Maher, you Fool! Science is Your Religion

"Those poor stupid people back in ancient times, they didn't have the Right Idea about how the world Works: as a vast Cosmic Machine; so it's understandable that they would make up silly stories to explain the world. We have the Truth, the Scientific Method. All debate ends with our method. We know better. "

That's the worst lie about mythology! Maher has absolutely no idea what he's talking about. He very plainly doesn't know the first thing about comparative mythology. He's just substituting the Myth of the Cosmic Machine for all others. He questions the certainty of others. What makes him so certain about scientific analysis? Science can't know everything.

Mr. Maher, are you a machine? Can you drop your assumptions for a while, and really Be in the world? Your science, you fool, is your religion. It frames everything you think. What's it like, Zen asks you, to think outside the frame?

Can you imagine being in the world prior to conceptualizing it in terms and symbols? If not, then whence come these very words? If you can't think without words, where do words come from? What is in the silence and the spaces between these words?

We use words like cups. We dip them into the ocean of inchoate meaning, fill them with our heart-felt thoughts, pass them over, where they now self-empty simply by being present. If you haven't already noticed, this is the inspiration for that very Zen delight, the tea ceremony.

Maher says he's "just asking questions," after already making the baseless accusation that religions are responsible for all the bad in the human world. As if!

As if the oppression of women by men, females by males, only occurs after the invention of religion. As if child rape and infanticide only began after religion was invented. After if war of tribe upon tribe, troop upon troop, only began after the invention of religion.

What a crock! Male dominance has always been the norm among primates; damn few primates are matriarchal, but there are some. Infanticide is a primate tradition: that's what those enormous gorilla canines are for. The sterotypical gorilla infanticide method is a bite to the cranium; chimpanzees typically use a disembowelling bite to the belly. A mother's boyfriend is the single biggest threat to an infant's life, bar none. That's true all across the animal "kingdom." (Gee, how did politics and religion show up in Maher's hallowed science, and just in one word like that?)

Maher assumes that, before religion, we lived in some sort of natural utopia--dare I say, a garden of Eden? We had no oppression, no infanticide, no wars, like was just blissful, I suppose.

Yeah, and the free market is our only hope, right? I've heard this story. The cosmos is a machine, it says, and we're just dust motes, insignificant particles, mere building blocks. Best thing to do is, keep stupid humans and their stupid religions from throwing sand in the gears of Life.

Agnostic, my ass! Maher is a hard-core Scientist.



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