The Mind In Chains

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty - Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) paleontologist, biologist, and science essayist 

 

 

A favorite theme of freethinkers is that the human mind is often bound by the chains of orthodoxy and religious superstition (which thought, by the way, I agree).

 

A thought not often given its due is that the so-called freethinker can also become bound in mind by slavish devotion to certain concepts.

 

There was a time, quite long ago, when religion and science weren't bitter enemies. I hate that today we are increasingly being goaded into a choice of accepting either one or the other.

 

The modern resurgence of atheism - the popular New Atheism (frankly, I found the "old" atheism more challenging) - is probably a reaction to theocratic-leaning religious fundamentalism, efforts to find a way to smuggle God into the public school's science classes and mandatory prayer back into the public classroom, jihadism, erosion of the separation of church and state, etc.

 

I suppose those things were reactions to modernism, the shrinking of our world and recognition of the vastness of cultural diversity, and what follows then, the rise of secularism. 

 

Yet through it all modernism has found ways to embrace both faith and reason. And from ancient times even as now reason has been able to stand on its own.

 

Science has marched steadily forward giving humanity deeper insights into the cosmos, and spirituality has been available to temper the starkness of those findings. 

 

It seems to me that true mental freedom cannot be dogmatic.

(Image credit: http://www.clker.com)