Sunday, March 05, 2006

Dawkins and "The Root of All Evil" BBC Special

On one of my trips over to London this year I had the privilege of seeing one of the episodes of the "The Root of All Evil" documentary on BBC hosted by Richard Dawkins, the author of "The Selfish Gene" and several other books on evolution and cognitive science.
The special is not available for purchase. It is sparsely available on the web. I had qualms about posting a copy of the special and discussing it in a searchable space on the web. Yet even for modern spiritual folks that are not dogmatic yet consider themselves religious and haven’t given away their minds – Dawkin’s history of religion and its consequences is extremely rationally done and well presented – let alone for all the agnostics (I don’t know and I don’t want to give my brain away to find out) and atheists (I have my own religion and it does not include a god) and the lethargics (I don’t know and I don’t care). Dawkin's specials are extremely important as part of a treatment regimen for this chronic, often fatal disease of fundamentalist, extremist, hate filled religious belief.
I guess I am a devout agnostic – someone that revels in the uncertainty and “unknowability” of the universe – but strives to understand anyway – A Sisyphus-ian dialectic if you will. A seeker is one that seeks – knowing that the destination is not really obtainable – but the process of seeking leads to a transformation of “the soul”. Whatever that soul is – reality, metaphor, the sum of a bunch of automatons running in our mind, some energy relationship in quantum mechanics that we may not (or may never) understand.
A cliché for sure, but it got that way because of its value: “It is the journey not the destination.” Dare I say this is a meme?
One is able to not know a god for certain and still have a reverence and spirituality for life and a value for it. Some of the most moral and caring people I know are areligious, even anti-religious. Some of the most evil people in history have been (and are) religious. Dawkin equates religious dogma and other-worldly beliefs and the behavior of religious extremists to recruit and seduce young Muslims and/or young Christians to hate and in extreme cases to murder and suicide “as a virus of the mind”. No other metaphor describes the process and the results as well. Bird flu may pail in comparison to the religious fundamentalist virus (meme).
I think I am going to arrange to serve a copy of the DVD - if I can ever get it downloaded via Bittorent. Serving this up is a sure way of getting plenty of unwanted attention from our growing numbers of fundamentalists out there in the world. So it goes...

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