Brutally Honest Rant - 07/26/06

Brutally Honest Audio Rant: Faith Versus Reason
Audio Transcripts
07/26/06

[Start Program]

(Computer – Introduction)
(Music intro – "American Idiot Remix" – by Green Day and David Matthews 2)

Good evening, and welcome to this week’s Brutally Honest Rant. I’m David Matthews 2, writer of the weekly online column Brutally Honest.

Suppose I were to tell you that I know THE ANSWER to all of the questions you may have about life, the universe, and everything! You don’t have to wonder anymore about the mysteries of life, because I HAVE THE ANSWER!

And the answer is… FORTY-TWO!

Now if you’ve read some of the best-selling books by Douglas Adams then you’d know how I came up with that number. But that provides another challenge… if the ultimate answer to the mysteries of life is forty-two, then what is the ultimate question?

Well let’s suppose that I were to tell you that you could ONLY ask me a question where the answer is 42. No matter what it is, not matter what you really want to know, you can ONLY ask me a question in such a way that it would match with my answer of 42. You’d think I was insane, wouldn’t you? You’d think I was a pompous, arrogant jerk making that kind of unrealistic demand on the world. HOW DARE I DEMAND that the world only ask a question in a way so it would conform to MY answer!

Well let’s go ahead and add some heat to this issue. Let’s suppose I were to have some very influential friends who agree with me and also agree in my ultimate answer. They LOVE having the idea of things being nice and neat and simple like that! No muss, no fuss… we know what the answer is, now you just have to come up with the question to match it. So my influential friends use their power to put pressure on YOU to ask the question "correctly". They hype it up in the public. They support my books and the talk show appearances to hype up the ultimate answer. They’ll publicly question and challenge your patriotism, your faith, your belief system, your morals, and even your sanity. They use the government to deprive you of funding if you don’t ask that question "correctly". Hell, they may even have you thrown in PRISON if you don’t ask the question "correctly". And if by some miracle my ultimate answer doesn’t get the recognition it deserves, then my influential friends will do everything possible to make sure it is still on everyone’s minds. They’ll push for people to "discuss the controversy"… which of course would be completely fabricated, but it would still allow for my ultimate answer to be discussed.

Doesn’t seem right, does it?

Well THAT, my friends, is at the heart of the ongoing and endless pissing contest between faith and reason.

Once upon a time, religious leaders had ALL of the answers to life’s little questions. They supposedly KNEW how we all got here, why we’re here, and what happens when we’re not here. They codified it, they wrote it up in books and scrolls and tomes and then let the system canonize it. And they didn’t have to prove a damn thing either! They just let circumstances happen as they may and then say it was all part of some divine plan.

And then people started to figure out that those answers weren’t quite right. This little thing called SCIENCE started to question those so-called "absolute answers". Maybe the whole universe WASN’T created in six human-defined days. Maybe there were creatures that existed BEFORE humans. Maybe civilization didn’t get started EXACTLY like we were told it did. All of those hard questions, and they didn’t fit the pre-determined answer of the religious leaders.

And rather than make some MODEST tweaks to the dogma to adapt to these new discoveries, religious leaders declared their answers to be the ONLY ones, they accused anyone who questioned those answers to be heretics, and they used their influential friends in positions of power to persecute, prosecute, and even EXECUTE anyone who DARED speak out in support of these new discoveries.

THIS is our history, people! And scientists like Galileo and Copernicus WERE persecuted for DARING to use SCIENCE to come up with answers that conflicted with the ESTABLISHED answers provided by the religious leaders. This is FACT!

And we’re not even talking about speculative theory here. Copernicus and Galileo and others like them were persecuted and prosecuted for looking into a telescope and realizing that the Earth wasn’t the center of the solar system! Their eyes saw what the closed minds refused to acknowledge. And unfortunately for people like Galileo, the side with the closed minds are usually also the ones with the thugs with the weapons and the self-righteous justification to KILL anything they find offensive.

But then again, that’s the basic problem between faith and reason. Simply put, they don’t play well together. They never have; and, by their very natures, they probably never will.

REASON implies a logical course of action. There’s a THOUGHT process involved with reason. You actually have to fire up some brain cells. You need to explain your course of action. You need to justify your course of action. Why is something the way that it is? How does it work? Why doesn’t it work some other way? CAN it work some other way?

FAITH, on the other hand, doesn’t require any kind of thought process at all! It’s simply a matter of obedience. You don’t have to justify anything! You don’t have to explain a single thing when it comes to your beliefs. The old redneck saying of "The Bible says it, I believe it, CASE CLOSED" is the perfect example of this. It’s basically your mom or your dad telling you in that deep booming voice that scar children for life "BECAUSE *I* SAID SO!"

And therein lies the real gulf between FAITH and REASON. REASON is flexible. It is subject to reexamination and correction if new information comes in. There is room to be wrong when it comes to a rational thought process. If A plus B does not equal C, then you find out what it DOES equal to and THAT becomes the new answer.

