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Will reason ever outrun faith?
bessiambre10

At the time, the catholic church had a reign of terror. Going against religion was considered heresy and sometimes punished by death so it's not a surprise everyone were claiming to be good Christians and doing everything to look like good Christians. However, the Italian renaissance ideals were definitely moving away from Christian dogma and towards a more mechanistic, scientific, humanistic and secular interpretation of the universe.

I find Michaelangelo's sistine chapel representation of god being in the shape of a human brain a good example of the whole... (read more)

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Will reason ever outrun faith?
bessiambre10

Great article. I made the same unsettling realization a couple years ago. It hit me when I was pondering why the two other ages of reason: the Italian renaissance and greek antiquity only lasted a short period. It seems reason is not a good reason (heh) for self replication compared to religion. The superior demographic powers of the unreasonables always makes them take over eventually.

Once in a while, the stars align and the atheistic/scientific population gets some prominence but it never lasts.

We see the same debates of reason vs religion in the two ot... (read more)

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6taw
The Italian renaissance was highly religious and all major figures were devout Christians. There was nothing remotely atheistic about it. I don't know about how religious Greek antiquity was, but even the non-religious ones were not rational by even the lowest standards.
4MatthewB
This time, the atheists have a way to either escape from the brutality of religious oppression, or to overthrow it in a limited fashion. I think it was Cyril Kornbluth who wrote the Story The Marching Morons where normal society was... a bunch of morons. The society had another side though, anyone who showed the slightest real intelligence was whisked off to live as the real power behind society. While that was a fictionalization of a fear that the ignorant and stupid would out breed the smarter and better educated (a very real fear in my opinion), it did show something that is rapidly becoming the case. There are a great many technologies that require some pretty sophisticated knowledge to continue functioning. eventually society may get to the point where the intelligentsia may be able to hold the ignorant and stupid members of society (no matter how powerful) for ransom via the technologies controlled by the intelligentsia. It may not be obvious, explicit power, yet it is not something that should be overlooked.