line.
And I would like to jump headfirst into a contemporary issue just to make this a little less abstract. Everyone knows about what's going on in apartheid South Africa. I would merely like to draw your attention to something recently produced, called the Kairos Document, derived from a Greek word meaning 'the moment of truth.' It was written by committed Christians of many races who are opposed to the apartheid system in South Africa. And in the context of what we were just talking about, let me just paraphrase a couple of paragraphs to get a feel about this. It says that state theology in South Africa employs almost exclusively the apostle Paul's view of the state as a power 'ordained by God' and commanding obedience. It comes from the remark, 'Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's,' without there being any detailed explication as to how you go about doing that. The regime elevates the concept of law and order above every other sort of morality. It goes on to state that in the present crisis and especially during the State of Emergency, 'State Theology' has tried to reestablish the status quo of orderly discrimination, exploitation, and oppression by appealing to the conscience of its citizens in the name of law and order.
And then later on,
This God is an idol. It is as mischievous, sinister and evil as the idols that the prophets of Israel had to contend with… Here we have a God who is historically on the side of the white settlers, who dispossesses black people of their land and gives the major part of the land to his 'chosen people.'… It is the God of teargas, rubber bullets, sjamboks, prison cells and death sentences. Here is a God who exalts the proud and humbles the poor, the very opposite of the God of the Bible……
How rare it is that religions-especially established religions- take the lead in confrontation with the civil authorities when a monstrous injustice is being done. How often it is that the religious authorities take the safe way and temporize or talk about the afterlife or talk about moving slowly or talk about this not being the proper function of religion. And then, on the other side, how often is it that the established religions make authoritative pronouncements on matters of science, matters of fact, matters where they run the desperate risk of being disproved by the next discovery?
This idea was very nicely summed up by Pierre-Simon, the marquis de Laplace, one of the great scientists in the post-Newtonian age, and also a partisan of the French Revolution. In his
Well, I have tried in this talk to give a further sense of how it is possible in various sorts of ways, ranging from brain chemistry to the wish of the political establishments to maintain power, to understand some of the key aspects of religious belief. By no means does it follow that religions thereby have no function, or no benign function. They can provide in a very significant way, and without any mystical trappings, ethical standards for adults, stories for children, social organization for adolescents, ceremonials and rites of passage, history, literature, music, solace in time of bereavement, continuity with the past, and faith in the future. But there are many other things that they do
I would like to conclude with a quote from Bertrand Russell, from his
I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true. I must of course admit that if such an opinion became common it would completely transform our social life and our political system. Since both are at present faultless this must weigh against it.
Eight
Tradition is a precious thing, a kind of distillation of tens or hundreds of thousands of generations of humans. It is a gift from our ancestors. But it is essential to remember that tradition is invented by human beings and for perfectly pragmatic purposes. If instead you believe that the traditions are from an exhortatory god and hold that the traditional wisdom is handed down directly from a deity, then we are much scandalized at the idea of challenging the conventions. But when the world is changing very fast, I suggest survival may depend precisely on our ability to change rapidly in the face of changing conditions. We live in precisely such a time.
Consider our past circumstances. Imagine our ancestors, a small, itinerant, nomadic group of hunter-gatherer people. Surely there was change in their lives. The last ice age must have been quite a challenge some ten to twenty thousand years ago. There must have been droughts and new animals suddenly migrating into their area. Of course there is change. But by and large the change is extraordinarily slow. The same traditions for chipping stone to make spears and arrowheads, for example, continues in the East African paleoanthropological sites for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
In such a society, the external change was slow compared to the human generation time. Back then traditional wisdom, parental prescriptions, were perfectly valid and appropriate for generations. Children growing up of course paid the closest attention to these traditions, because they represented a kind of elixir of the wisdom of previous generations; it was constantly tested, and it constantly worked. It is not for nothing that ancestors were venerated. They were heroes to subsequent generations, because they passed on wisdom that could preserve lives and save them.
Now compare that with another reality, one in which the external changes, social or biological or climatic or whatever we wish, are rapid compared to a human generation time. Then parental wisdom may not be relevant to present circumstances. Then what we ourselves were taught and learned as youngsters may have dubious relevance to the circumstances of the day. Then there is a kind of intergenerational conflict, and that conflict is not restricted to intergenerational but is also intragener-ational, internally, because the part of us that was trained twenty years ago, let's say, must be in some conflict with the part of us that is trying to deal with the difficulties of today. So I claim that there are very different ways of thinking for these two circumstances: when change is slow compared to a generation time and when change is fast compared to a generation time. There are different survival strategies. And I would also like to suggest that there has never been a moment in the history of the human species in which so much change has happened as in our time. In fact, it can be argued that in many respects there never will be a time when the change can be so rapid as it has been in our generation.
For example, consider transportation and communication. Just a couple of centuries ago, the fastest practicable means of transportation was horseback. Well, now it is essentially the intercontinental ballistic missile. That is an improvement from tens of miles per hour to tens of miles per second in velocity. It's a very substantial increment. In communication a few centuries ago, except for rarely used semaphore and smoke-signaling systems, the speed of communication was again the speed of the horse. Today the speed of communication is the speed of light, faster than which nothing can go. And that represents a change from tens of miles per hour to 186,000 miles per second. And never will there be any improvement on that velocity.
Now, it's a very different world if the fastest that a message can get to us goes from the speed of a horse or a caravel to the speed of light. The speed of light means that we can talk-in essentially real time-to anybody on the Earth or even on the Moon. Or consider medicine. A few centuries ago, most of the children born to the great houses of Europe died in childhood. And they had the exemplary medical care of the age. Today even quite poor people in some nations at least have infant mortality astonishingly less than the crowned heads of state in the seventeenth century Or consider the availability of safe and inexpensive means of birth control. It immediately implies a revolution in human relations and especially in the status of women. These are all things that have happened very recently, and you can think of many, many others, all of which involve not just a change in the technical details of our lives but changes in how we think about ourselves in the world. Very major changes, and therefore not a circumstance where the wisdom of, say, the sixth century B.C. is necessarily relevant. It might be, but it might not be. And therefore, for this reason as well-for this reason especially-wisdom may lie not in simply the blind adherence to ancient tenets but in the vigorous and skeptical and creative investigation of a wide variety of alternatives.
