War - what is it good for?

“If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining…

The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.”

― Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class

A new vision of the pale blue dot from Cassini

Prompted by the images from Cassini I have revisited Carl Sagan

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

Still puzzled why people believe

Ok. So I'm gonna have another shot at understanding how this religion thing works for people.

It seems that all human societies wherever situated historically or geographically have developed some sort of belief system which usually involves a "God" or "Gods", and some sort of sacred text claiming to emanate in some way from them.

Most systems have a creation myth and a belief in different types of afterlife for the soul after it leaves the body.

There is usually a priesthood of some sort which acts as a go-between in the day-to-day transactions between the ordinary people and their God. The priesthood normally have responsibility for instructing the people in how to interpret the sacred texts, and also for ensuring that any criticism of the status-quo is punished in some way. They are also responsible for conducting the rituals surrounding the observances required by the system. They also act as gatekeepers to the afterlife.

Prophets claim to have information revealed directly to them by God for dissemination to the believers.

These belief systems have invariably been used in conjuction with political power as a means of social control. 

The form and content of these many belief systems is very diverse indeed, but they all share one thing in common. There is no factual evidence to support or validate that any of these beliefs are based in truth.

The usual position adopted by each system is that their own religion is validated by "faith", which then negates the need for any proof. By definition of course, a faith-based belief in one particular religion means that from that point of view all other religions must be false.

Obviously the many different religions each have lots of followers who believe, through "faith", that their religion is true, and that all others are false. This usually comes about because belief systems tend to be passed from generation to generation through cultural indoctrination.

So where exactly does that bring us to.

Well I think it brings us to the realisation which I first experienced when I was about eleven years old: As it appears impossible to provide any rational proof which would privilege any one religious belief system above all the others, they must all be of equal worth. 

Now, you can pick you own opinions but you can't pick your own truth.

If all the religions ever followed on this planet are of equal worth, and they can't all be true, then they must all be false.

It's not really rocket science is it!

Carl Sagan quote (1996)

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

How strange again

“Why do more than 40 percent of Americans think that the Universe began after the domestication of the dog?” 

― Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward

Worth noting!

“Countries with a high percentage of nonbelievers are among the freest, most stable, best-educated, and healthiest nations on earth. When nations are ranked according to a human-development index, which measures such factors as life expectancy, literacy rates, and educational attainment, the five highest-ranked countries -- Norway, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands -- all have high degrees of nonbelief. Of the fifty countires at the bottom of the index, all are intensly religious. The nations with the highest homicide rates tend to be more religious; those with the greatest levels of gender equality are the least religious. These associations say nothing about whether atheism leads to positive social indicators or the other way around. But the idea that atheists are somehow less moral, honest, or trustworthy have been disproven by study after study.” 

― Greg Graffin

My Hero

This guy is my hero.

“I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here. I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell.” 

― Richard P. Feynman