I must say that learning about Bush’s decision on August 1, 2005 to promote teaching ‘Intelligent Design’ in American classrooms has prompted yet another wave of revulsion towards Bush. Whether Bush believes in this pseudoscience himself or just a willing lackey of the religious right, as President, he owes it to the American public to not promote the idea of full blown intellectual surrender.
My personal belief is that all religions are extremely artificial. As Bertrand Russell put it
Fear, the Foundation of Religion
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing — fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.
That being said, I meet the occasional polite person who tells me that one mustn’t denigrate other religions or other people’s beliefs because it’s rude. I disagree with that completely. Humour is a great ally in the fight against ignorance. Everyone should laugh at people who believe that the Earth is flat or that photographic devices steal your soul when your picture is taken. By that same logic, everyone should also laugh at people who believe in people who walk on water, or figures with elephant heads and 2 * 10^6 arms or figures that can hurl thunderbolts from the sky.
Yet these ludicrous beliefs persist. You would think that in the age of the electron, with Voyager now in the heliosheath, roughly 14 billion miles away from where it was launched, we’d have learned something. But foolish, pathetic, little man still clings to his primitive beliefs.