Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

Sadly it is not a live and let live situation, it's much more a live and stomp out the competition situation.

There’s a General Semantics-esque fallacy floating about in this and other recent posts, I think.

We can easily point to large, load, scary groups of people, such as fundamentalist Christians bent on banning books and birth control and Sharia Islam extremists bent on banning female literacy, and say “this is how religious people act”. In doing so, we ignore the existence of many strong proponents of science who self-identify as religious.

Even an atheist such as myself can accept reasoned arguments and evidence that mental health can be enhanced by a well-managed degree of self-delusion, be it secular (such as the unspoken belief that one is actually the prettiest/smartest/bravest/bad-assedest etc. person who has ever lived), or religious (such as the belief that one will awaken after death to find oneself in heaven). Many people appear to harbor such beliefs, and even proclaim them via organized religion, but have no difficult separating them from objective and scientific reason. The idea that people who believe in anything irrational are incapable of being rational in any subject is, I think, an example of a result of a kind of wrong, black-or-white reasoning similar to that behind the idea that people who don’t accept religious dogma are incapable of moral thought or action, or that people in formal disciplines such as math are incapable of emotionally-motivated decisions. The idea that human beings are complicated, contradictory being capable of having incompatible beliefs while still functioning well in any discipline is described eloquently, I think, in writing by Stephen Jay Gould’s about what he calls “nonoverlapping magisteria”.

Unfortunately, the impulse to promote ones beliefs by compelling others to share them seems a robust trait of human behavior. As with, as best I can tell, all drives to compel others, this one seems to me to be very damaging, whether practices by religionists or non-religionists, and in fundamental conflict with the good and important social concept of liberty. Acceptance of the rightness and necessity of liberty requires, without any exception I can see, adoption of a live-and-let-live attitude toward others.