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causticusSome thoughts of mine on one of those "religion vs. evolution" debates I recently came across on a Discord chat:
Orthodoxy, or really any Abrahamic religion, is fundamentally about maintaining a dominant frame in the eyes of a mass following; an outward face of certitude and absolute correctness on all things, whereby anything less comes off as weakness and wavering. The reason why is because these religions came about primarily as ways of ideologically herding flocks of unskillful and unmindful human followers (compare say to Buddhism, where pandering to the laziest and dumb of the laity was never a part of the religion). And thus the way these religions must interpret their own scriptures must be in the form of a lowest-common-denominator dogma that even its brutish 80 IQ followers can make some sense of.
So for an orthodox Abrahamic religion to even admit one error on something like scientific understanding, is to give up that frame of certitude and admit that has indeed been wrong about something, and this of course begs the next question, "well, what else are you guys wrong on?" In other words, a Pandora's Box of incessant probing and questioning. When a religion based on literalist dogma and historicized mythological narratives becomes the object of an inquisition, then it's light's out. When the average unthinking mass follower smells blood in the water, they just might wander off to some other ideological camp.
Religions that are fundamentally pluralistic, and/or based on a universal natural law, are far more flexible when it comes to adapting to the changes in understanding of the physical universe and thus can work very well with science.
In summary, the wholesale denial/dismissal of scientific theories like evolution only really seems to be an Abrahamic problem. And of course anyone who has studied comparitive religions and metaphysics has probably arrived at that conclusion that Science and Spirituality are not mutually exclusive.
Orthodoxy, or really any Abrahamic religion, is fundamentally about maintaining a dominant frame in the eyes of a mass following; an outward face of certitude and absolute correctness on all things, whereby anything less comes off as weakness and wavering. The reason why is because these religions came about primarily as ways of ideologically herding flocks of unskillful and unmindful human followers (compare say to Buddhism, where pandering to the laziest and dumb of the laity was never a part of the religion). And thus the way these religions must interpret their own scriptures must be in the form of a lowest-common-denominator dogma that even its brutish 80 IQ followers can make some sense of.
So for an orthodox Abrahamic religion to even admit one error on something like scientific understanding, is to give up that frame of certitude and admit that has indeed been wrong about something, and this of course begs the next question, "well, what else are you guys wrong on?" In other words, a Pandora's Box of incessant probing and questioning. When a religion based on literalist dogma and historicized mythological narratives becomes the object of an inquisition, then it's light's out. When the average unthinking mass follower smells blood in the water, they just might wander off to some other ideological camp.
Religions that are fundamentally pluralistic, and/or based on a universal natural law, are far more flexible when it comes to adapting to the changes in understanding of the physical universe and thus can work very well with science.
In summary, the wholesale denial/dismissal of scientific theories like evolution only really seems to be an Abrahamic problem. And of course anyone who has studied comparitive religions and metaphysics has probably arrived at that conclusion that Science and Spirituality are not mutually exclusive.
