Beyond Belief 7.

The beginning for myself was a step in a direction I had never really encountered before. The concepts of perception presented in Beyond Belief seven displayed surveys which displayed a key to learning of an individual and/or groups perception with regard to gender and racial schemas. Appropriately enough this segment commenced with a more generalized sample of human perception with the use of a picture of two tables, which is apparently widely used or known in psychology circles. To us, when we look at the two tables pictured they appear to be different, one square and the other more rectangular in shape; however, as shown by the speaker they are exactly the same. The speaker then continues into a discussion of “bugs” as being the perpetrators that narrow our mental scope with regard to our human perception of the world around us. She continues into a couple of surveys that have yielded consistent results among their human survey takers almost regardless of group characterization or affiliation. One example, being that of a survey among male and female college students at Princeton. The survey poses questions regarding primary desires in taking on a job. Among the noted categories were salary, city, boss and some others, great detail wasn’t given, as it wasn’t the point. The point was the results so consistently obtained which stem from the quantified use of a mathematical blue print which supports the structure of this survey. According to the speaker the results tallied indicate that 75% of the students, male and female, would sacrifice up to three thousand dollars in salary and even a better city to work under a male boss. I’m a little sketchy now on the way society is possibly being surveyed and controlled by uses of structures such as this. This clearly explains the feminization of boys in the public school system to rid the younger generations of gender schemas that are more or less natural in my opinion. It definitely explains society’s obsession with  celebrity and pop-music which leads to mass consumption of big corporation product such as Coke, Apple, Media outlets (Clear Channel, Murdoch) and Disney. What makes you or I think that this type of insight for quantifying human perception isn’t being used for other purposes? Ant-farms and rat-labs. Mass consumption could very well be our undoing which leads me to Richard Dawkins.

The headliner closing the session from Beyond Belief seven was the renowned Richard Dawkins. Dawkins opened as any highly anticipated speaker would and with his familiar and noted qualms toward religion, but minus his usual underlying and applied ferocity on the subject. I cringe at his usage of the term abuse when applying the notion to labeling a child with a religious tag, because I think such language is a bit over the top if induction and induction are the only actions involved. However, I do wholeheartedly and completely agree that children should not be labeled as such, and the same goes for any tag that the child isn’t cognitively ready to bare or identify with including atheism. I think that any such labels, especially those of a religious bind do cripple a child’s intellect or potential along with their overall scope and world view. As an Atheist father myself, I’d like nothing more than for my daughters (It’s plural now) to view the world as it theoretically appears, a product of an explosion and an ensuing and currently active evolutionary cycle. However, and I’ve said this before, if it happens that when they are ready to make such informative decisions about where they and the rest human race stand in the universe, I’ll gladly support their decision as long as they’ve gathered logic to support it and allow their fellow man to live as each one sees fit. And that is to say, I wouldn’t want to abolish religion completely, as Dawkins has famously proposed, if the two sides could live in harmony and agree to disagree. Simply put, I’ll keep my science and politics out of your religion, if keep your religion out of every ones politics! Some of the worst offenders are what Dawkins referred to as the “cherry-pickers”. A majority of the religious in modern times, and perhaps always is the “cherry-pickers”. When it comes to the disruptive effects of applied dogmatic enriched politics in the world, something that I know that spurns those such as Dawkins and Sam Harris the most, it is typically those that pick and choose what the “good book“ is saying, or they exaggerate a scripture to make it sound more hateful. Those that reside within the so-called “bible-belt,” along with Roman-Catholics I have found to be guilty of these acts of Cherry-picking. What’s worse, is that they label their children without providing them with substance, but instead a closed mind and fear based morals. I loved his sermon (pardon the term) in reference to morality and it’s roots within the human condition. This specific topic is a longstanding philosophical argument that those on the side of religion have been hanging onto and virtually all of them see it as a point tallied for their side. Dawkins’ core argument the shifting of the moral zeitgeist, is an effective one in that notable changes have occurred in the human condition within short periods of time during an era when the church’s influence appears to be weakening.

-Jeremy Watkins (M.G.)