The Fundamental Flaw in Fundamentalism
by
Michael
Graeme
The
fundamental flaw in fundamentalism, be it religious or
scientific is that it has a nasty habit of riding
roughshod over the humanity it claims to serve.
Let's deal with religion first.
When we hear the term Fundamentalism, the Western mind is
sadly conditioned these days into thinking immediately of
the less tolerant minority of the followers of Islam, but
the term applies equally well to Christianity and in
particular that brand of ultra conservative Evangelism
associated with the American Bible belt. The last U.S.
election campaign, during which religious leaders were
filmed telling their congregations whom to vote for
seemed just about the last straw. Indeed, it was during
that campaign the term Christian Fundamentalism began
making sense to me and I've been spending a while trying
to play this phenomenon out to its logical conclusion. On
the one hand, it's a frightening concept, but on the
other I take heart from the natural principle which
ensures that everything that is born, bears also the
seeds of its own destruction.
In a recent TV documentary here in the UK, the British
scientist, author, and self professed atheist Richard
Dawkins visited the American Bible Belt and attempted to
debate his views with a firebrand evangelical minister.
Now, I have to admit that I regard Professor Dawkins with
a mixture of both dread and admiration for the openness,
honesty, authority, and impeccably well argued grounds
for his own views on the nature of life. Why dread? Well,
his clinical precision poses an overwhelming challenge to
my own woolly minded views.
The minister was reluctant to discuss his own
fundamentalist beliefs, becoming both irritated and
voluble in declaring the word of the Bible as an ultimate
and literal truth. Indeed, its fair to say he took
immediate offence to Professor Dawkins, not because
Professor Dawkins was rude, because he wasn't, but simply
because he asked questions. The climax came in a fairly
predictable and I have to say stereotypical response to
the mention of evolutionary theory, which resulted in
Professor Dawkins' ejection with threats of prosecution
for trespassing on church property. This was a sobering
and disturbing spectacle, and Professor Dawkins won a new
admirer, even though I timidly, and with all due respect,
beg to differ with his views.
There's a saying in my country that what Americans are up
to today, we'll all be doing tomorrow,... this applies
across the board, be it in terms of technology, social
attitudes, or religious evangelism. Christian
Fundamentalists in the U.K. perhaps spurred on by their
transatlantic cousins, recently flexed their devout
muscles by "suggesting" to a cancer charity
that it risked "adverse publicity" and the
"withdrawal of Christian support" for accepting
a donation from the cast of the "Jerry
Springer" musical, to which they had taken exception
on moral grounds. Suitably intimidated, the charity
handed the donation back like a scalding-hot potato. Now
I've not seen "Jerry Springer", the musical or
the T.V. show, but it doesn't take a Holy Joe to see
there's something rather un-Christian going on - and I
don't mean "Jerry Springer".
For the religious group involved this incident was
actually a public relation's disaster, played out on the
BBC Radio 4's Today programme, where the fundamentalist
view needed no help whatsoever in portraying itself in a
very bad light. Their defence over this issue was
essentially the right to freedom of "Christian
expression" and a reaction against their perception
that Christians are somehow inhibited from such
expression in a largely secular society. The moral issue,
however, the survival of the cancer charity, whose aim is
to spare human suffering and save lives, was overlooked
in favour of a statement of faith.
If people had actually been asked what was the correct
thing to do in this case, I'm sure most would have said,
let the charity have the money, let the cast of
"Jerry Springer" have our thanks for their
generosity, and tell the firebrand Christians that from
any reasonable perspective no benign creator God could
possibly have been offended by it. But people were not
asked, humanity was not consulted, because when it comes
to fundamentalism, humanity is actually no longer the
central issue. This of course is the inevitable
conclusion of any fundamentalist, or indeed any
ideological approach to society. Fundamentalism is about
the will to power and control over the freedoms of
others, rather than about actually doing what is right
and proper in a given situation.
Now, before we get carried away with our secular
indignation we should remember that religion is not the
only victim of fundamentalism. Science can also lack
common sense when the merits of the scientific method and
the ethic of documented and repeatable "proof"
are subordinated to an essentially atheist view. Science
then risks becoming the workhorse of secular society in
its perpetual search for financial gain and economic
growth, rather than working for the greater good. It
becomes narrow and utilitarian. It denies the harm we do
our planet with the epithet "not proven"
(global warming gasses, Ozone Layer and GM crops) - in
the same way that the fundamentalist churchman would, for
example, condemn homosexuality and lady priests as
"un-Christian". In both cases, the basic needs
of human beings are overlooked in favour of loyalty or
kinship towards an irrational ideological belief system,
be it spiritual or secular.
Human beings are not robots, but science likes to think
of us in that way, if only because the maths are simpler.
