Dear Religion... Yours, Science: The Joke That Needs to Go Away

[cbayer]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/philip-ellis/science-vs-religion_b_1975640.html

Philip EllisAuthor, blogger, ne'er-do-well
Posted: 10/22/2012 6:33 pm

On October 14, an Austrian named Felix Baumgautner made history by jumping from a helium balloon in the stratosphere and falling approximately 128,176 feet to earth, landing safely in New Mexico. A few days before, a young woman named Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman for campaigning for female education rights. Amazingly, she survived the shooting and is currently in a stable condition in a West Midlands hospital.

These two events became bizarrely intertwined this week in a tweet which read: "Dear Religion, This week I safely dropped a human being from space while you shot a child in the head for wanting to go to school. Yours, Science." The tweet originated on comedian Ricky Gervais's feed (although it is suspected he pinched the joke from another source), and variations on the same have been popping up all over the internet ever since.

When I first read it on Twitter, it riled me. And as the week went on, and I saw it pasted everywhere, it continued to do so. Not because I'm particularly religious (if anything I sway more towards the atheist end of the spectrum), but because the joke itself suggests a level of ignorance as damaging as that which so many religious people are accused of. It's a sweeping, fundamentalist statement equal to "money is the root of all evil" or "religion caused every major war."

By making Felix Baumgautner and science the "winners" of the joke, Gervais (or whoever actually wrote it) only succeeded in trivializing the acts of the Taliban and the fact that a young woman very nearly died. Yes, some terrible things are done in the name of religion. But to tar every religion, every single religious person, with the same brush is nothing short of fundamentalist behaviour in its own right. It is unimaginable that somebody would generalise that all of science is responsible for the atom bomb and the gas chamber, but for some reason an equally ridiculous caption has been adopted by the masses.

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[trotsky]

1. Then it is equally wrong to give religion credit when people do good things.

Yet that meme is promoted heavily right in this very group.

Hooray for double standards!

[dmallind]

2. It does need to go away

Religion needs to stop supplying the material. Wouldn't that be the best way to stop it?

Failing that - and we all know that WILL fail - it would be better to stop pretending the two worldviews are remotely equal, comparable, or merely "address different spheres of knowledge".

When every sententious pseud who solemnly intones "science merely discusses how; religion is concerned with why" is rightly laughed at mercilessly, other less flattering comparisons of the effects of science and religion like this tweet will rapidly become irrelevant.

[cbayer]

3. What do you think of his analogy about the atom bomb?

Science is responsible for the gun that shot the girl in the head. Should science stop supplying material that makes this "joke", well, a joke?

[trotsky]

4. Did science give them the reason or motivation to pull the trigger?

Your father brays about how his religion motivates him to do things all the time.

[Goblinmonger]

5. So, let's make sure we all have this straight.

1. If you do something good, it is perfectly fine to say that it was because of your religion. Your father does it all the time. You, and many others, pat him on the back for it every time he comes in here to preach about it.

2. If you do something bad, it is in no way about your religion. Religion can never be the reason for people to do bad things and anyone who says so is, at best, horribly wrong or, at worst according to you, and evil, religion-hating atheist.

How convenient. Science created a weapon which allowed us to protect ourselves and kill food which we otherwise couldn't with such relative ease. There are many reasons why people took that weapon and used it for bad purposes. One of those reasons is religion. One of those reasons has never been science.

[skepticscott]

9. Scientific discoveries are merely tools

and like all tools, they can be used constructively or destructively. Science does not make that choice for anyone. Religion does. Or else religion fails miserably in instilling the morality it claims to be the sole source of.

[LARED]

16. Your right

Science is a tool not a moral code.

[skepticscott]

13. See, this is another example of why no one takes you seriously

Three objections to the point you tried to make were posted, and you refused to respond to any of them. Despite your constant calls for "meaningful" and "productive" dialogue here. If your point was worth making, why isn't it worth defending?

[Fumesucker]

6. It's the *love* of money that's the root of all evil.

[cbayer]

7. Money worship. I agree.

[dimbear]

8. Mr. Ellis seems a bit weak on the concept of a joke.

Jokes aren't necessarily intended to save the world.

