In his last Channel 4 series, Root of All Evil?, the evolutionary biologist Professor Richard Dawkins explored how organised faith and primitive religious values blight our lives. But the fault line runs deeper even than religion. There are two ways of looking at the world – through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence – in other words, through reason. Reason and a respect for evidence are precious commodities, the source of human progress and our safeguard against fundamentalists and those who profit from obscuring the truth. Yet, today, society appears to be retreating from reason. Apparently harmless but utterly irrational belief systems from astrology to New Age mysticism, clairvoyance to alternative health remedies are booming.
Richard Dawkins - The Enemies of Reason (part 1)
Richard Dawkins confronts what he sees as an epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking. He explains the dangers the pick and mix of knowledge and nonsense poses in the internet age, and passionately re-states the case for reason and science.
Richard Dawkins - Enemies Of Reason - (Part 2)
The Irrational Health Service. Prof Richard Dawkins looks at how health has become a battleground between reason and superstition. A third of us now spend a total of over 1.6 billion a year on superstitious alternative remedies, but 80% of them have never been subjected to properly conducted trials.
Comments:
aHH, rICHARD Dawkins....your skepticism with alternative healing actually supports the awful government making drugs for band aid remedies in which they actually created the disease in the first place. Alternative medicine derived from ancient wisdom is the only way to heal oneself. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance due to genetics. We get our disease strictly from the modern environment. Nurture is the key. These “superstitious” practices are the very key to personal healing and peace.
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Atomosphere, could you please list the contributions alternative medicine has made to eradicating polio, or malaria, and what good has ever been accomplished from taking pictures of your aura? |
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Atmosphere, I don’t think Dawkins suggests we should not use alternative healing or ancient wisdom when those techniques work. For example, traditionally Alaskan Natives ate a diet of wild meat, herbs and berries. That diet has been replaced by sugar and processed meat with disastrous effects. Natives are returning to their traditional diet because it works. There isn’t anything illogical about it. Atmosphere your comment above seems to imply that ancient wisdom and logic are mutually exclusive. Not so. Logic implies we use ideas that work. |
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Atmo..."ancient wisdom”...yes, I see...it is all very clear to me now. Wait, which ancient wisdom are we talking about here? The stuff about the sun going around the earth and the planets influencing our health or maybe you mean the wisdom behind thinking that the circulatory system was the seat of thought. Which of these two should we readopt in modern times to get back to healing ourselves better? |
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on 12/21/2007