OK, I’ve never made any secret of it really. I’m in favour of science, the Enlightenment, rational thought and logic.
Yes, yes – you’re quite correct – I have my irrational moments and my strong emotions. Like everyone else, I have inexplicable whims, irrational longings and poetic leanings.
But in optimum circumstances, I’m for rational thinking every time.
Human society wages a constant war between rational thought and …well, completely crazy stuff.
“My husband was kidnapped by aliens” a woman told me. “If he hadn’t been, he never would have left me.”
Oh. Uhuh.
“I can cure you by swinging these crystals over your head” my friend was told by a charlatan. Oops, sorry, by a ‘faith healer’. How come these faith healers never say: I can cure you by swinging a lump of concrete over your head? Or an empty sardine can? How come it’s always a pretty crystal or a feather or a (supposed) fragment of a bone from an impossibly pious saint? Answer: they’re trading on the poetic/mystical/spiritual aspect of people’s hope. And exploiting it for money.
I don’t accept the nonsense peddled by homeopaths either. “Oh” they say “the water retains a memory of a weeny bit of something-or-other that was put in it ages ago and then diluted out of existence. It’s all the more powerful for being diluted a gazillion times.” Really? Don’t go swimming in the sea then, homeopaths. Just think of the hugely concentrated effect of all that urine contributed by swimmers over the years…
A recent campaign in London to expose homeopaths as frauds saw scientists and doctors “overdosing” wildly on homeopathic “medicines”. The scientists and medics bought homeopathic products, looked at the recommended doses and then swallowed hundreds or thousands of times the quantities specified. If a medicine was potent, you would expect an effect from vast overdoses, correct? Yet there was no effect whatever. Nothing. Zero. And zilch. The participants were not in the least surprised. Homeopaths sell very expensive water and there is no danger swallowing lots of it. There is no effect – medical or otherwise – on disease or illness either. That is not to say that all homeopaths are charlatans. Some certainly are. Others may just be misguided. In other words, they are poor scientists. They have sought solutions to medical problems and have come up with ineffective answers. That’s poor medical science.
And then there’s religion. Religion is a huge big deal in the US and Middle East. I may be entirely wrong about this but it sometimes seems that the strength of religious ‘faith’ correlates around the world to the temperature of any particular geographic region. Hot in the Middle East for example. Cool in Iceland. And so on. OK – it’s a theory. But anyway, religion essentially reflects the longing of the human child/heart/spirit to have a powerful daddy. Daddy is the one who will reward us, save us or punish us. Daddy is more powerful than ‘we’ are. Even more powerful than mummy. And from the irrational belief in an invisible being springs all sorts of….crazy stuff. One population’s god wants the men to cover their wives in black cloth. (Excuse me??) Or kill their daughters if they look shyly at handsome boys. Another god tells you you’re not allowed to use contraception. Or, a god created the world just a few thousand years ago, despite an avalanche of scientific evidence to the contrary.
It’s scary stuff because, as we have seen, irrational belief can persuade people to do all kinds of irrational and deeply anti-social things. 9/11 saw some crazy people take the controls of aeroplanes because they believed that their god wants America destroyed. Their screwed up religious delusions made them believe that their own lives were expendable and that they had a right to take the lives of thousands of others – sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands, wives.
I live in a publicly secular society – France – where representatives of the public – mayors, politicians and so on – are not allowed to express their private religious beliefs at public events. In private, everyone is free to believe whatever they want, no matter how bizarre or irrational. But those beliefs cannot be forced on others. To my mind, it’s a good system. Freedom to believe in whatever the heck you want is protected. But society is run on secular lines. Science is subject to the rigours of objective scientific method and not to subjective arbitrary belief or faith.
My mother called me last week about a problem I am having. “I’m praying for you” she said. “I have to believe in the power of prayer.”
She is, quite rightly, free to believe in prayer, Father Christmas or the Great Pumpkin. But in reality problems are solved by rational thought, knowledge and action – not by wishful thinking.