New Paradigms Needed

I must disagree with the idea that suicide bombers indicate a clash of religions. They do not. In truth, social ills, mainly poverty and injustice, are at the root of terrorism. In a phrase: jet hijackers are poor men manipulated by wealthy men, and love of "money" is all that truly unites them.

Humans who may be convinced that their lot will be better in an imagined afterlife must first be poor in spirit and material wealth. Only someone spiritually destitute could be made to believe the ludicrous notion that he may help destroy Christianity, Western civilization, or any other vast system by blowing himself up.

At core, suicide bombers are protesting materialism, which is ironic because one must have a profound desire for material and its theoretical trappings (e.i. respect) to commit suicide in a way which removes a valuable mass of people and material from the world. If they truly had less respect for and attachment to earthly things, they would not destroy themselves to damage any of it. That said, though I disagree with all forms of violent communication, the bombers are correct that materialism has run amok. A few have much too much while many have nothing. Until this is corrected, we will have people willing to commit acts of terror. This would be true even if we all agreed to become atheists today.

Note: terrorism only happens when folks willing to commit terror are contacted by people with the wherewithal to strategize the acts. The "lone gunman" is a myth.

Terrorism is exemplary of torn social fabric in need of repair and we need new thinking to answer it. Subscribers to any religion who do not recognize this (like Bill Kilpatrick) are on the wrong track. Furthermore, media focus on the role of religion in terrorism only distracts us from its true causes and Earth's deeper problems, all of which stem from rampant materialism.

9/11/2013

Nathan Bragg

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From: ebammel@earthlink.net
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 17:48:52 -0700
Subject: Meeting Thomas Kuhn...
To: ebammel@earthlink.net

GNPRT 350: Kuhn…

All along, I thought I was meeting Lawrence Kuhn, the host of the remarkable PBS series "Closer to Truth," but instead it is Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the book that impacted just about every branch of knowledge in the 1960s. Kuhn had been teaching various history of science courses when it dawned on him that every branch of knowledge has a certain over-arching "paradigm" or model, in the light of which the problems of that branch of knowledge are dealt with. And when there are too many problems that the "paradigm" cannot solve, it is time for a paradigm change!

The problem that gave Kuhn his insight was the move from the Ptolemaic paradigm that made the earth the center of the universe, to the Copernican heliocentric paradigm, which demotes us earthlings to rotating around the sun. "The repercussions of this are dramatic: you go from thinking that everything in the universe revolves around you, to realizing eventually that you are just a tiny speck revolving around an insignificant star in a remote corner of the universe. So this paradigm change didn't just affect astronomy, it had far-ranging repercussions on understanding just how important or unimportant human beings were to the universe."

Being more earth-bound than my astronomy-minded friends, I ask Kuhn why the word "paradigm" meant so much, and why his book had such an impact on so many people. "It's simple," he says, "Paradigms are the source of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time." We all work with our own predominant paradigms all the time, we just don't think about it!

What about the dominant paradigm in comparative religions, that there are many "ways of being religious," and that in some way, all religions are just treading different paths to the same mountaintop?

An author named Bill Kilpatrick buts into the conversation at this point. "All religions are not the same, and we are not all climbing the same seven story mountain. I am most concerned about our mistaken idea of Islam. What role did Islamic piety have in motivating terrorists to hijack jets and kill 3,000 people on 9/11? I think Islam and Christianity are engaged in a clash of civilizations, and if we go on thinking naively that one religion is just as good as any other, it will lead to our undoing."

Well, that certainly kills the paradigm that all religions are just different paths to the same mountaintop! Since I have many Muslim friends and associates, I want to believe the basic paradigm, and I remember the words of the Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Arabi: "There was a time when I blamed my companion if his religion did not resemble mine. Now, however, my heart accepts every form…Love alone is my religion."  

To see Islam as a threat to western civilization is to tear down the paradigm that all religions ultimately teach the same thing, and that the ultimate message of all religions is that love is what really matters….

Paradigms change when the problems in any given area of human experience can no longer be solved by the reigning paradigm. When new evidence contradicts basic components of a paradigm, the old paradigm no longer enables problems to be solved.

Copernicus and Galileo won people over to heliocentrism because there were so many astronomical problems that the Ptolemaic system could not solve. Are there problems in Comparative Religions that the old paradigm will not solve? Here are some of the thinkers working along these lines….

Bill Kilpatrick: Christianity, Islam and Atheism: The Struggle For the Soul of the West.

Steve Prothero: God is not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter.

Ibn Warraq: Why I am not a Muslim

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Reza Aslan, No god but God.