Michael Mitchell: Archive

This is why religion, any form of mysticism, is so dangerous. If you believe what you believe based on faith, not only with no evidence to support your beliefs, but also with the belief you don't need evidence to support your beliefs, then no argument or persuasion is possible between people who disagree with each other.

God(s), religion, faith -- they always lead to the rationalization of the use of force against each other because people who've renounced and abandoned facts, logic and reason have no other means of mediating honest disputes or peacefully resolving conflicts of interest.

Faith is really just your emotions. It's the feeling that something is true or false when you can't consciously connect your belief to reality and you choose to blindly stick to the belief, to evade your doubts rather than facing them.

Beyond the perceptual level, it's hard work figuring out what's true or false, even more difficult to determine what abstract principles to use to guide your choices in life, and then applying them to different circumstances and future endeavors is a never-ending intellectual process, so most people simply give up and accept ready-made shit like religion or other social influences before they even have enough information to know better.

The consequences of that choice, however, cannot be evaded. When reality inevitably doesn't fit your emotions or your religion's narrowly-defined edicts, when what you believe and what's true are contradictory, you're left psychologically helpless with no means of correcting your errors other than to desperately attempt to force reality (usually other people) to fit your inadvertently irrational beliefs.

The belief in reason leads to freedom because force is incompatible with it. You can't reason with a gun to your head, when someone else, for whatever reasons, expects you to think and act according to their beliefs, wishes and whims. But someone who relies on faith, someone who rejects reason, doesn't believe it's even possible to persuade you to think and act the way they "think" is right, and that's how faith leads to slavery or war, because disagreement itself is perceived as a threat to someone who doesn't believe beliefs are chosen, that other people are in full control of their own minds, much less that they have the right to their heretical views.

People who believe in reason understand they can't force anyone to accept their beliefs. They don't merely think it's wrong because it harms other people. They know it's impossible, that a mind can't be physically coerced. People who believe in faith, however, think force is the only way to maintain social order.

The whole purpose of the separation of church and state is to exclude the dogmatic religious mentality from the coercive power of government. Freedom of religion is still a very radical concept. It means the expression of everyone's beliefs are protected but that their practice is subjected to laws that apply equally to everyone regardless of their beliefs. It allows all beliefs to be influential but no particular set of beliefs is enforced by law for a very important reason: faith is fucking nuts. Unfortunately, most non-religious belief systems are even worse, even more mystical.

We've never fully understood political freedom, though, because we've never fully committed to reason. For instance, how can reason be validated without using reason? Most people simply don't trust their own minds without some external authority to support their conclusions, never mind those who don't even bother to attempt to think independently. And if reason can't be validated, then isn't faith and religion our only recourse?

Most religious people would say that everyone relies on faith, that even militant atheists who constantly attack faith and intuition and mysticism and all that transcendental shit are really ultimately relying on faith because the validity of reason can't be proven. Basically, the argument a conscientious theist would make is that atheists have faith in reason the same way theists have faith in God, that at the root of all critical thought the validity of consciousness itself, the connection between the awareness of reality and reality itself, rests on an act of faith.

The mistake is the denial (usually a willful evasion) of the self-evident. Belief in God requires faith because there's no evidence of His existence, but reason proves itself, no different than any perceptually available existent. You need no second opinion, no external validation of it, no authority higher than your own mind to verify it, only self-confidence derived from the experience of successfully using it. Your ability to reason is as obvious as your ability to walk or eat food or read these words. You can stumble or choke or lose your place, but your capacity to do such things is beyond doubt. In order to prove or deny the validity of reason, you have to rely on the validity of reason. It's inescapable, absolute.