Random crap I do

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is wrong about many things, but the most important of them is that he thinks faith is about explaining how the world works. The point of science is to explain how the world is; the point of religion is to explain how the world should be. And that is something science can never do.

Dawkins argument in this particular quote is “religion says God created man, we know man evolved, therefore religion is wrong”. Creation is not the point of religion. Creation is an incredibly insignificant part of all monotheist religions.The creation narrative takes up about a minuscule amount of space in the Tanakh (Bible); the Bible takes more time describing how the Israelites created the tabernacle in the desert than how God created the world. The medieval Jewish scholar Rashi (whose commentary on the Bible is considered by Jews to be very authoritative)  says that the only reason the creation story is in the Bible at all is to establish that God was responsible for the Earth coming into being, and therefore owned the Earth. Because God owned the Earth, he can give parts of it to various nations, such as giving the land of Israel to the Jews. Rashi states that the Torah should have begun with “this month shall be to you the first of months” because that was the first command God gave to the Jewish people, but instead it begins with creation so that when people accused the Jews of stealing the land of 7 nations we could say “ah, but God created, and therefore owns, the Earth, and God gave this land to us”. The beginning of Genesis isn’t a scientific document, its a political one.

Science is about facts, religion is about morality. And as much as science tells us about the physical structure of the universe, it can tell us nothing about the moral structure of our behaviour. Darwinism evolved into social Darwinism, the attempt to apply evolutionary principles to human society, which has been used by those who oppose universal healthcare and similar government welfare programmes to claim that society needs to leave behind those who cannot look after themselves. Before it fell out of fashion, many social Darwinists believed that humanity was involved in a constant race struggle, and only the fittest races would survive. The impact this had on the development of Nazism, and in particular the forced sterilisation and murder of the physically and mentally disabled, should not be understated. Thomas Huxley thought that black people were the missing link between Apes and Whites. I’m not saying that anyone who believes in evolution is a racist, just that while science is very good at finding physical truths it does not help us find moral ones.

Scientific progress has not made humanity more moral. We discovered the secrets of physics…and dropped them on Hiroshima. We discovered the secrets of chemistry…and used them to make Zyklon B and the gas chambers. Scientific truth cannot tell us how it should be used, humanity has used great innovations for both good and bad. We’ve used the railroad to deliver food to the hungry and to deport dissidents to forced labour camps. We’ve used the television to educate people and to broadcast the worst kind of propaganda. We’ve used mobile phones to tell our family how much we love them and to detonate suicide bombs. Scientific and technological advancement cannot tell us anything about the right way to behave; for that we need religion.

(via thejewishhippiewithabeard)

You have summed up my thoughts completely! Although I don’t think morality completely comes from religion I do believe it helps cultivate it and guides those with who struggle with it! And of course this isn’t to say that atheists are immoral.