IGM Pithy quotes at the Expense of Religion

Inter-Galactic-Memo
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: Pithy quotes at the expense of religion
August 22, 2009


Here is a quote I found on my Google homepage this morning. It is from Stephen Weinberg, arguably one of the most brilliant Physicists this country has ever produced. I have been reading his stuff or reading about him for thirty years. He was one of the three people who unified the Weak Force and the electromagnetic force, (a “really big deal”) and many other things. The quote:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
- Steven Weinberg

Well, it’s pithy. And I’m sure he has genuine feelings about the subject, but it is always surprising when ostensibly intelligent people say patently ridiculous things. This statement is so obviously and purposefully a raging oversimplification, falsehood and deception that one staggers at its ignorance—especially in the light of an IQ hovering in the stratosphere. It is duplicitous and inaccurate.

Let’s turn it around, shall we?

With or without science, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes science.

How do ya like me now, Stevie?

I can name just as many egregious abuses in the name of “science” and research (especially if one includes alchemy) as he can religion. And who would even argue that good people do bad things? Or that bad people occasionally do good things? That should be so obvious that a pithy aphorism hardly seems necessary. But Steve felt strongly enough about this that he offered an inaccurate, provocative statement I’m sure he knew to be misleading. No doubt, like approximately everyone who feels this way, he had one or more negative experiences with religion. Well who hasn’t you sheep-dip swilling, emotional pauper?

This memo is not the place to list the intentional and accidental abuses of science over the centuries. But they exist. Why? Because people are Human. For those religionists out there, we call that Mortal, or Fallen. For Weinberg to suggest that there is some kind of division—a quantifiable demarcation—by which we can determine who is good and who is evil, is monstrous.
“Everybody who goes to church, stand over here. Okay, you guys are the only ones who ever do evil things.”
To suggest that only through the religious experience can evil be perpetrated on the world is really beyond the pale. If I were the Science Czar (and under Obama there is one) I would give Steve a long Time-Out. Bad boy! I would send him to a re-education camp like that modified drive-in in Red Dawn where Charlie Sheen fails to rise to the level of acting again. In fact, now that I think of it, let’s mention some of those real re-education camps, concentration camps, etc., of the last century. Hitler comes to mind, and his cadre of Third Reich scientists who came up with the Final Solution. How about Mao, and Pol Pot, Stalin and the Gulags? The North Korean regime? The North Vietnamese? The list goes on. All good little atheists, doing their things not only without the benefit of religion, but as various attempts to eradicate it. But hey, they only murdered 300 million people between them, give or take, so what’s the big deal? (That’s the population of the US, by the way.)
And yes, I can mention Jim Jones as well, and the Spanish Inquisition (which no one ever expects) and the Salem witch trials and Ireland, and on and on. So what?
The problem is this. Weinberg says something mildly humorous, stating what sounds like some kind of revealed truth, and doesn’t have the guts, or character, to think about the consequences. What if some redneck from Alabama read that? Lacking the IQ of most Opossums, he might feel as if he’d had an epiphany and abandon his snake-charming church forever. (You see what I did there? It’s so easy.)

Lots of people hate religion, and/or want nothing to do with it. That’s fine. Who cares? We can’t all be perfect. Besides, without them there wouldn’t be a Law of Opposition. But it gets really old when self-appointed arbiters of reality don’t even come close to their chosen goals. Weinberg is a physicist. His life-long pursuit has been to discover and describe “reality”, truth. And he says something like this? It kind of puts him in the same camp as Rowland and Molina, the “Hole in the Ozone” scamps. (Two more scientists who managed to do evil). Weinberg has been one of my heroes for years, but now I’m going to have to relegate him to “really-smart moron” status. It’s almost like scientists didn’t like Believers, or felt superior to them. But that couldn’t be right. Right?