People who have actually read some of my work may find me repeating myself on certain topics, but that’s only because I can’t remember where I put every little concept.
So here’s some crap that may or may not be new.
Basically my point here is that while religion discovered early the power of hiding facts, science kind of stepped over it in smug oblivity. – And yes, I’m aware that’s ‘not a word’, yet. Don’t complain, you’re lucky I even attempt to use your spelling. Actually come to think of it, I don’t, I use AHK to translate my spelling into your arbitrary madness.
Like most of the horrors of religion, I don’t think it’s so much a willful thing as tradition and stagnation of psychological inertia. But the end result is the same, the modern scientific community has way too much in common with the early church.
Here’s what I had to say in my old essay “The Lab Coat Effect”
It’s a startling fact that science today has many similarities with the early church. Allow me to elaborate. Let’s compare a modern day orthodox scientist and a priest of the early church.
They both…
have a body of text that is incomprehensible to the layman.
have texts that are unreadable without special linguistic training.
profess to understand what’s in that body of text better than the layman could.
profess that the text is extremely important and reveals the nature of reality to one degree or another.
throw up barriers to the acquisition or translation of the text for lay examination.
are caustic of any work not approved by their orthodox ruling bodies and councils.
…and perhaps most importantly people take their word on things because of title without having to see evidence. Seeing a pattern here?
Using Latin and lingo in an era of instant translation is simply to keep the layman out more than anything.
One reason for this similarity is deceptively simple. Science is beginning to try and answer religion’s question, and vice versa.
Science answers how, and religion answers why. They are different question, and to use them interchangeably is corrosive to understanding. Some dismiss this as merely “semantic” as if the meaning of words is inconsequential. I find this laughable in the extreme.
How and why, religion and science, emotion and reason, are both fundamentally important. The problem is execution. They recognize each others power and are baffled by each other, and thus they fear each other and if there is anything we primates know about it’s over reacting to fear.
The only time they fight is when they act on that insecurity and invade each others turf thinking they’ll get an advantage, this is pretty well the main source of war. Religion should not try to answer how creation happened, because then you get absurdities like humans riding dinosaurs and a time traveling Satan. Nor should science try to tell you why you are here, you get nonsensical answers like “because e=mc^2.”
If they could just grasp that How and Why are both necessary, and stick to each side there would be no need to fight. And in fact maybe they could help each other.
