the rix mix

The other day, I offered the opinion on an internet thread/link that personal stories of journeys toward & away from religious belief rarely have any original insights, & the tales - & the arguments for & against -  could be categorized, usually according to where they began the journey.  On the topic of religion, Bill Maher is as tedious to me as any protestant Born Again, & his attitude is the flip side of angry right wing Irish-American Catholics. I wonder if he realizes how much his tone of voice, his sarcasm,  can sound like Bill O'Reilly?   Ideologues tend to sound similar, & Maher is also a religious ideologue.

But atheists / humanists have a tough time in America just admitting unbelief. The vast majority of Americans believe in some form of "God," although exactly what this means is difficult to pin down.  There seems to be some common misconception that good morality & ethics depend upon belief in a deity, &^ that we cannot as a society  arrive at them without the aid of  Biblical scripture.

Religious ideologues (which includes some expressions of atheism) struggle with metaphor. They tend to be literalistic, & the worst of them are fundamentalists.  Science doesn't always work for me as literalism because I don't understand physics as mathematics.  So the only way I grasp time & space & speed of light, quantum physics, string theory,  & other bizarre, mind-boggling concepts are through pictures that physicists & math geeks  know are incredibly dumbed-down,  & lead to all sorts of misunderstandings.  Biblical literalism would require me to believe the universe is six to ten-thousand years old, & humans co-existed with dinosaurs.

It's the scientific process we trust, not necessarily the results & conclusions - because they do not stop the process, which continues & is, hopefully, self-correcting.  Biblical literalism requires that facts be forced to fit The Book, & some theories dismissed altogether. But "science" did not exist when The Bible was written, & it's also a poor source of historical fact just by making Israel look more powerful than it was. We say history is written by the winners. The Bible is wonderful because it was written by  the losers, inhabitants of petty kingdoms on a highway between empires. The Bible  as "book" was codified & promoted by winners. & therein lies  the source of much misunderstanding.