The age of endarkenment
sduford on Aug 15 2007 at 2:31 pm | Filed under: Politics, Scams, Science, Skepticality
The Guardian has a very nice op-ed piece today on our society’s slide back into the dark ages of superstition and quack science. Well worth a read. Here’s an extract:
The enlightenment was a beautiful thing. People cast aside dogma and authority. They started to think for themselves. Natural science flourished. Understanding of the real world increased. The hegemony of religion slowly declined. Real universities were created and eventually democracy took hold. The modern world was born. Until recently we were making good progress. So what went wrong?
The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes’ notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
That article is awesome!
The best atheists don’t so much object to the idea of God, but to the stupid, asinine, idiotic concepts of such propounded by religion, “Christian” fundamentalism being just one of many convoluted examples.
Ayn Rand broadened the focus to include the “mystic” spiritualism-based concepts as well (the driving force behind much of the so-called “environmental” movements to this day) because they ultimatly emphasize self-immolation rather than fulfillment and actualization.
The phrase “endarkenment” brings to mind the still-prophetic warnings of Winston Churchill’s “a new, dark age made more sinister by the likes of perverted science” .