Skip to main content

Silence & Opium

If you watched the movie, Silence, which tells the story of two 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priests who travel to Japan in an attempt to locate their mentor who is rumored to have committed apostasy, and to propagate Catholicism.

But, as a mental experiment, consider what would happen if we did not traverse through time in a forward motion, so that we are unable to see the hurricanes created by our various butterflies until sometime long after we are gone.

Could Christ, for example, have ever predicted the countless horrors perpetrated in his name?

But if we could instead traverse from those hurricanes back through time, to those moments, and indeed those butterflies, from whence they emanated, would we still see such actions as wise or moral?

If the priests  depicted in the movie Silence, who sought only to Christianize China for God, could see the horrible toll their religion would be used to create in the opium trade, when Christian England forced the sale of such a drug upon both India and China a century later, would they still feel that their work was for the one true God, and the salvation of souls?

Would Oppenheimer have  worked on the atom bomb, or would he have at least tried to sabotage it, if he knew the horrible devastation his monster would produce?

Would the German alchemist Hennig Brand, who discovered phosphorus while living in Hamburg in the 1660s, have abandoned his search for gold in the properties of urine, if he'd known that his discovery would be used to firebomb that same city three centuries later, during World War II?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are Republicans Pro Life?

Most people don't realize that the Supreme Court has been in the hands of the Republican party since at least 1970! In fact, even in the landmark case of Roe v Wade that legalized abortion, SCOTUS was inhabited by 6 Republicans and 3 Democrats, and the vote was 7 to 2. One of the reasons is that the Republican Party has absolutely ZERO desire to win on the abortion issue. And that's because abortion gives the GOP a clear focal point with potentially unlimited organizing power. And it's an even simpler message to sell than religion, since we are "pro-life." (if that was true, however, they wouldn't be actively trying to repeal healthcare for up to 30 million Americans, nor would they be so pro-gun, pro-war, pro-death penalty, pro welfare cuts, pro- social security cuts, pro- drone strikes, etc). The Republican party officially became "pro-life" in 1976, thanks to Jesse Helms (R-NC). The only reason no serious challenge was brought within the pa...
  The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter even by a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” James Baldwin   

The Clash of Religious Beliefs with Reality: Over Simplicity in a Hyper Complex World

God is the anthropomorphism of  our hope that life has a "happily ever after" ending, where there is no such thing as death and suffering, which we anthropomorphize in the form of the devil. In a sense, we are taking ideas and turning them into phantom figures of our selves, with angles and demons being projections of our own souls and our penchant for good and evil.  We see this when we anthropomorphize the act of gift giving into Santa Clause and think in terms of "old man winter" and "father time." We even reverse this process by describing ourselves as living in the springtime of our youth or the autumn of our years.  Religion takes this habit to another level, however, and teaches people to "believe" that the personifications we rely on to describe our hopes and fears are actual "beings;" beings from whom all of the characteristics we tend to associate with ideas of life and death, good and evil, necessarily emanate. Thi...