But human beings are actually rather complicated and they
behave in irrational ways. We are moody and emotional,
and we come with all sorts of psychological angles on
life, from the calculating to the spiritual. Yes, even a
scientist would have to agree that human spirituality is
a fact,... it cannot be ruled out of the equation in
order to make the maths any easier, any more than you can
rule out our desire to live happy and fulfulling lives.
There are many views on what the purpose of the spiritual
function is. One view is that the more we learn about our
place in the universe, the smaller our significance
actually seems, and the spiritual function might simply
be a safety valve for helping us to get through life when
common sense is telling us there's not an awful lot
waiting for us at the end of it. In other words it may
just be a delusion, or then again, the humanist
psychologists will tell us it could be evidence of a
deeper connectedness with the universe. All we know is
that it exists and it's been around for a long time, a
lot longer than any of the world's current religions, and
a good deal longer than our scientific methodology.
It's important at this stage, I think, that we should
differentiate between spirituality and religion. The
spirituality I'm talking about is a psychological
function. Religion, of whatever creed, simply provides
the labels, the dogma and the ritual. It imposes a
pattern, if you like, upon an innate sense. Christianity,
Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, New Age whackiness, these are
all patterns we impose upon ourselves, but
fundamentalism, be it religious or scientific, by
devaluing the human spiritual function seems to reject
the humanity it claims to serve. And yes, I do claim that
for many the experience of religion is one in which
matters of the spirit seem to take second place to
matters of conformance, guilt, ritual and subservience to
an authoritarian God who does not like to be asked
questions - and of course any system that denies its
adherents the right to ask searching questions of those
who speak in authority, has to be wrong.
Human spirituality, by contrast, is actually very simple
and does not need a framework of elaborate ritual in
order to survive or even to gain proper expression.
Spirituality is about the basic need for guidance and
comfort, a bit like a child holding on to the hand of a
parent in the midst of an intimidating crowd. The
fearless intellectual who brands himself an agnostic or
an atheist may not be intimidated by the crowd and is
happy to let go of the guiding hand, but not everyone has
the wits to navigate the arguments here. The more timid
and less intellectual among us rely instead on something
innate, a spiritual instinct that reassures us everything
is going to be okay.
In my experience, the youth of Western Europe is as
spiritual as it has always been,... it's simply that the
number one collective outlet for that spirituality,
namely Christianity, seems unable to keep pace with the
spiritual instinct, which has grown more enquiring and
inquisitive of late. So, the more moderate or middle of
the road churches no longer attract the young and have
begun their decline. Many will have closed their doors
for the last time within a generation, then all we'll be
left with, for a while at least, are distasteful pockets
of entrenched fundamentalism.
Christianity has been navigating a fairly straight course
these past two thousand years and it's given comfort to
millions of people around the world. But since the 60's
people have spied rocks on the horizon and a lot of us
have begun taking to all manner of little spiritual
lifeboats with a view to exploring a way around the
logical, moral and psychological impasse that dogmatic
religions represent, namely that their sacred texts seem
to deny the evidence of scientific research. The
fundamentalists, however, have taken another view and are
currently sailing full steam ahead, because nowhere in
the Bible does it mention anything about rocks.
I don't know what the outcome of this will be except to
say that history has shown us how any rise of
fundamentalism, be it political or religious is always
the kiss of death to the very thing it claims to
represent. In strict Darwinian terms all things must
either adapt or die, while in the slightly less chilling
parlance of eastern philosophy we can either reject
change and stagnate, or we can accept it, adapt to it,...
and grow.
My own agnosticism has undergone a bit of a shift in
recent years with the discovery of some of links between
eastern philosophy and relatively modern psychological
and cosmologial theories. These links have always been
there of course, and many have explored them in the past.
It is a personal process of ongoing change and
questioning of the established view - certainly not a
path I would urge others to follow lightly if only
because for all the effort involved it might just be
plain wrong. The bottom line of such thinking is that no
matter how smart we are, we'll never answer all the
questions we can ever ask, and so there comes a point
when one must accept the concept of an ultimate mystery,
beyond which man's knowledge cannot pass. This sounds
like a cop-out, a reason to reign in the thirst for
knowledge and to deliberately curtail our understanding
of the universe, but that's not so. Given the infinite
nature of the cosmos, it's entirely reasonable to accept
that there is a limit to what we can ultimately know, in
the same way we accept we'll never know the last digit in
an infinite series, but this does not mean we stop
pushing back the boundaries and unravelling as much of
the mystery as we can.
It has to be said, though, I view many branches of hard
science these days with as much contempt as I view
religious fundamentalists of all creeds for not doing
enough to broaden our understanding of the issues facing
the continuing evolution of humanity i.e. "us".
Many scientists are also fundamentalists, in the sense
that they begin from an essentially atheist viewpoint
even though atheism is itself a form of irrational
belief. Such science is very good at explaining the
nature of tangible things, but has an aversion towards
anything of an even remotely spiritual nature, and a
nasty habit of ruining the careers of those who adopt a
more open minded approach. Indeed such scientists see the
spiritual function more as a pathological defect, as a
virus of the mind, as if it were a mental disease
preventing people from engaging properly with the world.
