because I was making the point that organized religion doesn't necessarily cause ignorance but tends to feed on and encourage it to the extent that the ignorance of believers furthers the larger goals of the organization. The same is often true of other organizations, especially political parties. Your point, with which I agree, is that people also want to be ignorant, if only subconsciously, because their ignorance furthers their psychological needs. Needing money to rebuild St. Peter's in Rome in 1517, Pope Leo X collected alms called indulgences based on an earlier teaching that these were good works by which people could "buy" their way into Heaven. I don't know whether Pope Leo actually believed this, but he definitely capitalized on it. Churchgoers believed it, though, enough to contribute a lot of money, and they felt better knowing they would go to Heaven. (Martin Luther didn't believe it and came up with the doctrine of justification by faith, but that's a whole 'nother story.) Believing God will protect them from serpents, some pastors fondle rattlesnakes during church services, with mixed results. If the snakes don't bite them their belief is reinforced and everybody feels good. (If they get bitten they claim their belief was insufficient). Many strange things are believed in the name of religion or politics or sheer foolishness, but there is always a psychological reward involved.
You might find this op-ed in this morning's Minneapolis Star-Tribune interesting, whether or not you agree with it:
We humans ask two questions of the world: how and why. How does the world work, a really useful body of knowledge if we’re to survive; and why is there anything rather than nothing, what is the purpose or meaning of our lives? Before the 17th century, these questions were one question, why a necessary part of how; Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton all looked to nature in order to verify scripture, to find God. What they found was more nature, which natural philosophers, or “scientists,” as they came to be called, beheld more clearly and more usefully the more they forgot about why and concentrated on how. In time, the two ways of understanding the world became completely separate and were often in conflict.
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Problems arise when these two ways of knowing overlap. Ask a how authority about the purpose and meaning of life and you might be told that we’re in this world in order to pass our DNA on to future generations. Really? How has this motive produced the Taj Mahal, Bach’s “B Minor Mass,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Sgt. Pepper”? Surely there’s more to it than that.
Creationists run into problems when they read the Genesis creation story, a why narrative if there ever was one, as a how document, a scientific treatise. The people who wrote/compiled the Genesis account(s) — Moses, if you will — and the people who read and listened to it, would not have known what we mean by scientific fact; the scientific method of empirical verification under carefully controlled, laboratory conditions was thousands of years in the future.
Yet even some of these “pre-scientific” people read the Genesis creation story as a “poetic” or allegorical account of the world’s origin. St. Augustine asserted in the fifth century A.D. that the universe was created not in six days but in an instant of time, which is more or less what the Big Bang Theory says (though Augustine and a modern physicist might not agree on what happened after that instant).
http://www.startribune.com/one-man-s-journey-to-reconcile-reason-and-faith/493347531/
Is it possible to bifurcate one's beliefs from one's desire for proof?
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