Right, let’s take a controversial topic today. Religion. The world’s great spiritual traditions. And militant atheism.
The pope is in Turkey today, as a head of state, as a source of encouragement for the country’s beleaguered Catholic population and most importantly, it would seem, as an agent of dialogue between religions- in this case, the Greek Orthodox Church and the colossus that is Islam.
I am myself a severely lapsed Catholic. I went cold turkey several years ago, when I first heard Jeffrey Lewis sing:

“God is just a story someone made up long ago
Before they had books and t.v. shows
I don’t believe in him and I ain’t afraid to say so…”

I’m currently chugging along on rationality and some vaguely utopian ideals, but again as the great songwriter said “It’s hard not to be superstitious, despite all you know.” That pretty much sums up my position. Sometimes I get so thankful, and sometimes I get so scared and other times so concerned, that I positively need to unload my hopes and fears and joy into something inconceivably bigger than myself. And I need to believe he’s listening.

There’s also the question of rationality, which in itself has no rational basis(at least I think that was the gist of Bertrand Russell’s writing-there were large tracts of his books I didn’t understand.) There is always the possibility that God really is just messing with our heads, or in the Buddhist tradition, we are messing with our heads. There are monotheists in all faiths who believe everything just occurs through the will of God, and at a certain fundamental point, this is as rational a position as holding that the universe runs according to certain immutable laws that can be determined through reason and observation.

The problem is that we’re all starting from different points of view. Two people who look at a wafer of bread in the hand of a priest will see very different things depending on whether they believe at the most fundamental level in pure reason, in God’s message as communicated by his incarnate son, or in God’s message as communicated in our heart of hearts, but only when we stand on our heads in genuine faith and squawk like a chicken. There is no real objective way to decide which of these beliefs is the truest. At a certain point, everything is faith.

This is why, when on my frequent and aimless trawls through cyberspace, I find some asinine group with a name like The Rationale Police or The Society for the Prevention of Intelligently-Designed Anti-Theism, I get all annoyed and write vaguely offensive gobbledegook like this sentence. It is utterly, utterly pointless and stupid to go about trying to destroy religion, or even convince others of its untruth. I have no problem with people ridiculing intelligent design or being generally insulting when religious groups try to go toe-to-toe with scientists on their own turf, but when you try to dispute their beliefs from first principles, you’re guilty of the same mistake.

The worst thing about this whole ‘science v religion’ debate/fiasco, is that really most of the people are on the same damn side. There are no substantive ideological differences between any middle-class western people. None. Do you think that people that support abortion believe that aborting a fetus is the same as killing a child? Or that those against it think they aren’t acting in the woman’s best interests? Each side believes they’re acting in the best interests of the child, the mother and society. Yet with these acres of common ground, there is no dialogue between the two sides. So we bicker over our petty differences while crime spirals out of control, adolescents kill themselves and the world begins to broil…

Frankly, I admire all the religious men in the world who have peace as their aim, whether they are protestant ministers, Roman Catholic priests or Muslim Imams(I hope thats the right word, I really am not au fait enough with the Muslim religion.) I particularly admire the pope when he calls for tolerance and dialogue between religion(it’s a little known fact that this was the subject of the speech he with that medieval quotation in it, the one that sparked those riots all over the middle east.) This tolerance and dialogue must extend further however, to encompass all ideas and philosophies. The only means through which the human race will have a future is if the battle of ideals is moved to a plane where everyone will suspend their preconceptions and actually figure out where the hell the ship is going.

And that means scientists too.

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