avevale_intelligencer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2011-09-06 01:23 pm
avevale_intelligencer) wrote2011-09-06 01:23 pm
A passing thought
Just read this post, following a link from Clement's blog, and was intrigued by the way the writer describes how being exposed to creationism and other pseudo-science at an early age caused him to start thinking and questioning what he'd been told. This parallels my own experience; reading von Daniken caused me to question conventional science, from which I passed as a natural consequence to questioning von Daniken.
And that's one of the things that bothers me about the perennial claim that religion, or creationism, or pseudo-science, causes people's brains to shut down; the people making that claim have obviously encountered these things themselves, and it's had quite the reverse effect, as it had with me and the writer of the article. Either he, and I, and a select few, are examples of a superior race whose enhanced brains are immune to the numbing effect of the opiate of the people so decried by Marx (a suggestion which I view with a certain scepticism)...or ideas are just ideas, and people have control of their own brains, and it's just as easy to choose to be asleep at the wheel whether you believe in Richard Dawkins, YHVH or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or nothing at all. And just as easy to choose to wake up and question. (I should perhaps make clear that this latter is the explanation I favour. I don't have an enhanced brain.)
And that's one of the things that bothers me about the perennial claim that religion, or creationism, or pseudo-science, causes people's brains to shut down; the people making that claim have obviously encountered these things themselves, and it's had quite the reverse effect, as it had with me and the writer of the article. Either he, and I, and a select few, are examples of a superior race whose enhanced brains are immune to the numbing effect of the opiate of the people so decried by Marx (a suggestion which I view with a certain scepticism)...or ideas are just ideas, and people have control of their own brains, and it's just as easy to choose to be asleep at the wheel whether you believe in Richard Dawkins, YHVH or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or nothing at all. And just as easy to choose to wake up and question. (I should perhaps make clear that this latter is the explanation I favour. I don't have an enhanced brain.)