A Vestigial Mote
Well-Known Member
Wasn't even talking about claims made. Wasn't. If you're talking about the idea I posed that religious people think they "know" certain things are true or correct without having done any reality-based investigation to correlate their beliefs to said reality... a great many of them do think this. They do think they know. I am not sure how there is any denying this. I have never met a single religious person who didn't believe that they knew something special about some aspect of the universe that simply IS NOT apparent nor correlated with reality. Whether that's simply that God exists, or that given enough time, concentration and "enlightenment" a person can levitate, or that there is some "spiritual dimension" that can be accessed via prayer or whispers in the dark, or that there are spirits that dwell and move among us here on Earth, etc. Never met a single one who didn't hold to some idea like this and would swear it was true. Not one.Come off it! Most religion makes no such claims, nor does it impede knowledge-seeking activities of humanity. It's true that fundies may try, from time to time, but most religion is not fundie.
And you're absolutely correct (thank the gods!), the efforts of the religious to cast aside all knowledge that didn't jive with their beliefs have been mostly put down or ignored, and they can't infiltrate everyone's lives to make sure they aren't investigating things that will turn their beliefs on their heads. But seriously - there are so many examples, even contemporarily, of people trying to thwart the progression of human knowledge. Just look at what happened to the Middle East when Islam took greater hold - used to be a great bastion of knowledge and learning - and then the leaders of the Islamic traditions waged war on that. Consider all the hubbub surrounding evolution being taught in schools - a battle still being waged today. I've heard enough first-hand accounts, testimonies and anecdotal evidence to believe that some Jehovah's Witnesses actively discourage their kids from attending institutes of higher learning. The Catholic church has many multiple times decided it was against particular avenues of thought or teaching methods (see sex ed. and contraceptives, or HIV in Africa and their "advice" on contraceptives) and made wide-sweeping decrees about what everyone in their "flock" should be doing. I've even heard that the number of people who believe in a flat Earth is ON THE RISE. Don't tell me that it just "can't happen" that religion gets it's hooks into the teaching and learning of a populace... because it has happened. And as far as I have seen there will continue to be people who will try and make it happen.
So no thanks. I won't "come off it."
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