“The Stupidity of Belief”: The Inner Politics and
Nature of Mankind Have Not Changed in 7,000 Years
Global Research, April 03, 2016
Oh, How primitive we are still!
Around 1600, when Europeans began to use the methods
of learning that are now called scientific, Galilleo peered at the moon. In
1969, a man walked on the moon. In fewer than 400 years, people went from
peering at the moon to walking on it.
Scientific knowledge works. Yet beliefs, claims that
are not and often can never be known, have caused human beings to kill each
other in wars at least since the first city states were organized around 4,000
BCE.
The people who lived in these states believed that
their cities were protected by patron deities and when the cities went to war,
the war was thought of as fought for or even by the deities themselves. Ever
since, war has always had a religious aspect. Armies have always gone into
battle believing god was on their side, even when two peoples who claimed to
believe in the same god fought each other. The absurdity of that seems to have
always eluded people. It is noteworthy that even today the leaders of nations
ask their patron deities to bless their countries.
The American president, for instance, always asks god
to bless America, never the American people. Gods, it seems, only protect
states, not their peoples who are decimated in wars for the sake of their
nations. Remember John F. Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you,
ask what you can do for your country.” Throughout human history, people, like
soldier ants, have always existed to preserve the state rather than visa
versa. So here we are, seven millennia since the founding of city
states, still acting just like the pagans of Mesopotamia. For seven millennia
of belief guided human history, the progress of human nature has stood still!
I have written previously that mankind is creedal
rather than rational an that ideology (creed, dogma, belief) is a lie that will
not die. Religious beliefs certainly exhibit those characteristics. The
primitive nature of religion is also evident. In the Ancient World, religious
rites were practices to propitiate gods. Today they are used to dispatch dead
souls to their rightful places in eternity. The funerals of Antonin Scalia and
Nancy Reagan are examples of rites that date at least as far back as the Roman
Empire. It is clear that the conventional notion is that religious belief is a
“higher” virtue. Those with it are considered to be better than those without
it. This notion persists despite the large number of logical absurdities that
have been identified in religious doctrines and other creeds. Remember
Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum—”I believe because it is absurd.”
Despite this history, people seem to be addicted to
creeds. In the United States of America, whose Constitution prohibits the
Congress from adopting a state religion, officials still commonly speak the
language of belief—”In God we trust,” “one nation under God,” and “God bless
America.” Yet religious Americans worship multiple gods. Freedom of religion is
a constitutional right. So the word ‘god’ in these expressions has no
definitive denotation. The God of the New Testament is incompatible with the
God of the Torah. Americans seem oblivious to the fact that a sentence
containing a substantive with no denotation is utterly meaningless, and any
connotation it possesses is entirely subjective.
The French, during the Revolution of 1789, sought to
destroy the Catholic religion specifically and religion in general. But in
1801,Napoleon signed an agreement with Pope Pius VII marking an end to the
attempt. Similarly, during the First World War. Orthodox Russian prelates
carried holy icons through the trenches before battles begging God to bring
victory in coming battles only to see the Russian army annihilated instead. So
when the Russian Revolution occurred in 1917, the newly created Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics banned religion and locked the doors to all churches. Yet
in 1991, when the USSR was transformed into the Russian Federation, the church
doors were unlocked and the Russian people flocked to churches to resume their
faith in the Orthodox Church. Similar attempts to promote the eradication of
religious belief are going on in China with little success. What accounts for
this persistence of creedology?
In fact, this persistence is so strong that it is
commonly considered to be virtuous. The admonition, “Stand up for your
knowledge” is never heard, but “Stand up for your beliefs” is common. Yet if
beliefs are claims that are not known to be true or cannot ever be known to be
true, the admonition advises people to maintain and flaunt their ignorance.
Creedology is an attribute of utter stupidity. Still creeds seems to be what
human beings live by.
Any nation’s “way of life” is defined by its
creeds—religious, political, economic, social, educational. No one has ever
shown that any of these creeds is better than the others. As a matter of fact,
creedology is such a dominant trait of human beings that even science has
become a creed. Not only does science consist of a well defined group of
methods of learning, it also conveys the belief that those methods will
eventually solve all of mankind’s problems, a belief entirely like the
Christian belief in the Second Coming. But there is not one iota of evidence to
support this belief. Instead of science making mankind less creedal, creedalism
has made science into just another creed. Science has become nothing but a
handmaiden of belief. Scientists are now as much soldiers in ideological wars
as seekers of knowledge. This kind of science will never make it possible for human
beings to live in harmony with nature or live together in peace. Unless human
beings can be weaned off of this attachment to belief, Homo Sapiens is
a doomed species.
But such a weaning might not be possible. The human
attachment to belief might be instinctive. In fact, considering the attachment
to belief as instinctive might be the only way to explain the human attachment
to creeds for over seven millennia, which makes all of the horrible deeds of
people to be the result of a generic trait rather than personal faults.
Is this stupidity the essence of the human condition?
It is if standing up for beliefs is a virtue rather than a vice. Standing up
for what is known to be true is the better practice.
People do not wage war over what mankind knows; they
wage war over what they merely believe and that is doubly dumb.
John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy
and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving
in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university
professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook
in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of
commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for
newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © John Kozy, Global Research, 2016
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