Posted on 01/14/2009 8:53:34 AM PST by Ed Hudgins
Scientology, Seizures, and Science
by Edward Hudgins
January 13, 2009 -- Jett Travolta, the sixteen-year-old son of actors John Travolta and Kelly Preston, died recently of what the autopsy found to be a seizure. The boy had a history of seizures and unconfirmed reports suggest that his parents acted responsibly to ensure he was on medication to mitigate his condition.
We don’t know yet what caused the seizure—a change in medication or dosage, or a worsening of the underlying condition that caused the seizures.
I’ve held in my arms a dear loved-one during her seizures, someone who fortunately now survives and flourishes thanks to modern medicine. Thus I can identify personally with the dangers of such conditions and appreciate the imperative to understand and treat them.
And we can all have sympathy for Travolta and Preston and hope that progress in medical science can reduce the number of such tragedies so that other parents can be spared terrible grief and suffering.
But there’s a sad irony here: Scientology, the religion to which Travolta and Preston belong, and other irrational belief systems have, in principle and practice, always stood in the way of such progress.
Scientology was created by sci-fi writer L. Ron Hubbard. Its secret teachings apparently maintain that 75 million years ago the galactic tyrant Xenu anaesthetized billions of his enemies; flew them in spaceships to Earth; dropped them into volcanoes and nuked them; and collected their ghosts—called “thetans”—in giant theaters to show them movies that left them thoroughly confused and wandering aimlessly on our planet.
“So what?” you might ask. “All religions have weird beliefs.” True! Mormons believe that God lives around the star Kolob with his wife. Catholics believe that the bread they eat at communion is the actual, real, no-fooling flesh of Jesus.
(Excerpt) Read more at atlassociety.org ...
Grammar, punctuation and spelling would add immeasurably to your credentials.
Yes, the argument from creation (first cause) and design have been around for millennia, as have many solid refutations—“Who created the creator?” “He/she/it didn’t need a creator.” “Then why not say the same of the universe?”
I’m glad that excellent work is being done on the tendency of we humans to imbue nature with a will and consciousness (god) and how the nature of our minds and the inherence system that we each possess accounts for this tendency. See, for example, Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained.
But it is exactly the act of accepting every word of the Bible as true without subjecting the belief to true, rigorous, critical thinking that places the Christian in the same category as the Scientologist though, as I suggest, I have evidence that more Scientologists are self-deluded at a fairly fundamental level. These texts were collected and canonized over three centuries after the subject matter they cover, with dozens of books and texts left out. The New Testament is full of internal contradictions that reflect the different early, competing interpretations of Christianity—Gnostic, Ebionite, Marcionite—that lost out against what came to be the Orthodoxy. How did the men at the Council of Nicaea sort all this out? “Faith,” and not by any means that can pass as objective, critical examination.
And faith, in this meaning of the word, is the first and greatest moral vice or sin, if you speak that language. Not a mistaken belief but the mechanism or approach by which you gain beliefs is your problem.
That’s why your belief in transubstantiation—when a human with testicles talks to a piece of bread, it becomes the skin, muscles, veins, fatty issues, etc. of a 2,000 year old man who was is own father when you crew it—is on a par with the absurd believes of Mormons or Scientologists or Calvinists or Hindus or Muslims, all who hold those believes just as strongly as you do yours and with just as little reason.
Many would say that is the definition of a “Fundamentalist.”
“Def: A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.”
My Definition:
“Someone who believes that everyone else is doomed if they do not believe in one of the 600,000 religions that are in this world to believe in.”
Very good!
By the way Pawtucket Patriot, love your Family Guy beer!
What are your religious beliefs or knowledge?
I would be described as an Objectivist/Aristotelian/secular humanist. The highest value for me is to live a happy, fulfilling, flourishing life. And for the time I'm here, I want to live in a world with similar individuals who love their lives and who pursue their own happiness through their creative activities, whether they’re raising a child to maturity or a business to profitability, whether they’re writing a song or a poem or a business plan or a dissertation, whether they’re laying the brinks to a building or designing it or arranging for its finance. But this kind of world requires that we oppose the irrational ideas and ideologies, whether they’re found in religions or political, that are crippling and destructive. Many individuals find in religion a comfort/inspiration that can be found elsewhere, without the downside of religion. You can find a lot of my work on The Atlas Society website, www.atlassociety.org. I also call your attention to my “Objectivist Secular Reader,” which is described at this link:
http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth-13-2036-Obectivist_Secular_Reader_Published.aspx
You can find most of the articles The Atlas Society website if you do some looking around but it’s best to get the book! As to my knowledge, I have a Ph.D. and I'll let you judge from my ideas and writings!
To illustrate:
The highest value for me is to live a happy, fulfilling, flourishing life.
Why is this the highest value? Why does "happy" for example have more value than "sad"? While fulfilling than non-fulfilling?
Those are excellent questions and just the sort of discussion I like (oops, there’s a value judgement!) to hear. We are creatures with a capacity for rational thought. We are self-conscious and have subtle minds, emotions, and intellects. And we have, at a certain level, free will and free choice.
To me, the purpose of the science of ethics is to deal with the meaning and implications of these facts, which is what Aristotle, Rand, Cicero, Thomas Aquines, and others do through a critical, rational process.
So everyone, even you, has (assumes or knows) values/knowledge/truths that cannot be proven/known by reason alone.
Yourself included. You too have a religion - defined as truths and values held that are not known/proven by reason alone.
Objectivists blind spot is precisely here, that they have a religion while denying the sphere even exists. That's why I was pursuing yours as an illustration.
I was thinking I may have missed something in your post.
Was it an answer to:
Why does “happy” for example have more value than “sad”… fulfilling than non-fulfilling?
