I agree, Sair. And what you describe is part of a larger phenomenon. The religionist mentality which attempts to conflate science and emotionalized opinion hears its echo in similar apples and oranges attempts in nearly every area of human experience. The fundamental difficulty is the human propensity for belief itself. This propensity for belief is to some extent necessary in that it serves infants, toddlers, and children as far as surviving their parents until that wonderful time of teenage rebellion, which in fact is the time of claiming one’s autonomy as best one can. Unfortunately, most educational systems stemming from agrarian/hunter-gatherer cultures somewhat modified by industrialization, are not invested in more than cursory skills aimed at minimal economic competence, save for a few. The educational system is now even less accommodating of our age where the means of production has transited from machinery to information, especially that surrounding financial instruments.
What I am saying is that we humans in general are the living mental dinosaurs in an age that ought to be populated by masses who have achieved great wisdom, particularly in matters pertinent to psycho-spiritual development. And yet, our major religions, particularly the Abrahamic religions, are anchored in distortions of actual Ways of Knowledge to the point that those distortions have become prophylactic against the very object of their alleged intent. The entire serio-comic debate surrounding evolution is evidence of that.
Such a debate is never going to serve as other than a distractive bonfire until the participants in it grow up to the point where they understand the intrinsic root of both forms of the Golden Rule and the actual reason for the two Great Commandments attributed to Jesus. And that needs to happen in the scientific community as well as the religious, remembering that each is founded on very different ways of dealing with information, each of which needs clarification and respect, and which though relative,
have their own provinces, the mixture of which wreaks havoc.
So the debate here might very much and very far more usefully be about the role of critical thinking in both provinces, but especially in religion, and the general growth and maturity of the human population in self-knowledge transferable to the battered scene of world relations. Given that the very structure of most languages, particularly English, is unaccommodating of some fundamental spiritual subtleties, and that most cultures today are fundamentally adversarial even within themselves, never mind toward each other, there may not be much hope for that.
Despite faith in a second coming, a vastly and tragically misunderstood concept, no one said that the human experiment has to work out with success for the species. In fact it is evident that we are by light years more interested in and working for the comfort of a few of our race, the about 5% that own more than half of world wealth,* than we are in the survival of the planetary population and is habitation. We are making ourselves the dinosaurs by not growing beyond the lizard part of our own brains when we have had all along the means of incorporation and transcendence into a heaven on Earth, had we wanted it. As it is, we don’t even see the tools in our hands that could precipitate that very desirable end.
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* UN stats, as seen on [www.miniature-earth.com](www.miniature-earth.com) & dynamics of which on [www.storyofstuff.com](www.storyofstuff.com) and [www.howtoboilafrog.com](www.howtoboilafrog.com)
