Roman Catholic parents of siamese twins refusing an operation that would keep one alive instead of condemning both to death; to the official sanctions of bigotry against homosexuals; to Hindus and Muslims opposing attempts to raise the marriage age above 14 and 12 and thus legitimising paedophilia; and to most of the faithful continuing to support hanging instead of effective measures to battle crime.
Such situations demonstrate why, as long as religion penetrates our social and political institutions, all efforts to build a more rational, ethical and just society will continue to be retarded by its baleful influence. And, now that Clause Seven is law, this task has become that more difficult.
Copyright ©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh