Any one who really thinks he/she is a rational being should take a harder look in the mirror. If human nature were fully rational the world would be a very different place and those who describe themselves as ' free thinkers' are only free to deceive themselves. Why, all other concerns aside, because as a humanity, we remain somewhere on the learning curve of knowledge, both of ourselves and our natural world. All human perception exists within this incomplete paradigm of understanding. And however it may appear, at any period of time, from within any cultural construct, our 'cutting edge' is pretty dull and only an unknown portion of a greater and as yet undiscovered whole. Of course what is rational is the aspiration to advance towards that whole, sometimes called progress, unfortunately without a very clear road map?
Whatever this self selected group of free thinkers wish to believe, their rationality simply isn't all it's cracked up to be. One of their common attributes is an almost fetishistic belief in science and technology. In the pursuit of new insight, this may appear be the only serious game in town, but there is hardly a discovery or technology one can name, that hasn't over time exposed its limitations, as an often dangerous, unexpected downside or side effect, reflecting the partial nature of understanding. Who for example would have suggested, just into the twentieth century when Henry Ford rolled his first car off the assembly line, that he was opening the flood gates to a technology so damaging to the environment, a mere hundred years later, it would be seen as a primary contributor and threat to the sustainability of our species. Or think asbestos, thalidomide or DDT. Nuclear waste will be around to damage or haunt generations to come. Or consider microelectronics. The computer I'm typing on is just the latest of several I've owned, but the obsolesence of so much redundant technology creates massive environmental problems all is own.The downside list goes is a very long and costly one.
The search for new practical understanding is a hard taskmaster requiring both imagination and great discipline. One reason science is held in such high cultural esteem. But even scientific method doesn't guarantee results. There is no predefined rational path of 'pure reason' leading to discovery or understanding. If that were so, humanity would hold the key to all understanding but self evidently does not. Consider the search for an AIDs vaccine. Twenty years on and billions of dollars spent, a recent report underlines the problem; that those involved in this research are no closer to a working vaccine today then when they started. Such limitations means that millions of individuals must continue to shoulder the burden of fear. The war against cancer that started with a grandiose speech by a then president Nixon has hardly been won. Current controversy over 'assisted suicide' while appearing to be a moral/religious question, wouldn't even exist except for the limitations of medical knowledge.
And this brings us to the most contentious element of rationality. To be truly rational must also mean being truly moral. Lets start with a definition. 'To both know what's right and have the will to do what's right for its own sake. Sounds simple enough. Yet the difficulty of finding moral consensus, consider abortion for example, makes this impossible as our understanding of ourselves is as limited as that outside ourselves. To believe our species is moral by nature would be a grave error of presumption. That is not to deny moral progress, but whatever this potential, is surely not enough. What other species destroys it own environment and so many other species on the alter of a gross consumer materialism? What ever technological achievement nuclear power may be, the bomb came first. One doesn't need a degree in history to see how war and weapons development have driven the changing political fortunes of nation states, not unlike the effect porn has had on web development. That war and rape are longtime bedfellows is unquestionable.
What better contemporary example of a cultural collapse in ethics then the implosion of the financial system for which so many are now paying dearly. But are we not all culpable, having bought into a corporate conception of free market spin which moves entire industries and their jobs to third world locations where labour is cheapest and a system of credit, interest rates and dividends, that allows banks to throw families from their homes and close viable businesses and factories. The massive greed at the top, both individual and institutional is just a reflection of all those little greeds at the bottom that come from just opening a bank account, believing we'll get something for 'free'. I once heard banking described as a 'license to steal', yet all turn a blind eye so long as they get their share of the booty.
Whatever we may like to think about ourselves, however 'respectable' one may be, we may abhor war and injustice, but just by being part of a nation state, we are collaborating and subsidizing all those destructive forces, the side-effects of the system. And democracy can't even pretend to an alternative. The very divisions among ourselves, our country and the world only reflect our inability to know, discover or agree what morality is and where it begins. Like a ship lost at sea in a storm, we are perpetually tossed about an ocean of subjective value judgement and rationalization, reflecting the moral maze of existence. Peace is the port we never truly arrive at.
Two volumes of interest, while offering little in the way of solutions, at least attempts to confront the darker and more difficult elements of human nature most 'freethinkers' would prefer to avoid. The first is titled The Lucifer Effect , Understanding how good people turn evil by Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment notoriety. Although nothing intentionally to do with religion, it examines the fragility of the ethical and moral construct in which we inhabit, considers 'conscience' that all to easily and selectively turns itself on and off according to its own self interest and prejudices; and easily demonstrates that a potential for evil is part and parcel of the human condition. If there was ever a 'Fall from grace' we're undoubtably still down with no obvious way up?
The other book is by Cordelia Fine: A mind of it's own, how your brain distorts and deceives. This volume attempts to illustrate with examples how our very thought processes rarely provide us with a true view of reality, either of ourselves or the world around us. Considering all the other things hard wired into our nature, that we have no single conception of truth within our consciousness, to guide a 'rational' intellectual process suggests an incomplete nature. Or how can one even presume to be fully sovereign over our own being when there remain forces of emotion and passion outside our control and will? It's no wonder one can feel on the 'edge of chaos'? While many, especially the religious wish to describe themselves as 'spiritual', the growing environmental crisis created by a predominant materialism founded within human nature is slowly putting paid to that idea. Or on the secular side, consider those environmentalists who continue to think humanity is capable of turning around in a few short years, a imminent crisis which required an entire industrial history to arrive at!
