Ideologies put ideas first, reality second, and human rights may not even make the list.
Science on the other hand puts reality first, human rights next and ideas… last. Your ideas however elegant, invested, coherent, logical, or plausible don’t mean shit if they don’t map onto reality. They get discarded. Really clever hypotheses get tossed every day of the week.
And yeah, there may be some good old boy networks left in some areas of science, but everybody gets a shot: gender, nationality, ethnicity, SES,… none of it matters. Anybody can and does discover new knowledge about the world we find ourselves in. And much of science is out to not only discover how the world really works, but how we can make it better for all of us. But not in a moralizing, Utopian, ideological way that can be incredibly dangerous.
There is always a reality check.
Ideologies, both political and religious, kill people. They hold their pet ideas as more important than reality.
Mao pushed on with his Great Leap Forward killing 30-70 million people 1958-1962.
“To hell with reality or people, full speed ahead with the sacred ideas and pseudoscience.”
And Religion:
I have regular FB exchanges, some calm, some a bit tense with Xians over homosexuality and the Bible verses that support homophobia. They are really struggling with it. Good.
And its not just me and my FB friends, it is everywhere.
Rachel Held Evans the “liberal” Evangelical (I know that’s an oxymoron) Xian who I admire greatly for her compassion, truth seeking, and writing skill (she’s better than me) had a recent exchange on her blog (Everyone’s a Biblical Literalist Until You Bring Up Gluttony) that had over 450 comments before she shut it down!!
It is heartening really, to see the young Evangelicals trying to escape their Cultural Inertia™ (that’s all the bullshit they have been taught) and exercise their natural human compassion and try to work around or drop the “clobber passages” in the Bible that uphold the homophobia of the really Conservative Xians…
Rachel:
“Why is homosexuality the great biblical debate of this decade and not slavery, (as it once was) or the increasing problem of materialism and inequity? Why do so many advocate making gay marriage illegal but not divorce, when Jesus never referenced the former but spoke quite negatively about the latter?”
Why, indeed?
Maybe because the gay rights movement has pushed it to the forefront and our Xian friends ain’t stupid, not in the least. Rachel has said before her generation (30 something) possesses an exceptionally active “bullshit detector.”
Bravo! I think its a combination of the two. I get dissed now and then for being too blunt, too harsh in my attack on religious ideas, on religious thought. And just few of the Xians I banter with go “oh yeah stupid Christians again”… when I’ve never said anything even close to that. SOME have real difficulty having their ideas challenged, and can’t separate an attack on the illogic or repressiveness of their ideas from an attack on them. They’ll get used to it. Cuz the attacks ain’t going away… and the attacks aren’t just from Unbelieving Scum™ like me, they’re coming from within the Xian community itself, EVEN the Evangelicals!!!!!
Rachel again:
“I got to thinking about this after I was criticized last week for my post about loving gay kids unconditionally. Some folks were very upset that I had the audacity to write an entire blog post about putting a stop to LGBT bullying without including a Bible-based condemnation of LGBT people, or at least a theological discussion around the issue of homosexuality and Scripture.”
And the comments were overwhelmingly similar to Rachel’s views, so many of these folks have gay friends, sons, daughters, coworkers… they are getting educated, they are getting “Enlightened” they are figuring out on their own that their is no logic to clinging on to homosexual “clobber” passages in their Bible, if they have jettisoned similar ones on slavery, divorce, and a gozillion other ways their book says to behave or are abominable or a sin against god.
They are catching on that ideas are less important than people. They are slowly, sometimes painfully, discarding the ideology they grew up on or were converted into in a moment of emotional weakness and cognitive immaturity.
So Bozos like this guy are getting exposed as the ideological buffoons that they are, Ravi Zacharias:
Mao thought and this guy thinks his book has it all down: that ideas are more important than reality or people.
Philosophers, theologians, and political leaders are ideologists. Thoughts are paramount. Ideas rule.
If the world turns out not to fit their grand logical schemes, too bad for the world, throw out the data.
Scientist are realists and humanists. Science itself is egalitarian and democratic.
Bravo to Rachel and her readers for doing good science: comparing their ideas against the real world.
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