Since 1633, when Galileo was called by the Inquisition to answer for his theory that the earth revolved around the sun, there has been an ever growing tension between science and religion; or to put it another way, between what we can know to be "true" with any testable certainly, which can always be changed if evidence proves such "truth" is false, and what we simply choose to "believe" is "true," which is considered to be "absolute," simply because it can never be falsified.
And while the greatest heroes of science are those who have done the rigorous work of discovery and experiment that have so often changed our understanding of the world and ourselves, the heroes of religion are the saints and "martyrs" who have either devoted their lives to keeping human understanding grounded in perspectives of the past, or who have died out of their religious devotion and absolute refusal to admit they could ever be wrong.
Today, we see similar tensions rising between Capitalism and Christianity.
Christianity, it need not be said, was founded by a nomadic Arab who's poverty was only surpassed by his devotion to helping the poor and the powerless. Today, however, it is a religion that champions the rich and the powerful as deriving their wealth and privilege from God every bit as much as the monarchs of medieval Europe claimed their own power and authority was proof of the divine right of Kings. Where once it was a devotion to saving the poor, today Christianity has become little more than a devotion to emulating the rich.
Capitalism, which affords the wealthy few a life of leisure that surpasses even that of the great Pharaohs of Old Testament Egypt, has succeeded in not only selling people into their own bondage through a diversity goods and services (much of the development of which was paid for out of their own pocket in the form of taxes), but has marketed those products with all of the sophistication and manipulation of a certain famous serpent selling fruit in the garden of Eden.
In addition to using advertising as a way of using people's own endorphins against them, Capitalism has also succeeded in convincing American Christians that it is a economic "science," even though the entire idea of America's style of "capitalism" is based on the writings of people like Herbert Spencer and William Sumner, who, in an attempt to legitimize their own filed of sociology (which was still rather new and therefore distrusted by the majority of Christians in America at that time), argued that Capitalism was as legitimate an economic science as Darwin's theory of evolution was to biology.
That Christians are generally skeptical of everything that threatens or seems to threaten their own sacred "beliefs," never seemed to deter them from accepting the divine legitimacy of an economic perspective - based as it was in Spencer's sociological perspective of "survival of the fittest," that Darwin himself claimed could not have been further from his own ideas of "natural selection" - that was solely grounded in the science of evolution that those same Christians rejected as being completely heretical. How ironic.
In short, Christians accepted the economic "theory" of Spencer's "survival of the fittest" as scientific, by first accepting in the legitimacy of the relatively new "science" of sociology, then in the validity of the claim that economics was in fact a "science," and lastly in the idea that Spencer was himself a kind of Moses figure in his proclamations, even though the entire edifice of the unholy trinity of these ideas were all based on the 'intelligently designed" confabulation of a scientific theory that those same Christians all rejected as being antithetical to their own religion!
And by doing so, such Christians only proved that a person's willingness to "believe" something without any evidence to support it, and indeed even agaisnt plenty of evidence that disproves it, only prepared them to believe anything at all.
Comments
Post a Comment