Rarely are, in fact.

[cbayer]

10. No, but they can cause harm.

[trotsky]

14. And whom is this joke harming?

The religious fanatics who shot a girl for wanting to learn?

I'm sorry if I can't muster up any sympathy for their feelings.

[muriel_volestrangler]

11. He's wrong, and hasn't understood the basic situation

"One is a tragedy perpetrated by a totalitarian regime which uses religion to justify its own agenda."

No, it was perpetrated by a bunch of men who are not a 'regime', but who have been driven to psychopathic misogyny by religious teaching. They don't have an agenda of "we must despise women - oh, look, we can find an excuse for it in this religion"; they are religious fanatics, and that fanaticism controls everything they do. They do all sorts of other deranged things because of the same religion as well.

[Dorian Gray]

12. I don't disagree with you

though I think it's more than just religion that drives their psychopathic misogyny. In part, yes. But also culture. There are varying degrees of misogynistic thinking throughout the Islamic world. The cultural background often affects how people embrace said teachings.

Obviously, people have used religious teachings throughout the years to support abhorrent practices. Slavery in the US. Female Genital Mutilation. (to name just two)

[DagoRed]

15. Joke? trivializing? WTF?

I do believe you are mistaking Gervais' sarcasm for humor. Just because a comedian made the comment doesn't automatically mean its intent was humorous. If you reined in your highly misplaced irritation for a moment and took time to digest the implications of his comment, you would quickly realize his sarcasm covers an attitude that was gravely serious, and steeped in anger and frustration about the shooting. It doesn't trivialize or make light of the situation in the least bit.

Fundamentalism. You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means. There is nothing wrong with being a fundamentalist when the fundamentals to which you strictly adhere are sound and just. I hope people who are fundamentally good become fundamentalist about adhering to that goodness within them. Scientists who aren't fundamentalists about their science are quickly drummed out of the business. RELIGIOUS fundamentalism isn't crazy because its fundamentalist, its crazy because of the religion part -- religious fundamentals, regardless of the religion, are pretty undeniably quite nutty when you get down to them.

Lastly, just because some statements that paints religion with a broad brush sometimes over-general doesn't mean they ALL such statement will do the same. Gervais' statement, in fact, is correct in its criticism of all religion because his criticism targets the idea of faith, which is a common component to *all* religions. It does not, as you seem to think, implicate all religious people as murders. Science is the one institution that attempts to minimize faith in everything science does, while religion is the one institution that exalts it and attempts to maximize faith in everything religion does. The structure of Gervais' comment implies this stark difference, and gives a poignant example of just why this difference matters -- one institute (science), on occasion, pushes mankind to do amazing things, while the other (religion), on occasion, pushes mankind to endure some of the most heinous acts ever imagined.

Gervais' sarcastic comment, rather than annoying you, I would have thought made you sit up and ask yourself -- given the fact that faith at its best merely supplies people with some good feelings about themselves but at its worst has lead people to commit some of the worst mass killings humanity has ever seen -- what exactly it is about your version of faith that keeps you from doing something equally extreme? By what standard do you judge your faith so as to say you are incapable of doing harm through it? Where, in fact, is the net benefit to you or society receive from faith given the spectrum of possibilities it is capable of promoting?

[JNelson6563]

17. Good post, welcome to DU!

[Goblinmonger]

18. Welcome to DU

You earn extra super bonus points for the reference to one of my favorite films (and novels).

[DagoRed]

22. Always glad to delight through subtext!

TPB should supplant Romeo & Juliet in the HS English curriculum, in my opinion. People will likely still quote it hundreds of years from now.

[cbayer]

19. Welcome to DU and to the religion group, DagoRed.

I appreciate your comments, but I want to make sure that you understand that I did not write this (as you seem to be directing your comments to me and not the author).

[DagoRed]

20. Thanks for the welcome...and sorry for my n00b mistake!

but thanks for the heads up on my error. I will make sure to pay better attention in the future.

[trotsky]

21. Try using the Excerpt tag when posting a large section of text from an article.

Highlight the text in the edit window, and click the excerpt button. It will help make your posts clearer for others to understand.