Nameless Heathen

Religion has always depended on willful ignorance.  Faith is a pure and open expression of disbelief in your own powers of reasoning.  With the exception of the small fraction of adult converts, religion depends on careful conditioning of the innocent, gradually removing the power of reason from whole areas of life.  And that same conditioning is the public policy of fundamentalism.  “Teach the controversy” is an incremental and versatile  tool to create and embrace ignorance.  Creationism depends on a closed mind and a lack of curiosity about genetic history.  Anyone examining the world from an open position would be no more capable of believing in a 10,000 year old earth than of a regression of turtles supporting the Earth on their back.

Religion has often been a key component of politics.  Early rulers (including  the Christian Emperor Constantine) mandated state religion and cynically used it as a tool of control and conquest.  When region is conflated with morality it can be used a tool without appearing to be based in human motives.  This has allowed suppression of many minorities and both perceived and real enemies.

The techniques used by religion are now cynically manipulated to support the fear based Republican agenda build power and benefit favored corporations.  Xe (previously Blackwater) can not be profitable unless fear and hatred of American is growing.  Exxon/Mobil can not be profitable in a world where Global Warming is prevented. Northrop Grumman,  Lockheed Martin and Raytheon need insurgents to sell UAV’s.

Evangelical Fundamentalism, conservation and right wing authoritarianism are all faces of ignorance and use ignorance to breed fear.  Fear of the minority, fear of the different, and fear of becoming a minority.  It takes concentrated and willful ignorance to ignore the cost of security theater, totalitarian security and environmental catastrophe.   Fear produces hate both of and for the fearful and hate builds more fear.  And now that fear is the best tool to build power its production is as calculated and refined as any other product of modern society.

Check out this blog entry for commentary on a new “peer reviewed” creationist science journal. It got me to pondering again the Fundamentalist effect on science and education. (In the past I’ve talked here, and here about science and Christian education.)

I’ve often wondered what would happen if the fundies won and taught their view of the world. How catastrophic would it be? I’ve met brilliant “young earth” fundamentalists who have done things like plot ICBM courses for a living and others who could write FFT code off the top of their heads. They made it through life and acquired useful learning. Their religion didn’t reduce their capacity to learn hard stuff. Maybe we’d be ok as a society if people like them set all the rules.

Let’s imagine a world where schools everywhere are run by people like the idiot in my home state, Texas, that fired a science curriculum director for mentioning evolution.

My best guess is that engineering and experimental sciences would survive, math would flourish, the liberal arts would be bombed back to the middle ages and genetic research would die. Things like comparative genetics would be right out (imagine their reaction to cool stuff like this, or this), geology would look more like the 16th century, and biology would be reduced to debating how many “kinds” of animals the Ark carried.

Could the world really keep working? Imagine thinking like a physicist who believes rainbows literally first started happening after Noah got off the Ark. Surely that would blind you to something important.

I’ve seen it. I’ve talked with them and I know they sincerely believe what they believe and adamantly refuse to consider contradiction as anything more than a mystery of the one true God. Seeing smart people fall for this self inflicted form of lunacy is the most amazing religious phenomena I know. And it’s not just Christians. You can’t make it through engineering school without encountering dozens and dozens of intense followers of Islam, some with even scarier ideas. I think the math attracts them.

I’d be interested in other’s thoughts on this subject. What would happen to medicine? Psychology? History? Political Science? Economics?

Maybe there should be an atheist response to “Left Behind” ( I reluctantly admit reading 3 or 4 of those books in a masochistic attempt to better understand my co-workers). Working title: “Taken Over: A Novel of Earth’s last days of progress and reason”