[ExI] to install

spike spike66 at att.net
Thu Jun 3 19:39:31 UTC 2010


 

> ...On Behalf Of Anna Taylor
>...  Learn about respect, honesty, helping 
> others, believing in a cosmic energy for the greater good.  
> If churches could be replaced with "Community centers" 
> everyone would benefit.  Yes I know, wishful thinking... Anna


Anna, some churches are evolving into this community center notion.  I know
of at least one example of a fundamentalist church that went this route.  It
is in Palo Alto.  It started back in the early 80s as a church for former
Seventh Day Adventists who were no longer believers but were still
technically on the membership lists.  Over the years it has become the
Univeralist Unitarian equivalent of a former fundamentalist church, if that
makes any sense.

Lee Corbin suggested a kind of innoculation against religion, where the
children were introduced to a weakened form of religion for information
purposes, along with the clear message that the teachings and historical
accounts are not "true" in the sense of court testimony or scientific
evidence, but rather an ambiguously valuable ancient folklore with some
ethical and moral content, use with caution, your mileage may vary, void
where prohibited etc.  Lee's notion is that it would be analogous to
injecting a weakened form of a pathogen in order to pump the body's immune
system.  The brain's memetic immune system would then become better able to
resist memetic infection of fundamentalist religion or fundamentalist
environmentalism or any other fundamentalist memeset.

I find Lee's notion compelling.

spike





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