But the foundation for knowledge is axioms that cannot be denied, i.e. you must accept their truth in order to discuss them or anything else. They are:
1) Existence exists.
2) A thing is what it is, i.e. A is A.
3) I am conscious.
See Aristotle’s Metaphysics for the first two especially. To acknowledge the truth of these propositions requires no gods nor is to do so an arbitrary action. You must accept their truth even to discuss them. Aristotle observed that if someone says anything at all, then what they say is something and something distinct from other things they might say and thus assumes that existence exists and A is A. If someone will say absolutely nothing at all, there’s nothing to argue about!
Just as I (and you, I assume) reject the moral equivalence, say, between Nazism, Communism, and a free republic that protects individual rights, you must reject epistemological equivalence between faith, that is, holding out certain beliefs as not based on nor subject to rational, critical analysis, and knowledge based on evidence and reason.
And it doesn’t do to argue that reason, evidence, etc. are good for some things (science) but not for others. First, “Why?” And “How do you know? By what epistemology?” Second, you attempt to use rational analysis in your argument to limit rational inquiry. You can’t have it both ways.
Introspection, by the way, does constitute observations upon which some argue for a belief in god. Introspection is a valid place to start but ultimately you must move on to a systematic, critical approach to knowledge.
Good luck!
Yes, axioms or absolute truths.
As you know, these cannot be proven using reason/logic, else they would become conditional and require a new absolute, ad infinitum.
As for requiring no gods, religion does not require gods, deism does.
I am defining religion as that area of knowledge/truths/values beyond the sphere of reason/logic.
The three absolutes you list are foundational for science; however, they do not underpin a system of values. They would, by themselves be as useful to Nazism, Communism, Objectivism, Facism, Christianity, Atheism, etc.
As for the limited value of rationalism, we’ve just discussed it: You must have axioms outside the capacity of reason to know/prove. It does not mean one should not, cannot use reason/logic, it can even be used to prove its own limitation.
The same with pure empirical science.
Which leaves us to how you know/prove what you stated as your highest value: “to live a happy, fulfilling, flourishing life”.
Based only on the limited set of absolute truths you’ve given, one can as easily arrive at a highest value of living a sad, unfulfilling, stagnant life.
Your religion lies in the absolute values in between. What are they?
That the creator Himself has to be uncreated is not a refutation, it is a valid commentary.
I agree that “accepting every word of the Bible as true without subjecting the belief to true, rigorous, critical thinking” is wrong. This is why I am Catholic and not a Bible-alone Protestant. It is my Church who produced the Bible in the first place, precisely as a result of rigorous, critical, painstaking analysis.
Christianity is complex. Faith is an element of it, as it deals with the supernatural, but it also rests on solid reason. Whne people reason, they make mistakes of reason. Hence the endless heresies, that you mention, Protestantism being the modern one. Scientism and materialism, in which you seem to believe, is an error of reason also.
It is true that transubstantiation is a miracle that does not have a scientific explanation. However, the desire of the Creator to be an intimate part of our lives, — something that lead to the begetting of the Son, as well as His death, resurrection and trasnubstantiation — is in itself prefectly rational. Since God is love, it is rational for God to love you, in ways humans cannot love. Hence the miracles.
But this begs the question, “How to you have knowledge outside of experience or evidence that is subjected to reason and logic?” All you can appeal to is a feeling—you probably call it “faith”—the same basis for the alleged knowledge claims that are asserted just as strongly by members of other religions, claims that are contrary to yours as a Christian. So you ultimately have no objective standard by which to discover or, in the case of axioms, validate truth.
On the methodology and logic of deriving values via reason, that's a book-length discussion. I'll simply refer you to Ayn Rand short essay, “The Objectivist Ethics,” which does a fine job on this issue.
Everyone either 1) knows 2) assumes they know 3) just assumes - some truths or values in this category.
As to whether one actually "knows" or assumes, we can leave to another discussion on epistemology if you wish.
My point here is that everyone, yourself included, hold truths and values that are outside the faculty of reason/logic to know/prove. And that you and most Objectivist would deny the category even exists. A self-provable fallacy.
We were examining yours begining with your stated highest value of "happy..."
We can start there or another place if you will, but we will inevitably get to (quite quickly) a value statement (truth) that you know or assume outside of your faculty of reason.
So, for you, why is "happy" better than "sad"?
So, all other conditions being equal, why is "happy" better than "sad"?
I will mention that when discussing ethics you don't start with, “Why is it better to be kind rather than cruel?” or any other such dichotomy. The key is to ask, “Why do we need ethics in the first place?” “What facts of reality give rise to the necessity for a code of values?” Aristotle's Nicomacheon Ethics is an entire book on the subject. I obviously like Rand's approach.
I will mention one example from her to whet your appetite. She asks, “Would an indestructible robot need ethics?” She says “No” because 1) It can't choose, it has no free will; and 2) No choice would make any difference to its existence anyway since it's indestructible.
Good luck in your search for the true and the good! Just use a methodology that will get you there, not the fuzzy fallacy of faith!
Good luck in your search for the true and the good!
Don't you want to join me?
check out Rand's short essay “Objectivist Ethics”,
As I said, I'm quite familiar with Rand.
I studied her quite extensively. The problem with her ethics is very simple:
Ethical values known using reason/logic alone are, by definition, conditional. This is a foundation for, once again by definition, relative values, also known as relativism.
This, as I said earlier is the hole or blind spot in Objectivism - and it's a big one that stunts it considerably. Perhaps in your position you can change that and achieve a significant accomplishment.
I was inviting you to prove the Objectivist problem for yourself. I'm not asking for a dissertation, but one simple proof.
I don't believe you hold that ethics are relative. This is where Objectivism fails even you.
I'm don't why you would avoid this simple request if you have confidence in your beliefs. Would you care to tell me?
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