God and Science

Confusing the two can lead to atrocities.

(Substack 250 years ago)

Sage Hana and Margaret Anna Alice of Through the Looking Glass led a most stimulating conversation on Sage’s substack, on the nature of the Covidian true believer, how many came to be the zealots they are. The consensus seemed it is a combination of psy-ops and the appearance of the jabs in the midst of the fear campaign, though the commentariat speculated broadly. Sage’s Commentariat is lively.

Which Came First, the Cult or the Egg? Or the Chicken or the Zealotry? Or...something.

I ventured into the fray:

Writes Born on the Fourth of July 34 min ago

Liked by Sage Hana

“There is also a distinct fear of all things nature, that primed the covidians to become zealots. Science for them is what allowed us to climb out of primordial barbarism. It is also true that despite their pretensions to agnosticism and atheism, science has merely replaced God, or in some cases like proxy for God, in the infrastructure of their psyche. That they are ignorant of this makes them especially dangerous, as those of us who are dissenters on this come to represent the proverbial devil, demons and also uncivilized savages, and they are not constrained by any fear of God.”

“The Enlightenment” in the West is believed to be the point at which science led humanity out of the darkness of the past and the middle ages specifically, into a bright new age of reason, rationality and understanding. Sir Francis Bacon and his scientific method was a key to give the intelligentsia tools to climb out from the shadow of the Church. Hobbes slandered the past to make way for the future, Rene Descartes exclaimed “Dare to know!”, Sir Isaac Newton teased out the mechanistic nature of the material, macro universe, Leibniz pioneered science in the micro, John Locke reoriented political thinking about the the individual, Thomas Jefferson and the Federalists led the political revolution, while Galileo and Kepler turned our gaze to the stars.

There is another perspective about that, that Covid Policy and saber rattling around nuclear war is more evidence that the Enlightenment hypercharged some of our worst impulses.

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This fun video notwithstanding, humans are spiritual creatures, I say spiritual as opposed to religious, because religion is as old as civilization and the spiritual impulse is as old as humanity, which is as far as we know, a couple of hundred thousand and maybe a couple few million years older than civilization. Awe in the face of creation is innate to us.

I am certainly not the first to point out there is a religious quality to the woke phenomenon, and to science. The “covidian” attitude toward the jabs has all the hallmarks of religious faith. Faith, contrary to scientific thinking, is necessary to a healthy psychology, a lack of faith in anything is akin to mental illness.* The danger in a kind of religious faith in science is the same as the danger of religious faith in the Church, that the unquestioning attitude toward the intermediaries, the priesthood, allows the priesthood to lead the faithful unto atrocities against the unbeliever. Christians and Rationalists exterminating “savage” indigenous all over the world since the enlightenment is synonymous with Science today using pharmaceuticals to weaken, subjugate and kill the “useless eaters.” Covid jabs and passes are not really that different than “indulgences” giving the church and priests money as a kind of get into heaven card. The enlightened will line up for bimonthly multiboosters of every illness under the sun, accept covid passes and social credit scores tied to CBDC money, in the name of progress. ‘Heathen pagans’ are skeptical of all of that.

It is something of an irony that many of my favorite substack writers who I admire are agnostic to atheist, scientific materialist in their world view. Though I sense an undercurrent of spirituality that is somewhat tentative, wary of rebuke.

The true pathology of scientism as a quasi religion is most evident in the transhumanist crowd orbiting around but not exclusive to the World Economic Forum, the UN, World Health Organization and DC. A lot of people claim that it is a socialist movement, because of the common cause the corporatists and transhumanists have made with woke zealots, the latter of whom are of the marxist tradition. But I see it more as the global elite preying upon the religious impulse and faith of the masses. It is not socialist as much as scientism, as both an ideology and religion.

We aren’t going to challenge that with more science. That is one of the flaws I think, of the Covid dissident movement, the idea that if we just prove the science is wrong, that if we show people the truth scientifically, they will open their eyes. But it has become clear, the Covidians are not about science. Their embrace of the jabs is religious, and most of them aren’t going to be swayed by better science. Just as Christianity or Islam becomes fundamental to the very identity of those who adhere, to question the religion is to question one’s identity, which is incredibly difficult; for the covidian to question the jabs and covid policy is to question science which is to question their identity. Most people simply aren’t willing to do that, and only do so out of some necessity.

Neitzsche said God is dead, but he did not understand, Science would merely replace God. Science is not God, science is failing us, science is being used to enslave and kill us, the fix for that is not more or better science but a return to God. By a return to God, I mean something like the second religiosity of Oswald Spengler, the phenomenon he suggested appearing late in the decline of a civilization, when faith in the elite and their leadership is in a state of collapse. That should inform the covid dissident movement, but that would also require many in that movement to question their own assumptions and identity, and belief about our place in the universe.

My hope is that we can dispel that fear of nature inherent to most Religions and to Science and scientism, and make that part of the second religiosity.

• The psychologist Gregory Bateson showed that faith is essential to healthy psychology, that the absence of it is quite literally madness, the schizophrenic who obsessively finds over-arching meaning in every little thing, but also the catatonic who cannot participate in the world. We all have faith in a great many things, from believing that another will do as they say, to using our debit card to purchase something online, that there will be groceries on the shelf. - By way of John Michael Greer, After Progress: Reason and Religion at the End of the Industrial Age.