This is as opposed to religion, is it? Religion does not tell us the good, it only tells us the false and mythical. What good is that?Mugwump wrote:Science has its place, but science does not tell us the good, it only tells us the true, and these are not the same thing.
Religion doesn't "tell us the good". Of course it doesn't. It tells us what it thinks is good, and if there is one thing religions are spectacularly bad at, it is thinking. For every example of something good that religion has brought into the world, it is trivially easy to find something bad. Let's stop pretending that religions do good. They don't. Not compared to the harm they bring.
You are, of course, perfectly correct to be alarmed about the lack of moral and ethical substance in modern life. It worries me too. Pretending that the now-dying Western religions brought more good than harm, however, is not sensible or helpful.
Yet some people still do it, even with the live example of Islam before us, and the truly terrible history of Christianity behind us. It is utterly irrational. But then, so is all religion.
(PS: I don't mind irrational. Nothing wrong with irrational at all. Some of our best and most memorable achievements are irrational. Being irrational is like sleeping: it's something we all need to do from time to time to keep us human. But pretending that making important decisions on the basis of irrationality is in any way sensible is just dumb. You might as well sleepwalk and drive.)
