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God is the name we give great things
May. 26th, 2012 12:11 amIn first edition Mage (the world of darkness RPG), the opposition group was called The Technocracy. As described to me by my best friend in my freshman year of college, their goal was to wipe out belief in magic, originally for benevolent reasons like "penicillin works better with fewer chances of turning you into a chicken" but eventually because they just hated magic. Unknown to them, succeeding would cause an end to all scientific progress as well, because they would have killed humanity's ability to imagine and accept something better than what already existed.
Reading God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, I feel like a mage reading a book by a Technocracy operative. He points to all the terrible things people have done in the name of religion, and sees a reason to banish belief in deities. But that doesn't gel for me: there's no reason holding different stories about why the sun rises in the east should cause people to kill one another. Hitchens would argue that it's because the stories come with instructions to do so, but he also spends a lot of time proving that those stories are human creations*. It seems to me like religion is simply the name we give to the category of things that make people that stupid.** Or, I suspect, to one of the effects of a deeper Thing, the destruction of which would have larger consequences than Hitchens imagines or has even bothered to look for.
It seems like Hitchens believes that if he could just prove to people that their origin stories (and by extension their deities) were obvious falsehoods, they would stop killing their neighbors in the name Huitzilopochtli and everything would be fine. My belief is that, as long as there are resources to compete over, people will form in groups and out groups to help marshall those resources for themselves. Put another way: Christianity was used by priests in medieval Europe to move resources from non-priests to priests. But belief in God and Heaven and Hell, was the tool, not the reason, for that theft. You might as well ban electricity because it was used to execute people.
*I'm a bit annoyed at how long he's spent proving that the Talmud, New Testament, and Koran were assembled by human beings from a tangle of conflicting accounts, decades or centuries after the events in question, and in many cases can be definitively disproven with historical data. I would have spotted him this without argument, both because it's obviously true and because the point isn't interesting to me. It's possible I'm simply annoyed at him for not writing on the topic I wanted to read, but it's also possible I recognize a grad student padding out the strongest section of his thesis to disguise the fact that the rest of it is so thin.
**I'm using stupid in a less pejorative than usual sense. Being too stupid to know something can't be done is how we do new things.
Reading God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, I feel like a mage reading a book by a Technocracy operative. He points to all the terrible things people have done in the name of religion, and sees a reason to banish belief in deities. But that doesn't gel for me: there's no reason holding different stories about why the sun rises in the east should cause people to kill one another. Hitchens would argue that it's because the stories come with instructions to do so, but he also spends a lot of time proving that those stories are human creations*. It seems to me like religion is simply the name we give to the category of things that make people that stupid.** Or, I suspect, to one of the effects of a deeper Thing, the destruction of which would have larger consequences than Hitchens imagines or has even bothered to look for.
It seems like Hitchens believes that if he could just prove to people that their origin stories (and by extension their deities) were obvious falsehoods, they would stop killing their neighbors in the name Huitzilopochtli and everything would be fine. My belief is that, as long as there are resources to compete over, people will form in groups and out groups to help marshall those resources for themselves. Put another way: Christianity was used by priests in medieval Europe to move resources from non-priests to priests. But belief in God and Heaven and Hell, was the tool, not the reason, for that theft. You might as well ban electricity because it was used to execute people.
*I'm a bit annoyed at how long he's spent proving that the Talmud, New Testament, and Koran were assembled by human beings from a tangle of conflicting accounts, decades or centuries after the events in question, and in many cases can be definitively disproven with historical data. I would have spotted him this without argument, both because it's obviously true and because the point isn't interesting to me. It's possible I'm simply annoyed at him for not writing on the topic I wanted to read, but it's also possible I recognize a grad student padding out the strongest section of his thesis to disguise the fact that the rest of it is so thin.
**I'm using stupid in a less pejorative than usual sense. Being too stupid to know something can't be done is how we do new things.