However inexplicable, many 'rational' people will prefer holding tight to their ideas in the face of growing, even overwhelming evidence to the contrary; probably because it includes, in part, a more attractive but distorted view of ourselves we want to believe. This attempt to avoid confronting the lesser reality and let go, defies the very human need for a secure indentity. The holding power of any entrenched prejudice or ideology, founded in ignorance with cultural roots, often supported by institution is an all too potent force and continually thwarts real progressive change.
Watching the slanging match between a currently fashionable atheism and religion provides excellent sport, if not the very best arena to observe 'distortion and deception'. Not even out of the starting blocks on the learning curve is the God question, for the simple reason that tradition has not provided any knowledge of that reality upon which to draw conclusions. Contrary to the Christian/Judeo scriptural record and the very purpose of the incarnation, existing tradition has never provided the means to confirm that such a God reality even exists. Yet within this 'paradigm of ignorance', they have no difficulty claiming to speak with authority and proclaiming 'truths'. While many of these claims originated in pre-medieval minds and times and can be heavily discounted anyway, others continue to retail similar ideas on the basis of expert 'theological study'. And this exposes an irrational, and probably universal characteristic of the human condition: The self deception of intellectual vanity. Believing we know when we don't.
So one could ask and I will, if such a reality called God can be understood by natural reason, as theology supposes for itself, what need is there for religion, as we should all be able to discern and agree God's will for ourselves? That tradition has for thousands of years continued in dispute with itself should give one pause. The fact that large global institutions have grown on such an unrealized and thus wasted hope only obscures what may very well represent the greatest tragedy of our species. I have no wish here to deny the potential for such a possibility as God, but have no reservations stating, that existing institutional religion, has played the world for an all too willing fool. Traditional religious ideas cannot and never will demonstrate God as their source. Whatever faith an individual may attach to his/her religious convictions are certainly not in God but in the intellectual pretensions and fallibility of theology.
Religion cannot prove God because it has nothing to do with God! Religious dogma and doctrine are in essence no more than a collection of formalized, intellectualized prejudices, deceptively disguised in the elaborate trappings of ceremony. Nothing but opinion pretending to be fact, simple paganism veiled in a scriptural spin.
The other side of this tangled knot are the views of the secular scientific and/or atheist community having its moment for many good reasons. Nothing expresses the Lucifer Effect better than the gory side of religious history, both ancient and contemporary; what a gift to atheist adversaries of religion than a history with so much spilling of blood in the name of 'love' or 'righteousness'. Yet a parasite of religion, with no intellectual root of its own, the disingenuous side of this coin is using religions own presumptions, to attack not only religion, but to declare there is no God. They have a point. If existing tradition is the best God can offer humanity, then the very idea lacks any true purpose and is undeserving of ones confidence or support.
At the same time, because atheists cannot prove a negative and disprove God, they have no constructive input on the question, and it remains unresolved. Sadly, not content with their valid critique of religious practice and history, they begin, like religion, to generate their own growing dogma of counter prejudices, every bit as doctrinaire and intolerant as any religious fundamentalist. What I find personally disappointing is that so many normally intelligent people jump on this band wagon. If this 'fashion' is remembered for anything, it will probably be for reminding us all of the failure of traditional religious ideas.
As a humanity, we aspire to many things, rationality among them. But like morality or spiritually, we can't even agree how to accomplish such ends. A sure sign of our confusion over such matters. As one of the many paradoxes of our human condition, we are all too easily prepared to hold to what is irrational, unethical, and even immoral, while believing with conviction we are rational, ethical and moral?
So the crux of the matter is this. Our rationality is bound up to our limitations. By nature we're all a bit crazy, not quite the full shilling, It's just the some are better than others at recognizing and challenging those contradictions, thanks in part to educational systems attempting to discipline a chaotic mind. Yet all too often we dishonestly default to the illusion rather than a less palatable reality, especially about ourselves. And that's what makes us such a dangerous and destructive species.
So while we're waiting for either evolution or God to finish off project 'us', I can only wonder which might get the job done more quickly. I'm not sure we have time to wait for evolution to do its work, even if it could, as it's beginning to appear that Gaia may be planning an 'extinction-is-us' event. But however 'religion' has failed and discredited the very idea of God among thinking individuals, it may be time to separate the two, as Lenny Bruce once said, "I think it's about time we gave up religion and got back to God', This possibility, a prisoner of the intellectual and spiritual vanity called tradition, may yet hold new potential to explore if anyone was bothering to look? Where one chooses to invest hopes and aspirations remains a most personal matter. Getting it right is all that counts.
In the meantime, for those enjoined in the struggle to 'see' clearly, considering the darker spiritual and intellectual forces at work, any truly free thinker is one who strives to be free from illusion but never from the truth, founded not in language but in experience; is not blown with the winds of intellectual fashion or prejudice; has an enlightened humility and holds with integrity to a single conception of knowledge and what is true, one proven in the crucible of scrutiny that can demonstrate its own efficacy with direct supporting evidences, and is prepared to apply these principles to all things visible and 'invisible'. And when any new claim of insight becomes known, with the opportunity to test it for ones self, always go for the evidence, especially when it challenges the past and makes previous, long held theory or even cherished beliefs redundant, for that's the price to pay for progress, another step up the learning curve and into the future. Be prepared to accept ones own limitations and change. The man who cannot change loves himself more than the truth. Remember "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take"...........!
