Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Problems with words

Occasionally I catch an episode of the "The Big Questions" a quasi-religious program on the BBC, it's usually fairly sterile but now and then they invite someone on who stirs things up a bit. Last week Richard Dawkins was on the programme and the subject being discussed was "is the Bible still relevant", I had thought it might be interesting but alas I was disappointed, the opposition (to the token atheist perspective) were so weak and wishy washy that it was either bickering school kids arguing over semantics or happy clappies "praising the lord", nothing substantive.

It's on Youtube (4 parts) now if you're interested,



There were a couple of smallish points that stood out, for example it was pretty evident how much Christians disagree with each other on major points of principal and indeed what the Bible actually is or means; nothing new in that of course but it always amazes me how people can invest so much in something so obviously plastic. The other cringe-worthy moment was when Dawkins asked why anyone would heed a 2500 year old book written by people who were as ignorant as the myriad scribes who contributed to that document must have been. It was the word "ignorant" that nearly caused a fight, ruffled cassocks or what! In a peak of relativist indignation one of the apologists on the panel blurted out that the ancients "had just as much knowledge as we do, but different knowledge", what a crock, these were people who sacrificed goats to treat infectious diseases, they were unaware of most of the nature of reality around them. This doesn't mean they were all bad people or that they couldn't make valid observations on human nature it just means they didn't know much stuff and the stuff they thought they knew was mostly wrong!

In some future age (if the armies of the faithful don't nuke us back to the stone age before then) our descendants will look back on us and call us "ignorant", maybe in specific ways, maybe generally, who knows, but this has no bearing on us, just what we don't know. In modern secular societies each generation generally stands on the shoulders of previous ones via work done in science and developments in society, law and the arts etc. Of course, if you are unlucky enough to live in a theocracy or a totalitarian state then the chances of stagnation, corruption or even a reversal of  knowledge are much higher than if you don't; none of this is radical or new of course its just a statement of fact, clearly a corrosive fact if (like some on this panel) you happen to be invested in the past and not the future.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Yeah, Steve - disappointing. Most of the discussion from the religys included the assumption that it's not only relevant, but important. When the conclusion is present in the premises, it's not very interesting.

Steve Borthwick said...

Lisa, yes very circular, a theological speciality of course.