Poop Shute

Sh*t Stirring

Apparently I cannot avoid it. Most of my social and religious opinions are very controversial in some circles, so I really shouldn't be surprised. At any rate, I received an email from someone who said the comment system wasn't working. Here is my reply.

I made no such statement that any religious person is an idiot. Upon reading my original post with that in mind, I can see how I might not have been very clear, but I was attempting to talk about myself and my own situation. I imagine that if I myself had been on the streets or on death row or some other such rough position that I might not have ended up at the same conclusions about the world. I was pointing out that I see myself as fortunate to not need religion. Other healthy, educated and intelligent people don't need it either, but they do seem to want it. That want is their right and prerogative. I was not attempting to equate that want with stupidity.

Since sh*t has been stirred, yet again, and the conversation has been opened, I will further address the points you made in your email. You mentioned Einstein, Newton and Kant as examples of intelligent, educated men who believed in god. I will never understand why people continuously refer to Einstein as an example of a man of science who believed in god. That's just like the many people who insist on saying that Hitler was an atheist. Hitler, by the way, was most certainly a christian of some kind. If you're a history buff and you've ever read any of his books or speeches, he refers to god quite often, but I'm getting off topic. We're talking about Einstein here. He most certainly did not believe in any such thing. The following are two direct quotes from his own collected letters:

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

Einstein spoke often about the ethical and cultural value of organized religion to society, but he was not by any stretch a religious man. And as far as Newton and Kant go, they can hardly be counted as antithetical to my remarks, if anything they support my argument. The both of them lived, worked and wrote their opinions in a time when the world still needed stories for humans to explain it. The microscope was a revolutionary new invention. The concept of germs being teeny tiny agents of disease was very new in their day. They were brilliant minds, but they simply did not have all the facts, all the ideas and tested theories that we have today. Go back even further in time and find that Thomas Aquinas was one of the most brilliant minds of the 1200's and also one of history's most prolific writers on the topic of God and especially the devil and demons. That hardly discounts my point. During the lives of all these men human culture had not made the strides towards the real answers I mentioned in my first post. If it were possible to bring Kant and Newton back to life today, I would wager a hefty sum that neither would have stuck to their religious convictions.

And besides that, one of my favorite bits of Kant's philosophy, as I understand it, was as follows:

1 The human mind can only think in terms of cause and effect
2 There are such things that the human mind can never fathom the causes of, like whether the universe always existed or was created by some intelligence, or whether or not such an intelligence even exists
3 If we cannot find the causes then those questions are ultimately unanswerable by the human mind.
4 If the answers to these grand questions are unknowable to the human mind, then those questions are outside the realm of debate, and therefore irrelevent to the grander human conversation.

That may be an over-simplification of what he said on that topic, but it is a fair representation of his meaning.

And though Newton and Kant both clearly believed in a supreme being, they disagreed with many things in the Bible, and the church itself. Scholars today argue still about what exactly Newton believed. He was a complete heretic, going against the church and the bible repeatedly, which would lead me to believe that the more evidence he was provided, the less a man of faith he would have been.