The Bible tells us that we should not rejoice when our enemy stumbles, but that is indeed hard, and I had to fight to suppress a twinge of a smile when I read that the right-wing American Christian evangelist Tony Perkins has lost his house when it was swept away in a flood. For years this person has been preaching that floods, hurricanes and natural disasters are God's punishments on homosexuals and abortionists and I was left wondering how he will explain this to his poor family who have suffered a tragedy that their husband and father has assured them is reserved for moral degenerates. In addition, if such disasters are punishment for abortionists and homosexuals, I also wonder which category he fits into and how he will explain that to his poor family? Perhaps he fits both! I do of course feel compassion for his family as they cannot be held accountable for the insanity of their husband and father and they are suffering great loss, but the Bible also tells us that the sins of the father will be visited upon the children, so his family will be quite justified in holding Mr Perkins responsible for their tragedy. All this is, of course, God's Truth and His/Her will.
It must be wonderful to know the truth because it absolves you of any responsibility to think for yourself. However, if I may paraphrase a great American (John Wayne), when I hear someone telling me they know the truth I reach for my gun, because people who know a truth have an unattractive disposition to kill all of us who disagree with them. As you know, I have an admiration for Karl Marx amongst others, but I could never be a communist, why, because Lenin poisoned Marx’s works by declaring them to be a truth. “Marxism is scientific, therefore it is true” he wrote and condemned the communist movement to become an intolerant form of totalitarian thought with the blame landing squarely on the unfortunate Marx. When Marx claimed to be applying scientific techniques to his work he was referring to his empirical methodology utilising research and data, he was most certainly not proclaiming a truth. Marx told us that he had discovered the inexorable laws of human development, but, as Alfred Marshall tells us, when an economist uses the term law, he/she is simply referring to what he calls, general tendencies, telling us that “the term ‘law’ means nothing more than a general proposition or statement of tendencies, more or less certain, more or less definite”. The term law is ‘a statement that a certain course of action may be expected under certain conditions by members of a social group’ and, whilst Marx did indeed declare the inevitable collapse of capitalism, it would be a very foolish person today who could look at our world and say that Marx was completely wrong. Marx was perhaps arrogant and overconfident in his predictions, but can hardly be blamed for proclaiming a truth.
If you believe in truth you are inevitably set on a totalitarian path because everyone else is by definition wrong and you have total knowledge that cannot be refuted. You must, in the cause of proclaiming and advancing your truth, be intolerant. That is the main problem with religion, there are a million 'truths' out there and their adherents are the most intolerant and vicious people on the planet. The truth shall set you free an ardent evangelical told me with great enthusiasm. Oh no it won’t I replied, it will enslave me and poison my brain, making me arrogant, intellectually sterile and an intolerant bigot, and the worst part, it will justify my intolerance and bigotry, it will even justify me killing other human beings in the name of love. It always intrigues me how the love of a god produces a hatred of people.
My freedom came when David Hume showed me that there is no such thing as an absolute truth, that all things are relative and all science a matter of probability, not certainty. By showing us that we cannot know an absolute truth makes David Hume, in my opinion, the greatest of thinkers. Hume's scepticism liberates, destroys dogma and is the antidote to bigotry, discrimination and sectarianism. If you want to be truly free, I suggest a healthy dose of scepticism to rid your mind of the poison of certainty and show you how little you really know. So, just as I am not a communist, neither am I a Marxist in the sense that people use that phrase. I admire Marx and accept much of his work, but if you are a reader of this blog you will know that I read more Adam Smith than Marx. I am not a patriot of course, no intelligent person is, but I confess to a pride that two of the greatest thinkers in history, and certainly in modern history, were Scots. So, if I find that Marx, Hume and Smith all agree on something, then who am I to argue? You have been warned.
Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat
No comments:
Post a Comment