Polynomial

Being a person very interested in what “it” is all about, where did “it” all come from, and is there a divine being who made “it” all and rules over “it”, etc… I no doubt discovered the magic within this video somewhat later than most. But I suppose there is a reason lurking behind this. Namely, Richard Dawkins…

You see, while I am not religious in the slightest, nor have I any inclination to be religious or presume that there is a god that made everything, I can easily see the point of religion and why it came about i.e. how it bridged the gap in a world of man, who being given all the faculties of thought, reason and deduction, thought ‘he’ was special and above the other animals who surrounded ‘him’ and, no doubt in doing so, it must have seemed unfair to ‘him’ that, with all his inherent self worth, great abilities and success in life (building cities, growing food, developing artistic flows, etc…), he should suffer such great hardships when the chaos inherent in world deviated from the normal course of things and threw the predictability that he had become so accustomed to right out of the window of comfort’s little home… Being a creature of “why”, he must have sought explanations for these occurences. And religion would have seemed to provide all the “perfect” explanations that one needed (albeit, with some hindsight, in a very irrational way and self centered way).

Yes… Religion allowed us to explain what science could not at the time i.e. Chaos theory and the inherent unpredictability lying behind seemingly apparent stable cycles of weather systems over the short term. Why? Well, at the time science was nothing more but an infant, unable to talk or do anything by itself properly. However, as science has grown and developed it has also moved forward, shedding the teenage maligned convictions of childhood faerie land intermingled with everyday dreams, and replaced them with solid, empirical, real world facts that can be brutishly tried and tested. And with these facts, it is allowing us to build a majestic temple of Knowing, similar to that of the Tower of Babel. So… So far I agree with Dawkins…

But, having viewed religions like Buddhism and Taoism, I always felt that Richard Dawkins’ hard edged stance against religious doctrine was almost just as an extreme view as the idea “Religion” that he regularly leers at. With both Taoism and Buddhism there are hugely similar ideals that lie at the heart of science i.e. the search for truth and understanding, replacing stifling dogmatic ideas that serve more to bind and blind the general populous at large rather than free them of uncertainties… How can these branches of religious ideals be so in tune with facts of the universal laws and flows? Well… I can only begin to guess and suggest that what I have already done so in my past blogs… i.e. that we use the same structures and patterns that the universe uses to grow to think with i.e. we are part of a referential system of fractal evolution is space time. Just like the Mandelbrot set has small reoccurring pictures of the whole riddled throughout its being, so to are there structures of similar design riddled throughout the universe and our earthly and fleshy bodies:

So if we have these designs within us… Then surely we are parts of the whole. And if we are parts of the whole, using the same designs to “Be” and function with, then when we begin to know ourselves deeply (as meditation and other forms of mindfulness allow us to), we surely will begin to know the universe around us too. And as the similarities between what science’s shrewd empirical observations have show us about our origins and what the ancient philosophies of certain schools of Tibetan Buddhist thought/instinct have demonstrated, this idea is not as absurd as some might like to think. If you are not sure what I mean, please do research this idea for yourself. I’ll let the facts speak for themselves.

Islands of self similarity found within the whole...

So Dawkins’ adamant ridicule of religious doctrines, for me as an agnostic at least, can seem like the type of genocide that Hilter and the Third Reich wanted to posit through out humanity. Except, rather than achieving his means through the brutality of violence, bodily harm and war, he is persecuting memetic ideals and thus causing a strong tug in the opposing direction of religious flow. Which is in itself an extremist dedication. But having said all that, I still really do feel that Dawkins’ work is tantamount to mankind’s waking up… A waking up from religious intolerance, selfish driven greed, ideas of superiority and the resulting violence that sometimes ensues between the grating of patriotic ideals. And here, I think Dawkins is flying high… As Winston Churchill once said, “Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.” Obviously religion is no longer really needed to fulfill all of the roles that its human designers once expected of it. And Dawkins denial of there being a divine creator, even though it is a bit like a philosopher making a presumption about the liar paradox i.e. that it was either right or wrong, is enough to spark in this age of telecommunication a great and much needed debate on whether mankind will need religions in the same capacity that our forefathers once did.

But for the moment, let us place all that idealizing to one side… Here, contained within this twenty minute TED talk, Richard Dawkins sparkles wittily and spans the ideas behind atheism majestically with anecdotes and analogies that are more than fitting for the world’s climate of current beliefs vs. empiricism… Not to mention that it seems to carry the torch of this blog ever onwards, further and deeper into developing a knowing about the bizarre nature of the reality that we all find ourselves in. So sit back, have a giggle and enjoy this brute’s head trip: