Rosh Hashanah: Science vs Religion

I was actually quite disappointed with the content of this video. Hashanah basically spends half an hour trying to explain an extremely invalid point about the role religion plays in society now that science has taken its rightful place in explaining how the world works and how we got here. At 17:45 Dawkins raises the question of whether or not the stories told by the Hebrew Bible are meant to be taken literally or as symbolic of important lessons humans should be taught, and at 18:16 Hashanah responds with an interesting question. I think that this aspect of religion, if indeed symbolic, would be of great benefit to society. There are, however, two problems I have with this.

Firstly, creationism would be a beautiful way of introducing early societies to the basic ideas of how things come to be if it didn't throw itself completely off track. Genesis does not simply provide a stripped down explanation of things we can explain in their entirety nowadays, but rather a story similar in quality to that of the stork when explaining where babies come from. Here is an example of what I mean.

Genesis 1
3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

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14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.


Note how it claims that the stars (and therefore the sun) were made separately from the light in the sky which appeared before them, and that darkness exists in the same way that light does. If the purpose of this book is to provide people with a basic and metaphorical understanding of life, why does it not do this scientifically for people who could not possibly know these things at such a point in time?

Leviticus 11
13 “‘These are the birds you are to regard as unclean and not eat because they are unclean: the eagle,[a] the vulture, the black vulture, 14 the red kite, any kind of black kite, 15 any kind of raven, 16 the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, 17 the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, 18 the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, 19 the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

Apparently the people of Israel were too simpleminded at this point in time to comprehend the fact that a bat is in fact a mammal and not a bird. Is this what Hashanah is trying to communicate? Does he not know his own holy book(s)? From verses like this I conclude that such a religion never had any intentions of introducing the human species to the answers it wanted and/or needed when it may not have understood or accepted factual answers that we have nowadays thanks to science.

Secondly, religious texts such as the Bible and the Quran are famous for teaching barbaric morals that have absolutely no place in any society, regardless of what stages of development they are at. There is no justification for God teaching this to people:

Deuteronomy 21
18 If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, 19 his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. 20 They shall say to the elders, “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.” 21 Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid.

If this is by any chance symbolic, who on earth would want to teach their children through such brutal metaphors? I'm shocked that someone like Dawkins would even meet halfway with a person on the topic of religion in modern society when this is what their faith advocates.

The scientists never said that they support religion. What they did say is that it was neutral to them (the neuro-scientist), that they don't need it (the physicist), and that it is not always the most evil thing imaginable (the biologist). Any indication further than that was the creation of the interviewer after the conversation through narration.

All that being said, Capitalism is the bigger problem and in most cases religion isn't even an issue. We shouldn't harp on it too much since that would be counter-productive. Michael Albert puts it nicely.

Where did you get the idea that they might have said those things? Obviously Rosh Hashanah was narrating the programme in favour of his own ideas as that was what he set out to illustrate with the interviews. I'm just shocked that Dawkins didn't bring out his usual bunch of flowers on the topic of religion, or Judaism in particular.

I'll agree that, obviously, capitalism is a bigger problem in the world, but I don't see why that makes the issue irrelevant. Religion is not always free from politics, just as politics is not always free from religion. When people in the world are still being abused and killed over religious texts in 2012 I think we have a right to bring it up. Whether or not the true causes of these problems at their root is religion has little effect on what people will actually believe.

Yes religion is a plague. Its for weak minds and slaves. The Semitic ones are especially filled with slime shit. It would be my ultimate dream ( after government getting annihilated) to see them crushed. Fucking scum.