[ExI] Changing Other Poster's Minds

[Damien Broderick]

At 08:06 PM 5/2/2007 -0700, spike wrote:

>After thinking about this for years, long after realizing that the religion
>I knew was not true, I finally realized that it matters to me if my religion
>is true.  I love true things.  Religion should be treated as any scientific
>theory.  In that sense, altho I am now an atheist, I still have the
>fundamentalist's outlook, ja?

You don't have to have been a fundamentalist. I discussed something 
similar about being brought up Catholic (in my book FEROCIOUS MINDS):

< Half a century and more ago, I was raised within an Australian 
working class family so fervently Roman Catholic, as vectored through 
a clergy steeped in Irish tradition, that its beliefs and chosen way 
of life seem to me now to have verged on derangement. The often 
vicious moralizing constraints of Catholicism--the kind I was exposed 
to from pulpit and primary school nuns, and later from Jesuit and 
Christian Brothers, and later again in the French-influenced seminary 
where I spent my last two years of school, aged 15 to 17--had the 
usual double impact. While I managed to avoid being sexually 
molested, still my relationships with my own body and with other 
people were at least somewhat harmed by wretched men and women 
terrified of the flesh yet apparently obsessed by it, a sorry saga 
that is now so boring and ubiquitous in the laments of Catholic and 
ex-Catholic writers world-wide that I will not tire you with it.
           At the same time, this ancient tradition of purportedly 
rational belief--Aristotle! Aquinas! Duns Scotus!--provided a durable 
framework for viewing the world as a place that made sense, that had 
moral depth and called out a certain strength of mind, if not always 
of heart, in those persuaded (or more often, in the first instance, 
brainwashed) by its principles.
           The odd thing about such an upbringing is that after you 
break free you retain a background metaphysics (think of James Joyce) 
that prevails even when you come to understand that in fact the 
universe is *not* intentional, was not designed by a higher 
intelligence. That it is, in fact, neither benign nor malign but just 
*there*, evolving in the darkness, cooling into eternity.
           Absurdly, you tend to respond to the world with an 
optimism that is strictly unfounded. (Of course, some luckless souls, 
like nauseated Jean-Paul Sartre or the Australian novelist Gerald 
Murnane, respond instead with a deeply irrational and lifelong 
terror. Curiously, theological fright can be a source of considerable 
art as well as personal heartache, or so I have observed without, I'm 
relieved to say, experiencing it.) Luckily, we live at a time when 
science and technology are yielding solutions to many of the miseries 
of human life. Perhaps, indeed, that will eventually include an 
answer to our otherwise inevitable mortality. Confidence in the human 
prospect is not now as fatuous or gratuitous as it was a thousand 
years ago, and is more firmly grounded than the famous optimism of 
the encyclopedic Enlightenment in the second half of the eighteenth 
century, crushed prematurely by Romanticism and the Terror in France, 
and then more dreadfully by murderous totalitarian ideologies in the 
twentieth century.
           Plainly, for an evolved consciousness in an uncaring 
universe, no `technical fix' for the drawbacks of life can solve 
these deep metaphysical conundrums. Still, the incessant biological 
decay that now causes us to age and die might be remedied within the 
next half century, granting us, or more plausibly our children or 
grandchildren, the space, time and basic comfort and security to work 
our way toward some answers that are not wholly contrived out of 
self-delusion. We find ourselves in an epoch I believe might become a 
full reawakening of the Enlightenment's best hopes. >

Damien Broderick