Paul Fidalgo at The Morning Heresy, a freethinkers roundup site, has a plaint to utter concerning, well, what the competition is forcing him to do:
Bob Smietana at Religion News Service reports that Christian finance guru and COVID-denier David Ramsey is being sued—again!—for religious discrimination. The complaint says that Ramsey calls people who want to avoid getting or spreading COVID a “wuss” and anyone who disagrees with him on this point is a “moron.” In a novel twist, the plaintiff, Brad Amos, is suing on the basis of his own religious beliefs, with faith in science being a core tenet of said beliefs. I don’t claim to know how sincere Amos is about his belief being “religious,” but either way, it’s sad that in order to defend our right to stay alive and abide by facts, more and more it seems we have to act like those are religious convictions.
Here’s the thing: regardless of Fidalgo’s theatrical concerns, it’s not wrong to think of science as simply another approach to living. While a lot of different things can be said about religion, and for that matter very systems of philosophy, right at their foundation is their function as a way to understand, and react to, reality. Reality is a collection of events, some causally connected, some not, with many imperceptibilities (false negatives) and illusions (false positives) generated by our limited perceptual apparatus. How we interpret this collection is defined by our major belief system, which can be a member of the religious category, or scientific rationalism, or quite the number of less easily categorizable systems.
Nor is simultaneous use of several such systems excluded.
Scientific rationalists believe the direct study of what we hope is reality, and rigorous exclusion of claims that are unsupported by objective evidence, or violate the derived rules of reality, leads to an approach to life that results in continued survival and prosperity.
The religious, in following their theologies, hope for the same, in the main, if a point may be stretched in allowing the pleasing of supernatural creatures will also result in survival and prosperity.
In the end, like any system of logic, the foundations are always unprovable assumptions. That’s just how sufficiently powerful logical systems work. The fact that medicine and technology, building blocks of survival and prosperity, are primarily the result of scientific rationalism, does suggest that scientific rationalism has a better grip on how to reach the common goal.
But it’s important to recognize that all of these systems for comprehending reality are in the same category. Calling them belief systems or reality-comprehension systems is more accurate than religious views, as the latter refers to a sub-category, but in the end we can only hope that the evidence so observed supports our predilection in belief systems.
Fidalgo may need to get out the face paint.
