A small minority of religious people are aggressively so (although, seeing
as how many votes Buchanan attracted, I may have to moderate that...).
Almost all of the Christians I know do not practice "go forth and preach";
they realise that such behavior is antisocial and closed-minded. People can
be antisocial and closed-minded without religion; if a Christian were
closed-minded to begin with, religion would give a vent for this. If, on
the other hand, a Christian were more inclined to be clear-thinking and
polite, he or she would probably tend toward "Judge Not...". I once asked
one of my Christian friends why he never encouraged me to convert; he said
that he was too overwhelmed with the responsibility of his own soul to worry
about mine... (Sliver and Plank parable? perhaps...)
Anyway, my point of all this is not to deny the existence of
closed-minded religious people, but it seems that saying that all religious
people are closed-minded is a stereotype. Even if it is true in many cases,
that does not prove that ignorance is a sine qua non of faith. We all
choose ancient rituals- they have their purposes, and they are not always
practical. As the weather here in Indiana moves from pleasantly warm to
unreasonably hot, I am wondering why I shouldn't go to class in my speedos,
or in nothing at all. Darn those ancient rituals... Most of us avoid
science, as well- it's not that science is dangerous anymore, but it's hard
and we don't want to look ingnorant... In my work in economic history, when
I try to explain a shift in an infrastructure to my intellectual-history
friends, there's something that's turning them off to this science, and it's
not religion... You could probably argue that proportionally, more atheists
are scientists, but there were many scientists who were not. Did they
overcome their religious prohibitions on science in order to become
scientists? To me it seems just as likely that atheists feel more of a
compulsion to be scientists, because their lack of religious foundation
leaves more to be explained.
Anyway, to wrap things up, I think there's a logical process that somehow
says that if A(1)=B, A(2)=B, and A(3)=B, then it doesn not necessarily
follow that A(n)=B...
Patrick D. Bunt
pbunt@indiana.edu, patrickb@io.com
812-857-7149
http://copper.ucs.indiana.edu/~pbunt/index.html
"Most people who criticize Karl Marx have not read his works. Of course,
most people who support him have not read his works either. This guy writes
a nine hundred page treatise on economic theory and calls it Volume One,
it's a wonder anybody has read his works."