Jim Murphy's Web Page

No Religion, No Philosophy, No Ideology

Time will tell, but the Internet should do even more than the printing press to make information and ideas available to all. One might hope that this potential will serve to lessen the hold of prejudice and superstition; but, considering the history of the human race, I would not bet on that outcome. Rather, we may discover more evidence that there is a Gresham's Law in the world of ideas and that stupidity, advertising, and lies tend to drive out wisdom, knowledge, and science.

Be that as it may, in this section, I am using the wonderful "soapbox" power of the Internet to broadcast my opinions. On the Internet, everyone can pose as an authority - and every browser can ignore such posings.

My own credo is an anti-credo. The less we believe, the better. We cannot stop believing in ideas, but we can and should limit our beliefs to what is rational and good and avoid those ideas that are stupid and harmful.

Of all the creatures on earth, human beings are apparently the only ones to have ideas, at least in the sense of having thoughts that can be put in words and thus examined. Not without reason, human beings pride themselves on this ability.

But when we examine the results of this power, it is clear that its exercise has at least been as much for ill as for good. The history of the human race is a record of destruction even more than it has been of one of accomplishment. And for every good idea that human beings have come up with, there have been even more bad ones.

Perhaps the worst ideas that human beings have created have been the various forms of prejudice - racism, sexism, homophobia, patriotism, and so on. In exercises of mental stupidity absurdly beneath the level of other species, human beings have denigrated, demonized, enslaved, and killed one another simply because of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and other attributes.

Next to prejudice, the worst ideas originated by homo sapiens are religious ones. Put religion and prejudice together and the result is the most self-destructive human behavior ever. In Northern Ireland, followers of different forms of Christianity (sometimes described a religion based on love) kill one another for political reasons. I n the Middle East, the voice of God tells a Jew to go to a mosque and murder the worshippers; the voice of (the same?) God tells a Muslims to commit murder and suicide. In Sri Lanka, Buddhist monks destroy people of a different ethnicity and faith.

Religious and ethnic bigotry go hand in hand.

The above picture, from a seventeenth century manuscript, shows St. James aiding the Spanish conquest in America. St. James was the legendary converter of Spain to Christianity. Later legends told how he appeared in a cloud to assist Christians battling Muslims in Spain. The conquistadores brought this idea to the New World to justify their murder and plunder of native peoples. Religion and prejudice are invariably; hatred and persecution are the common results.

When taken seriously, religious ideas tend to such destructive results, because each religion each claims to have the true way to salvation and condemns those who disagree. But even when not strong enough to lead to an auto-da-fe or a jihad, religious ideas cause pain and hur, for every religion tells us to renounce the pleasures of life. (Once again, other animals are more intelligent. You don't see tigers preaching against eating meat or rabbits denouncing the evils of lust.)

All religion works as follows: Don't enjoy life. Don't have sex, don't eat a ham sandwich, don't drink alcoholic beverages - or whatever. Instead, give money to priests. You'll get pie in the sky when you die.

That the premises behind and promises of such ideas have no objective validity does not stop most people from believing them. As Dogbert points out, most people are morons! But no doubt the hold of religious thinking stems from its being imprinted at an early age like other irrational beliefs such as dietary and sexual taboos.

Next after prejudice and religion in order of stupidity and harmfulness (in my rating system) comes teleology, the idea that things happen for a purpose. The idea that Life or the Universe must have a meaning is possibly the most inane thought in all human existence. From such nonsense arose philosophical ideas, which, like religious ones, have a reputation of being of the highest good (and arguably have in fact served some beneficial purposes historically) but in fact have only led to more searches for wills of the wisp and El Dorados.

In truth, Life (whatever that means) doesn't have a meaning any more than a slice of salami does. And to seek the purpose of the Universe is as pointless as to look for the significance in a lottery number.

To paraphrase Frederick Crews, when one finds one's self in possession of correct thinking and everyone else to be wrong, one has the obligation to correct that imbalance. I hope in this section to provide a continuing series of destructive criticism of prevalent ideas that are not only wrong but also pernicious. If such beliefs seem good to you and an attack on such tenets wrong, let me propound the following: ask not what you believe, but why you believe it.

Sincerity or emotion are no gude to the validity or worth of ideas. The Aztecs believed that if they did not offer human sacrifices to the gods by cutting the heart out of live victims, the sun would fail to rise. A pious Aztec would no doubt they would have been as offended by a denial of that belief as a pious Christian would be by a refutation of Jesus' teachings, or a pious Muslim would be by a denunciation of the Quran, or a pious Hindu would be at an encomium of sirloin steak, or a pious Zoroastrian would be at the statement that light and dark are simply physical properties. All of us go through life with ideas that are just as absurd as belief the tooth fairy.

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