TODAY IS GOING to be an extremely busy day as yesterday unexpectedly was. So I'll answer the same stupid claim George Carlin made part of his scolding atheist sermon as stand up comedy routine after that beatnik shtick failed him with a post where I answered it.
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Why Let The Facts or Logical Coherence Get In The Way Of A Satisfying Prejudice?
As I said in passing in a
short, impromptu post a few days ago, I increasingly don't listen to
the CBC's Sunday Edition because its longtime host Michael Enright can
get on my nerves. That was on my mind because last week was one I opted
not to listen.
That's too bad because the piece I wrote about the scummy product of too many elite Catholic schools in the United States could have benefited from his piece about the scandal plagued St. Michael's School, which he went to, which had its own, Canadian problems with jock culture and machismo. It's a good essay which I certainly would have referenced. Hockey culture can be as anti-Christian as football, though most of that is not an intrinsic part of the game, as it is in American football. You could, conceivably, play a game of hockey without any violation of anything in the Gospel or epistles. Though you can certainly violate those as typically they are in all sports. But you violate everything up to and including the Golden Rule as soon as you start playing football, violence is an intrinsic part of the game, it is more than slightly and more than intentionally like the Roman gladiatorial spectacles that were eventually banned by Christianity in Rome. The presence of American football at any Catholic or supposedly Christian school is a sign that the moral character of the place is a facade covering moral decay.
But my reason for writing this was in the letters Enright read today, a letter writer who talks about the priest-coach who ran a sadistic sports program, him witnessing the priest kicking a player of Italian heritage and calling him a "yellow wop". The letter writer said that witnessing that put him off "organized religion". My question is why didn't it put him off organized sports, especially organized sports in schools, such incidents abound in entirely secular contexts, schools, universities, amateur and professional sports, youth sports (wonder what the guy said about the various sex scandals involving prominent coaches in Canadian Youth Hockey a decade or more back).
It comes the day after I heard a podcast in which the host cites GORE VIDAL! as an expert on the history of the culpability of "single-god religions" in producing the long history of warfare and bloodshed. That someone could believe Gore Vidal on anything much is a head shaker. The guy was an admitted pederast whose frequent trips to Thailand, rightly infamous as a center of pedophile sex slavery as well as a long and documented life of cruising, sometimes in company with other celebrity writers and celebrities of not even that accomplishment are well known. Not to mention that his veracity on matters historical is documented to be spotty and suspected of being ideological if not just a reflection of his prejudices and personal preferences.
This isn't what I was looking for by way of citations on this and I'm still worn out from being sick so I'll just post this:
In his hilarious [I'll break in here to stipulate that I've never found a single thing he did "hilarious"] analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,” and many take this idea as an historical fact. When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, “Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?”
Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.
History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon.
Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever.
Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russia Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause. While religious groups have been specifically targeted (most notably in World War II), to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators’ motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious.
I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition. And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided.
That's too bad because the piece I wrote about the scummy product of too many elite Catholic schools in the United States could have benefited from his piece about the scandal plagued St. Michael's School, which he went to, which had its own, Canadian problems with jock culture and machismo. It's a good essay which I certainly would have referenced. Hockey culture can be as anti-Christian as football, though most of that is not an intrinsic part of the game, as it is in American football. You could, conceivably, play a game of hockey without any violation of anything in the Gospel or epistles. Though you can certainly violate those as typically they are in all sports. But you violate everything up to and including the Golden Rule as soon as you start playing football, violence is an intrinsic part of the game, it is more than slightly and more than intentionally like the Roman gladiatorial spectacles that were eventually banned by Christianity in Rome. The presence of American football at any Catholic or supposedly Christian school is a sign that the moral character of the place is a facade covering moral decay.
But my reason for writing this was in the letters Enright read today, a letter writer who talks about the priest-coach who ran a sadistic sports program, him witnessing the priest kicking a player of Italian heritage and calling him a "yellow wop". The letter writer said that witnessing that put him off "organized religion". My question is why didn't it put him off organized sports, especially organized sports in schools, such incidents abound in entirely secular contexts, schools, universities, amateur and professional sports, youth sports (wonder what the guy said about the various sex scandals involving prominent coaches in Canadian Youth Hockey a decade or more back).
It comes the day after I heard a podcast in which the host cites GORE VIDAL! as an expert on the history of the culpability of "single-god religions" in producing the long history of warfare and bloodshed. That someone could believe Gore Vidal on anything much is a head shaker. The guy was an admitted pederast whose frequent trips to Thailand, rightly infamous as a center of pedophile sex slavery as well as a long and documented life of cruising, sometimes in company with other celebrity writers and celebrities of not even that accomplishment are well known. Not to mention that his veracity on matters historical is documented to be spotty and suspected of being ideological if not just a reflection of his prejudices and personal preferences.
