[lit-ideas] Re: Topography of faith
- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2012 04:41:39 -0400
>> the backwards states of american minds is supernatural
The USA has, by far, most of the great universities and medical centers.
We went to the moon and back. Since 1950, Americans have won about half
of the Nobel Prizes awarded in the sciences. Self-criticism is a
national pastime, sometimes even applied to the silly game of baseball.
National comparisons aside, the notion that anyone who notices the
mystery of existence is "backward," is essentially a nonscientific
attitude.
This review of _On the Origin of Everything: A Universe from Nothing_ by
Lawrence M. Krauss, takes a lot of the
monistic-physicalist-atheists-are-the -only-smart-people dogma to task:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/a-universe-from-nothing-b
y-lawrence-m-krauss.html?_r=1&ref=bookreviews
[Extract of concluding paragraph]
" the whole business of approaching the struggle with religion as if it
were a card game, or a horse race, or some kind of battle of wits, just
feels all wrong - or it does, at any rate, to me. When I was growing up,
where I was growing up, there was a critique of religion according to
which religion was cruel, and a lie, and a mechanism of enslavement, and
something full of loathing and contempt for everything essentially
human. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn't, but it had to do with
important things - it had to do, that is, with history, and with
suffering, and with the hope of a better world - and it seems like a
pity, and more than a pity, and worse than a pity, with all that in the
back of one's head, to think that all that gets offered to us now, by
guys like these, in books like this, is the pale, small, silly, nerdy
accusation that religion is, I don't know, dumb."
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