[extropy-chat] Nietzsche on Religion Incorporated

[Gennady Ra]

At 09:23 AM 11/4/04 -0600, you wrote:
>At 07:00 AM 11/4/2004 -0800, the Spikester wrote:
>>Isn't it shocking?  Religion Incorporated seems
>>to be making a raging comeback in our modern world.

Damien Broderick replied:

>In all sorts of brands and guises. It's bitterly ironic (to me, anyway) that avowedly hi-tech widely educated societies such as the USA and Russia have so many citizens reaching for the god pill, while their antagonists are swigging madly from the god bottle, all factions boiling away with contrived and almost arbitrary iconologies of bigotry. 

The key phrase:

>It starts to look as if people really *do* find secular scientific cultures too `cold' and `impersonal' and even `inhaman' to sustain the glow of life. 

>True, there are parts of Europe and Australasia where Religion Incorporated has been sidelined for a few generations, but I'll bet it comes ripping back in the clutches. Time for humanism and transhumanism to start thinking seriously once again (as Bertrand Russell and Wells and others did nearly a century ago, without getting anywhere) about some sort of secular equivalent of worship (ugh; whatever) and mutually supportive emotionally enriched fellowship. But I don't imagine it will emerge from any bunch of INTJs like this list...
>Damien Broderick

 From Human, All Too Human, Section V, 
Signs of Higher and Lower Culture, 251
http://www.underthesun.cc/Nietzsche/Human/Human259.html

Future of science. To the man who works and searches in it, science gives 
much pleasure; to the man who learns its results, very little. But since all 
important scientific truths must eventually become everyday and commonplace, 
even this small amount of pleasure ceases; just as we have long ago ceased 
to enjoy learning the admirable multiplication tables. Now, if science 
produces ever less joy in itself and takes ever greater joy in casting 
suspicion on the comforts of metaphysics, religion, and art, then the 
greatest source of pleasure, to which mankind owes almost its whole 
humanity, is impoverished. Therefore a higher culture must give man a 
double brain, two brain chambers, as it were, one to experience science, and 
one to experience nonscience. Lying next to one another, without confusion, 
separable, self-contained: our health demands this. In the one domain lies 
the source of strength, in the other the regulator. Illusions, biases, 
passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the 
pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented.

If this demand made by higher culture is not satisfied, we can almost 
certainly predict the further course of human development: interest in truth 
will cease, the less it gives pleasure; illusion, error, and fantasies, 
because they are linked with pleasure, will reconquer their former territory 
step by step; the ruin of the sciences and relapse into barbarism follow 
next. Mankind will have to begin to weave its cloth from the beginning 
again, after having, like Penelope, destroyed it in the night. But who will 
guarantee that we will keep finding the strength to do so?
==== 

Best!

Gennady
Simferopol Crimea Ukraine