This isn't what I was looking for by way of citations on this and I'm still worn out from being sick so I'll just post this:
In his hilarious [I'll break in here to stipulate that I've never found a single thing he did "hilarious"] analysis of The 10 Commandments, George Carlin said to loud applause, “More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason,” and many take this idea as an historical fact. When I hear someone state that religion has caused most wars, though, I will often and ask the person to name these wars. The response is typically, “Come on! The Crusades, The Inquisition, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, 9/11. Need I name more?”
Well, yes, we do need to name more, because while clearly there were wars that had religion as the prime cause, an objective look at history reveals that those killed in the name of religion have, in fact, been a tiny fraction in the bloody history of human conflict. In their recently published book, “Encyclopedia of Wars,” authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare, and from their list of 1763 wars only 123 have been classified to involve a religious cause, accounting for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare. While, for example, it is estimated that approximately one to three million people were tragically killed in the Crusades, and perhaps 3,000 in the Inquisition, nearly 35 million soldiers and civilians died in the senseless, and secular, slaughter of World War 1 alone.
History simply does not support the hypothesis that religion is the major cause of conflict. The wars of the ancient world were rarely, if ever, based on religion. These wars were for territorial conquest, to control borders, secure trade routes, or respond to an internal challenge to political authority. In fact, the ancient conquerors, whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, or Roman, openly welcomed the religious beliefs of those they conquered, and often added the new gods to their own pantheon.
Medieval and Renaissance wars were also typically about control and wealth as city-states vied for power, often with the support, but rarely instigation, of the Church. And the Mongol Asian rampage, which is thought to have killed nearly 30 million people, had no religious component whatsoever.
Most modern wars, including the Napoleonic Campaign, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russia Revolution, World War II, and the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, were not religious in nature or cause. While religious groups have been specifically targeted (most notably in World War II), to claim that religion was the cause is to blame the victim and to misunderstand the perpetrators’ motives, which were nationalistic and ethnic, not religious.
I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition. And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided.
"I think the reason that lazy-assed journalists, scribblers, babblers, go to that old saw about religion being to blame for everything is exactly that, they're lazy and they know that it's the easiest accusation in the world to make and, being easy, it will get the universal approval of the bigoted and superficial, risking little in the way of opposition. And, as it notes in my immediate previous post, its total lack of veracity and documentation will not make the slightest bit of difference, even when the refutation of it is provided."
ReplyDeleteAnother hangover from the Enlightenment and the 19th century, in which it was easier to blame religion than to think, or to know anything. Knowledge is difficult to acquire; thinking is hard. You can't blame modern technology for that. 'Twas ever thus. There was a brief, shining moment of hope that democratizing knowledge would improve it and improve the lot of all in the democratic society. Alas, that was quickly snuffed out by the reality of the difficulty of acquiring knowledge and the even greater difficulty of thought.
So little has changed. We're just alive to be aware of it, and clinging to our myths of the idealized past in the always chaotic present. Only the past and future ever seem certain, because we are never living in either one of them. And they are always certain because we always oversimplify them, usually to our present benefit. So the past was rife with "religious wars," but we know better now. Yes, we slaughter on a scale no religious war could ever compete with.
Tell me again why people thought a stand-up comedian was a sage and an historian to boot. Any half-brain could have responded to him: "WWI and WWII, just for starters." Carlin's assertion is perfectly absurd on its face. And people wonder how Trump won the Presidency.
Could it be any plainer?
When I read the pamphlet The ABCs of Time Planning (don't know the English title, read it in Esperanto) and it said that the average lifetime had something like 200,000 hours in it do actually do things the first thing I thought of was how many of those hours people spend watching TV (it was before many people spent time on the internet). Another thing that led to was realizing how few hours, in comparison, were spent in school and how many fewer hours than that were spent in church or religion and that by a minority of people. And the school for insanity that TV is doesn't ask anything of people, it panders to their greatest weakness to lie to them and gull them and cheat them. I don't remember many of the religion haters going after TV on those counts, either.
ReplyDeleteThe "enlightenment" was a PR job in itself, turning what should have been a method of specialized investigation into an ideological totalism that restrained the limits of permissible thought and expression. Few of its major figures aren't exposed as having feet of clay when you fact check their legend.