Ask Dr. Silverman 15 — Scribble Me This, Mathman!

By Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Herb Silverman is the Founder of the Secular Coalition of America, the Founder of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, and the Founder of the Atheist/Humanist Alliance student group at the College of Charleston. Here we talk about the highly probable human interventionism mistaken for divine interventionism and human literary productions mistaken for divine texts, and a whole lot more.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: At the end of the day, ancient peoples, human beings, probably men — males, wrote books in a illiterate period, in an illiterate part of the world, before the understandings of the modern scientific revolutions, where mystical beings did magical things and the ancient peoples believed supernatural things and in personalized amorphous forces and entities fighting for them and against them, above and below them, even through them. Those personal beings who could be petitioned with, who one could argue with, and who held the fortunes and fates of one’s life in their hands in some way; all the way up to the self-existent penultimate. To this day, these books have a professional protectorate class, scribes and priests and religious authorities and institutions of males — men, who provide the proper interpretations of the texts. Human books by natural-world-ignorant people. They could have known better if they had the information and the tools. They just didn’t. Some make logical rather than emotional or authority-based arguments for gods. Even if in some future context such gods were shown provable or, in some sense, modestly empirically reasonable, these would be reinterpretations unintended by the original authors. What does this mean for the North American favourite religions? How would this reasoning extend to the world’s religions? What makes this an unpalatable drink to swallow for the world’s faithful? How can secular and freethought people be polite and respectful in appropriate contexts and steadfast in equality in other proper moments? When our knowledge of things hits a wall, whether by talent or ability or interest, when can the religious and secular show proportionate humility to the evidence of the day on hand or, more properly, in hands? What might future religions become with reinterpretations or the crushing non-viability of some paths of argumentation and reasoning…