The featured article in this week’s eSkeptic is on the Soviet attempt to eradicate religion by fiat out of the Russian people. The attempt failed utterly. The historical experiment carries an important lesson for those who study belief systems in general and religion in particular: you cannot legislate beliefs and faith. Today’s atheists who are emboldened by Richard Dawkins’ Lennonesque clarion call to “imagine no religion” should read this article (and the book on which it is based) carefully, and then try to imagine another solution to the problems caused by religious extremists, for as another evolutionary biologist — Edward O. Wilson — cautioned us in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, On Human Nature:
Skeptics continue to nourish the belief that science and learning will banish religion, which they consider to be no more than a tissue of illusions… Today, scientists and other scholars, organized into learned groups such as the American Humanist Society and Institute on Religion in an Age of Science, support little magazines distributed by subscription and organize campaigns to discredit Christian fundamentalism, astrology, and Immanuel Velikovsky. Their crisply logical salvos, endorsed by whole arrogances of Nobel Laureates, pass like steel-jacketed bullets through fog.
There is, indeed, something deeply elemental about the power of belief.
The article is reprinted in its entirety here It would be nice to have all the comments back here, rather than under the article, itself.