But you can’t do that with FAITH! FAITH is rigid and absolute. You’re not supposed to challenge it. You’re not supposed to question it. You’re not supposed to do ANYTHING to cause doubt. It cannot afford to be wrong even by the smallest amount! It’s zero-sum. You’re either all-in or you’re all-out… with us or against us. It doesn’t matter what A plus B equals, the answer will ALWAYS be forty-two and we will FORCE A and B to change UNTIL it equals forty-two!

Of course this explains why some of the world’s most notorious tyrants in human history use religion to advance their cause.

Now some folks have TRIED to bridge the gap between faith and reason, but all too often they fail. Blaise Pascal quickly comes to mind. He tried to offer what he called a "wager" to rationally justify religious beliefs, but he realized that he couldn’t really do it. He fudged the conclusion and said that it was a "sure bet" to believe.

The fault, my friends, is that those who put their stock in pure faith market it as THE end-all-be-all in the universe! You don’t need anything else. You don’t need food or water or shelter or sex or money or friendship or anything else in this world… that you just need to BELIEVE and you’ll be fine! They have no problem with reason as long as reason only serves to support their beliefs.

And those who advocate nothing but reason aren’t helping matters either. The most polite cop-out that I ever heard came from a TV miniseries about the end of the world, where a wheelchair-bound astronomer was teaching a college class about the nature of the universe, and some student asked "but where is God in all of this discussion" in that condescending tone that you normally see on religious channels. The professor gives a haughty spiel about "oh, if only he were to make himself known" instead of giving the correct answer to that kind of question. (And by the way, I’ll give you the correct answer to that kind of question later.)

That kind of exchange pretty much reflects the conflict between faith and reason. Those who believe demand complete complicity, and those who use reason simply brush even the moderates off with an equal amount of arrogance.

Now you’re probably wondering why the hell I’m even discussing this, right? I mean, we have some SERIOUS issues to deal with, and here I am waxing philosophy and theology!

Well let’s get brutally honest here… this conflict between faith and reason is evident in just about every conflict, both violent and non-violent, in the world today!

You’ve got the obvious ones: the current military combat going on between Israel and Lebanon. The acts of international terrorism being committed by Islamic extremists. The quest of countries like Iran to get nuclear weapons.

Then we’ve got the subtle ones… like the ongoing and endless power-grab that is the Bush Imperium. Whether it is the PATRIOT Act, spying on Americans, the continued call for CENSORSHIP of broadcast media, the egregious abuse of presidential signing statements, or the recent veto of embryonic stem cell research, the White House under George W. Bush has gone out of its way to cater to religious forces in this country. They have taken the inflexible and dictatorial tone with the rest of the world and have demanded that everyone OBEY their will, without question and without challenge. And then we have the ongoing crusade by conservatives and neo-conservatives and theo-conservatives on a LOCAL level to subvert church-state separations and incorporate religious beliefs and religious symbols into society through laws and forced displays.

All of these things are a reflection of the ongoing conflict between FAITH and REASON, with those on the side of FAITH waging an endless war to SUBVERT all intellectual processes for their own purposes.

And yet… it doesn’t really have to be this way!

Listen, folks, we are in SORRY need of a new human renaissance movement. A reformation of both man and society the likes of which would make the Protestant Reformation of the 16^th century pale in comparison! And we need this to happen SOON, because right now we’re spiraling towards self-imposed extinction if we don’t get our act together!

Now I happen to believe that both faith and reason have their places in life, and that neither should EVER be allowed to subvert or to usurp the other. They are both important in their own unique ways. Faith, no matter WHAT specifically you believe in, is what keeps us going. Reason is what justifies and explains our actions. You keep those two things in their proper place and in the proper balance and guess what? No hassles! No drama! No extremism! And certainly no excuses for dictatorial power-grabs, either subtly or blatantly.

I think that last benefit, in and of itself, would be worth the hassle of bringing this renaissance about.

(Computer – some timely clips)
(Fade Music In – "Mythodea" by Vangelis)

Okay, and now to wrap up this week’s rant, I want to give you the correct answer to that fictional astronomer’s question. This was when the TV show professor was giving his lecture about the nature of the universe and how our sun would eventually burn itself out and destroy the world with it, and then a cocky student asked where God’s place was in this study of stars and the cosmos.

So here’s my answer: If you happen to believe in God, then you’ll never find him or her in even the most powerful of telescopes. If you truly believe that there is an all-powerful being that created all that you can see and hear and taste and touch, then asking for God’s place and God’s position in that creation is like an amoebae asking about the existence of a blue whale while sitting in its belly. Studying the stars neither confirms nor denies the existence of God. All it really does is to enlighten the inquisitive mind and to make the ignorant mind feel that much more insignificant in comparison.

(Pause)

Brutally Honest is a Get Brutal production, all opinions expressed are those of the commentator, and may or may not be shared by the online provider. This is David Matthews 2 saying good night, and I’ll speak with you soon!

(Fade out)
(Computer – Ending/"End of Recording")

[End of program]
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