A National Day of Reason, a secular contrast to the National Day of Prayer, I admit gives me mixed feelings. There are two reasons for this.
The first reason is simply that a National Day of Reason strikes me as a sort of me-tooism which some excitable - and more polite, I should add - members of the secular community go through every now and again. (A similar example is the 'tree of reason' idea - a tree with the names of scientific discoveries stuck on it, to be placed at town halls as a complement for menorahs and Christmas trees and so on.) The rationale is understandable but silly to anyone on a moment's reflection.
I don't imagine many atheists - or laymen with a science fetish - would propose a National Day of Reason if there wasn't a National Day of Prayer sitting around.[1] To put it on the same day as the National Day of Prayer means that reason isn't even the focus. If it were in mid-June I'd see the point to it. As it stands, it is me-tooism, plain and simple.
The second reason the National Day of Reason gives me mixed feelings is that I am annoyed by the deification of reason and rationality among secularists.[2] Please do not misunderstand me: Reason is a wonderful thing and one of the most useful tools we have as humans. My objection is that reason without sufficient data ranges from the interesting but unprovable to the useless to the dangerous. I am entirely in favour of reason, as I am sure most people are; however, if you're going to deify reason in opposition to faith,[3] it should be as a trinity with empiricism and skepticism.
It is not (just) that religions are often irrational which means that they are not true; it is that there is insufficient empirical evidence to suggest that religions are true.
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[1] Some would, surely. But some people are strange.
[2] The charge of 'that is irrational' carries as much weight and venom among some atheists as 'that is immoral' does among many Christians.
[3] Which is, to put it mildly, a terrible way of verifying truth claims.
Not that it says anything about Obama because he has eaten dog, but it is such a great platform on which copious numbers of jokes can be built.
ReplyDeleteBut again, neither romney or obamas dog issues mean anything, one is just funnier than the other.
I don't know how I managed to get this on the wrong post.
ReplyDeleteI was a wee bit confused there. I am impressed.
DeleteThis is the post where you make allusions to the French Revolution. The dog post is the other one.
Vive la France.
ReplyDeleteI figured out how I managed this. I had both posts open in different tabs and I left to run an errand. Then I picked the wrong tab, commented and exited the window.
I haz Skillz.
You make a great point here. As a member of the secular community, I have seen oodles of godless folks jump to some pretty un-reasoned conclusions (veganism, organic, anti GMO, protectionist.) It's like the term "free thinkers." Everyone, everyone, seems to think they are a free thinker. There's a lot of hubris in saying you are a better thinker than everyone else because you don't believe in a god.
ReplyDeleteMany secularists act as if they (we?) have all the answers by virtue of our reasoning ability. I have visited quite a few blogs whose authors proudly announce that they will delete any 'irrational' comments.
ReplyDeleteA disbelief in a deity is not enough to break us from a long personal and evolutionary history of taking mental shortcuts in reasoning. And yet there are some skeptics who are not skeptical of their own reasoning abilities.
And anyway, I'm too reminded of the Cult of Reason during the French Revolution to be comfortable with an NDR.