Sunday, September 4, 2011

To what end? Because...?

"I want people to leave religion..."

"I want people to embrace science..."

In the answers to these questions lies the direction of "our"* movement.

*Whether or not it's mine depends on the answers, I suppose.

2 comments:

  1. Can I question the premise?

    To me, discrediting religious faith, religious authority, and (probably most important as an initial step) religious privilege is more important than getting people to leave religion. If religion survived, even with a fairly large number of adherents, but in a social milieu in which it was very much not privileged and in which religious faith and authority were not subjects of social esteem, I'd be awfully happy with that outcome. It'd be more or less what P.Z. Myers says in his interview from Expelled: a world in which we treat religion the way we treat knitting. I'm not opposed to overt attempts at deconversion (and in a world with much reduced religious privilege, there would inevitably be lots of deconversion), but it doesn't seem to me primary.

    I'd say the same thing for the embrace of science if it weren't for the degree to which our survival as a civilization (or a species?) might well depend on our embrace of science. It's awfully hard to be optimistic on that score, though. Quite possibly we're simply fucked.

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  2. To me, discrediting religious faith, religious authority, and (probably most important as an initial step) religious privilege is more important than getting people to leave religion.

    Huh. I can't really see how the former wouldn't necessarily entail the latter. But the fine distinctions are secondary to my question about motivations.

    I'd say the same thing for the embrace of science if it weren't for the degree to which our survival as a civilization (or a species?) might well depend on our embrace of science.

    But that's only true for certain meanings of "embrace" and to the extent to which science is used in pursuing cetain value commitments, right?

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