[lit-ideas] Re: Faith

  • From: "Mirembe Nantongo" <nantongo@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 17:13:01 +0100

Believe it or not, my beef is not with faith, but with reason. ("You think 
faith is unreasonable?" I read somewhere recently - "What makes you so sure 
reason is reasonable?").

The big discovery of the seventeenth century, Reason was (and incredibly, 
still is) billed as the Last Best Thing, meant to lead us out of Middle 
Ageian darkness into a state of earthly perfection. More than 400 years 
later, where are we? Out of the Middle Ages and technologically very 
advanced, to be sure, but still in one hell of a muddle. No-one is claiming 
Reason does not have its important applications. But is it the Be-all and 
End-all, the Last Best Thing? Obviously not. Reason is admirably adapted to 
advancing our interests in the field of technology and there it should 
remain. It clearly has little or no relevance to advancing our interests in 
the fields of either human-to-human relations or human-to-cosmos relations. 
And yet there it sits, smugly and uselessly, purporting to govern these 
all -- with the consent of us, the benighted governed, if you please --  
generating nothing but sterile chatter, wars, dead-ends, divorces and Paul 
Stone.


Would someone please invent a new Last Best Thing? It's definitely not 
Reason. Reason is just a fat sacred cow cluttering up the place, the emperor 
with non-existent new clothes, the trap we each of us eagerly set for 
ourselves and each other only to be caught in it ourselves moment after 
moment, day after day, century after century, age after age. 
Heeelllllppppp........

I propose a Lit-Ideas contest: Invent a substitute for Reason. (It can't be 
Faith, obviously, since all that did was dump us in the Middle Ages last 
time around.)

Judges are Marlena Boggs and Phil Enns. First prize is of course a 
list-sponsored dinner with Mike Geary in Memphis.

Best, Mirembe
President, NPRPRITPS
(The Not Particularly Religious Put Reason In Its Place Society)






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