Those scientists however find it difficult to accept that
many people simply would not want to live in a world
where there was no concept of God.
A mischievous atheist might liken belief in God to a
belief in the idea that there's a copy of the Times
Newspaper floating somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto.
It's impossible to prove or disprove either of these
things, but the more reasonable approach, say the
atheists, is not to believe in either. Personally, I
would not believe in the newspaper theory, simply because
it seems unreasonable, yet I pause and wonder about God,
because I feel the need to do so somewhere deep down in
my bones.
A less trivial example of this sort of thing is the
Global Consciousness Project in which a small team of
scientists at various universities around the world have
stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon regarding
randomness. To cut a very long story short, they were
able to detect dramatic changes in the behaviour of
random number generators which correlated to moments of
intense human focus upon say a natural disaster, or a
terrorist outrage. The conjecture is that somehow humans
can create a disturbance in the physics underpinning the
cosmos if distracted in sufficient numbers. The results
are repeatable, though inexplicable. My own mind is open
on this one, but the scientists involved, all of them
serious and dedicated academics, have been ridiculed by
other scientists whose minds are essentially closed on
the subject. Why? Because the conjectured phenomenon
cannot exist. Why? Because in the unwritten Atheist
handbook, there can be no disturbance in the physics
underpinning the cosmos.
"Who
says so?"
"Well,..
there just can't."
"But
what about the data?"
"It
must be wrong."
It is the
same tone of argument put forward by the churchman in
defence of his own dogmatic beliefs.
My own experience has been that the years I've spent in
rejection of the spiritual function were years marked by
a deepening sense of personal unease, both at the way
western society seems to be degenerating, and also how I
was supposed to fit in with the world around me.
Conversely, my more recent acceptance, at least of the
premise that the spiritual function serves an essential
purpose in the psychological development of a human
being, has brought with it a renewed sense of inner calm
and a feeling of what in the face of reality might seem
like a totally inappropriate optimism.
It might
of course be a delusion, but does it matter if it makes
me feel better?
We've
known for a century now that the universe does not
conform strictly to the deterministic laws of Newton's
Principia. Newton is held up as a model of deterministic
rationalism, yet his personal writings reveal a man
steeped in the alchemical tradition, a tradition in which
the human psyche and the transformation of matter are
taken as being intimately linked, a phenomenon which,
through the eyes of modern science, makes no sense
whatsoever. It seems ironic then that the key
contribution of a man who was probably the last of the
old world mystic alchemists, should have been the
opposite of his alchemical ambitions, for he succeeded
only in driving a wedge between psyche and matter. Psyche
and matter have been heading off in different directions
ever since, constantly sniping and sneering at each
other.
It's a
divergence that persists - yet I remain optimistic that a
reunification will take place. Parallels continue to
emerge between psychological, spiritual, and scientific
thinking at the sub-atomic level. These parallels seem to
be nudging the human being back towards the centre of the
cosmos, rather than further out towards its chilly rim.
This of course is also an area of half baked ideas,
pseudo-science, New Age whackiness and charlatanism,
since both religion and "respectable" science
have become too polarised and entrenched to want to risk
a serious engagement with it. It's an area where
non-scientists present unproven, crackpot theories as
"fact", and where scientists debunk dimly
understood phenomenon of potentially outstanding
significance, as being crackpot. Meanwhile the religious
clutch their sacred writings and mutter darkly about the
workings of satan. Somewhere in this strange hall of
mirrors is a way through to a deeper understanding, but
at present there's no one brave enough, or influential
enough, to reliably lead the way.
As agnostics, we can either be passive, and accepting
that belief in any form of spiritual activity is
pointless without certain proof,... or we can be active
in our search for evidence of why the spiritual influence
has been central to man for so long, and why it persists
to this day. The truth is out there,... as Mulder once
said to Scully, back in the closing days of the twentieth
century, but fundamentalists, be they scientists or
clergymen will have us founder on the rocks of spiritual
and possibly physical extinction before they will abandon
their dogmas. If only they would turn to the rest of us
and actually ask us what it is that we want from them!
If we are
to face the challenges ahead, and human beings are to
realise the goal, not just of surviving the coming
centuries but of actually transcending all of the issues
that are currently crippling us, our direction cannot be
towards either of the fundamentalist poles; they are
simply too entrenched and moving further away from the
central question of what it means to be human. Instead,
our direction must lie somewhere between the two, towards
the point where moderate minds, both spiritual and
scientific can come together and provide the rest of us
with an answer to how we can best realise our fullest
potential, as individuals, as a global community, and as
an integral part of the cosmos.
Michael Graeme
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Copyright
© M Graeme 2007
m_graeme@yahoo.co.uk
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