What Would Happpen If We Lost..?

[dd5]

You know it's really damned interesting to see how John Locke's concept of “Tabula Rasa” can have such a deep and profound effect on humanity. As a scientist in training I see the world as a chaos loving nature at the atomic level expanding out into a calm orderly world that we live in. I see how everything is connected. It all makes sense in a logical and analytical way. Yet in all our understanding of the mechanisms of life, we cannot understand why it exists. Why have no idea at all why any of it exists, even evolution cannot lead to perfection due to its underlying constraints, so it's not “progressing” towards anything. It just exists to allow life to adapt. So then I wonder why don't the religious take these questions we cannot and perhaps will not understand anytime soon and use them as a model for faith? The funny thing is, man is bickering and destroying himself over a god he created. We made the imaginary ghost that haunts our every move. As social animals we have a communal nature, one of family, one of wholeness when we're together under a common theme. Was it so bad during our history that we had to resort to this? Do we really have to resort to making up a reason to create togetherness? To create hope in places where there is none? More importantly, however is the fact those under the Christian banner make what we call voters. In a democracy they pitch in to decide our leaders. They have in a way (well a very extreme reductionist way) control of 1/3 of the worlds economy. Control of the only country with veto power at the Breton woods organizations (world bank and IMF), and behind that they have an army of nukes capable of wiping out most if not all humanity.

 

To make things worse, they have been trying really damned hard to push their agenda recently. I used to live in a horrible neighborhood where the church was a sort of “town square” and its gotten to really really sad points in these areas. Most of the people who live there are poverty-stricken minorities and the church zealots know this. They've gotten salvation army sections installed in public high schools to recruit more people into the faith. They lure the kids to the salvation army meetings at the school by bringing in local athletes or any other famous religious-friendly local celebrity they can bring in. They tell the people to bring their problems to Jesus. They instill hope by bringing in the “lord” into a population of people that has lost all hope. Most of the time this does more harm than good as many will ignore ways to fix the problem and put the entire solution up to faith. In return for these “life changing ways to fix your life” the churches get rabid followers of the faith. The people of these poverty stricken areas hang on to faith while their lives most of the time continue to crumble and turn. However the weekly church lectures teach them how to ignore this (by putting faith first) and those involved are convinced their life much better. Perhaps it is, if only in the mind of the believer. But it gets better, you see there are also what I like to call “political weasels” who infiltrate churches to get state representative votes in local communities. They go into these places of worship, focus points of hope and community and blend in. They gain trust and voters among the poor and become “heroes” of the community when they really used them to get ahead.

 

The minds of the less knowledgeable of the world are being manipulated and toyed with to achieve desired effects. My fear in this lies on what would happen if they gained more power? What would happen if more than what we already have in the American government as “Christian fundies” took control. I have heard many say we should just ignore them and they'll die down, science will triumph. But my question is, what if the majority does and the voice of science then becomes the sideshow? Will we, those who are actually knowledgeable of how the world works and unlike many Christian fundies do not live in a world of fantasy let them do humanity in on the next big decision that will affect our world? What happens when they gain in numbers?

 

I also ment to post this in the rant forum, bleh