Volume 2, Issue 4
4th Quarter, 2007


A New Opportunity to Teach and Succeed

Jack Harney

Page 3 of 5

How powerful are these religious forces? Richard Nixon’s cover up of a two bit bungled burglary at Watergate led to the resignation of supposedly the most powerful person in the world, the President of the United States. Yet, two American clergy of the Catholic Church involved in the scandal surrounding the sexual molestation of children have yet to be indicted for their offenses. They not only covered up the acts of the offending priests, but moved these pedophiles from parish to parish leaving unsuspecting families to become the future victims of these heinous crimes. In fact, Francis Law of Boston was conveniently dispatched to Rome to assume substantial duties at the Vatican and Roger Mahoney, then archbishop of Los Angeles, has since been elevated to the status of Cardinal.

Let me also share the extent of the problem in terms of the general public…the powerful religious hierarchy and their political panderers aside.

In an article in USA Today, dated September 12, 2006, the title reads, “View of God can reveal your values and politics”. [1] The subtitle was, “Baylor survey of religion maps four images of God that shape how Americans see the world”. This survey was conducted for Baylor University by Gallup. It asked 77 questions with nearly 400 answer choices and focused on how Americans viewed God on a more personal level. 91.8% of the 1,721 respondents, the largest study of its kind, said they believed in God, but the crux of the responses of how they personally “saw” God fell into 4 categories. Those categories, their definitions, and the percentage of people in each group are shown below.

Authoritarian: This view saw God as angry at sinners and takes part in the lives of individuals and governments. This person’s God was willing and able to exact whatever punishment he deemed necessary on the unfaithful. This group wants the government to operate on Christian values and support its belief systems through things like prayer in schools. 31.4% (Some of these people preach that 9-11 was our punishment from God for our tolerance of homosexuality…as limited as it is.)

Benevolent: This God, while still setting the rules, is more forgiving and is willing to accept repentant sinners into his arms. He appreciates good works as acceptable behavior for being a good person. Slightly more than half the people in this group want the government to advocate Christian values. 23%

Critical: This God has a judgmental eye on the world, but is not going to intervene either to punish or comfort. The people in this group are middle of the roaders. They have mostly traditional beliefs, but don’t go to church or affiliate with any particular religious groups. 16%

Distant: These are the new critical thinkers who see God as a cosmic force that created  the universe, but has left it to its own devices ever since. 24.4%

Atheists made up the last 5.2%

This report is very revealing. Introducing to the 91.8% of the people who believe in God that they, as Transhumans [2] may actually experience a God like state of consciousness is clear evidence of a major gap in understanding. Dangerously still, 42.9% of Americans, which includes all the Authoritarians and half of the Benevolents want the government to reflect their beliefs in how it makes and interprets laws and also protect their specific interests and belief systems. A silver lining in this report is that the Distants and the Atheists who total 29.6% have been growing in numbers over time and at least have the freedom to believe as they do. It was only 300 years ago in the late 1600s, when virtually everyone in these two groups would have likely been put on trial in Salem, Massachusetts as a heretic or a witch for stating their positions. Can you imagine what trouble Ted Kennedy would have been in his own native state back then?[3]

Maybe the most revealing part of this report is the section on the amount of education each group possesses. The report breaks down educational levels into two categories…College or more and High School or less. It is no surprise that 32.5% of the people in the Distant Group had a college education or more as opposed to only 23.9% in the Authoritarian Group. But even more revealing was the dramatic education difference between the Distant Group and the Authoritarians as respects having only a High School education or less. Only 14.7% of the people in the Distant Group had an educational level this low, while in the Authoritarian Group a whopping 40.4% fell into that category. The Authoritarian Group is by a substantial margin the least educated group of all. With the atheists only having 2.2% of their respondents falling into this category, the Criticals at 18.6 % and the Benevolents at 24%, it is clear that the more a person leans to dogmatic beliefs, the more likely they are less educated. 

I am in no way denigrating anyone’s educational level. However, it’s easy to see how now, as well as throughout history that the least educated people have been the most vulnerable to accepting fear based religious belief systems. They are also the easiest to be conned into providing financial support or worse yet, to have their energies enlisted to set someone’s stake on fire.

Of course, I’m not predicting anyone will be burned at the stake. However, making any claims that a new science may replace God’s control over immortality and even God himself, may be viewed as the most extreme claims ever made by science challenging entrenched religious dogma. In fact, any discussion of an immortality generated for Humans by science will be seen as a direct threat to the immortality taught in the Bible and the Qur’an where death is a requirement to experience it. The resulting fear generated both personally and promulgated by the religious hierarchy who will foment it, could be quite the maelstrom. History teaches that nothing coalesces a unity of disparate interests like a common enemy. Can you imagine Islam and Christianity joining forces to combat what they see as the handy work of the consummate “Evil One”? How scary is that? If the Singularity is thrust on the public with this type of dogma demising theme, it is not stretching the imagination to assume that grave danger may lie ahead.

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Footnotes

1. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “View of God can reveal your values and politics: Baylor survey of religion maps four images of God that shape how Americans see the world.” USA Today 12 Sept. 2006.
Usatoday.com/educate/college/polisci/articles/20060917.htm November 9, 2007 1:03PM EST

2. Transhuman. More than human.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. Retrieved November 09, 2007 1:18PM EST, from Dictionary.com
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/transhuman

3. Ted Kennedy - (D) Senator Edward M. Kennedy has represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate for forty-three years. He was elected in 1962 to finish the final two years of the Senate term of his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, who was elected President in 1960. Since then, Kennedy has been re-elected to seven full terms, and is now the second most senior member of the Senate.
http://kennedy.senate.gov/senator/index.cfm   November 9, 2007 1:43PM EST

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