intellectual d-bagism

So I was finishing up this sci-fi fantasy novel I was reading and the climax was this chapter long speech about the triumph of reason over faith and how the human spirit will finally emerge and flourish when people overcome their useless religions. Bleh. First of all, that’s a terrible way to end a book. Not to mention it was written badly. If you have to say the same thing over and over, how much substance is there in what you’re saying. Second, it doesn’t take a couple dozen pages to say what I said in a sentence; if you can’t condense a tedious monologue, you are a bad writer. Second, I wanted so badly to argue, but I can’t argue with paper. Gah! Logic is just a way to check the reasoning in your arguments, it is not the end-all-be-all of philosophy. It’s just an empty frame, a blank structure. It offers nothing of any meaning in and of itself, and it certainly isn’t a foundation you can build a society on. Human nature has been borne out time and again, its not religion that has cause all of society’s ills, it’s the people that make up society. Religions, just like all other institutions, are made of people. People are greedy, mean, petty and cruel. With adequate push, or even just a flimsy pretense, people will do horrible things to each other. At times, religion has been that excuse, but more often it is something else, culture, ancestral right to a piece of land, business interests, politics, oil, whatever. The common denominator is people and their nature.

Also, faith is not the enemy of reason and logic; they go hand in hand. Even for those who are not religious, faith is still a preserver of sanity. It allows us to function by filling in the gaps between what we don’t know and what we must act on anyway. Logic, reason, common sense, whatever you want to call it, they allow you to contextualize and process what is already known; faith does the same for what is unknown. You could spend a lifetime learning everything you would need to know to function for a single day in absolute certainty, without any faith at all. To know how the electricity in your homes powergrid works, the quantum theory behind the semiconductor-based circuitry in your cell phone, the psychology of why those around you do what they do and how they’ll react to you. There is far too much information in the world for any one person to know. We believe in experts, texts, the internet (oh man don’t get me started), or what we hear from friends and family, all is taken in, faiths in various sources is ranked and compared and info is absorbed or discarded based on the results.

Besides this author (and many like him) is just substituting to make themselves sound less douchey. What they really mean by Indomitable Human Spirit is The Way I Think People Should Be, and logic and reason really mean My Point of View. With that in mind that stupid speech I read makes so much more sense.