But science is a humane undertaking. It is religion that is responsible for immense human suffering.
You’ve got to allow that we’ve made some progress. It’s not like we do that anymore.
Two more words: human testing.
Huh?
The Department of Energy’s radiation experiments. MKULTRA. Eugenics. Tests on POW’s.
OK. But those are isolated events.
Really? How many isolated events does it take to make a pattern?
OK. But they’re the result of a few quacks here and there throughout history…
Modern history.
Yes, modern history, and quacks who had access to power and misused it. But that doesn’t represent the ideals of science.
But you don’t grant this same reprieve to religion.
Oh, all right. Touche.
But the similarity stops there. You haven’t accounted for the unique guilt of science in that it has placed itself above human life while claiming to serve human life. It is doctrinaire science as a law unto itself – every bit the modern surrogate for religion – that has more or less consistently argued in favor of man’s destruction by degrees, and the horrible irony is that it does this presumably as a means to serve man. There is an underlying premise at work there, and that is why it pops up rather consistently, and the quacks are consistently taken seriously by presumably the best minds in the so-called scientific community. Read the AMA journal for a taste of the latest – fetal harvesting and so on.
Granted, but I wouldn’t say man’s destruction is at stake. Perhaps that of a few men.
The Manhattan Project.
Well, I see your point.
Abortion on demand.
True.
Operation Paperclip.
Perhaps.
And how many men is “a few men”? How many can sanely be sacrificed for the good of how many others? Isn’t science’s arrogance far in excess of religion’s worst nightmare in that science, far from repudiating God, has replaced God with a priesthood of specialists.
I could say that the scientific crimes you mentioned were not serving science but proceeded only in the name of science. I would hardly call them a priesthood.
Yet they proceeded under the direction of the foremost scientific minds, with the support of the journals, the academies, and the blind faith of their cultural parishioners, caught up as they were in the ecstatic faith of progress, babbling like witchdoctors about how we should bring back the throwing of virgins into volcanoes to save the village or, if you prefer, how we should sacrifice this or that group of people presumably to save some other group of people, and how that is presumably compassionate. Religion, like science, may have been perverted, but it is religion that offers man the hope of repentance. It is religion that has achieved in so many cases, which are seldom cited, what science has proposed but only succeeded in mocking – human freedom, which is above all the freedom to exist. Romania and Poland are two good examples. There religion has been a civilizing force in the face of presumably scientific elitism.
And still people kill each other over religion in Northern Ireland.
Do you really believe that is over religion, or do you believe it is over politics which hasn’t the courage not to hide behind the name of religion.
Ah. You didn’t buy it when I said that about science’s quacks.
For good reason. At least those fighting over Northern Ireland have the decent honesty to frame their epithets in terms of raw power, however they toss around religious affiliation as the terminology of power. It is only in the press, after all, that the religious aspect is taken seriously by the chronically theologically illiterate.
I suppose. We should talk more on this.
I hope we will.
Good day then my dystopian friend.
Adieu then, True Believer.