The Four Worst Ideas in History and their Solutions

Copyright 2008 Roberto Diego. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the copyright holder. This book is being offered to publishers who might be interested in publishing it as a hard cover or paper cover book. If you are a publisher and would like to talk to the author about publication of this book, please contact by email robdiego@aol.com.

Bad Idea #1 – Rationalism

One of the most harmful ideas developed by man in pre-history was the idea of spirit. This concept most likely developed as an outgrowth of projecting a superior consciousness onto the behavior of animals and possibly upon the planets. When men decided to emulate these superior consciousnesses and their behaviors, in order to acquire their powers, they began to associate spirit with their own consciousness.

Since the source of consciousness has been presumed to be supernatural, mankind looks at the idea of a benevolent, all-knowing god as a sort of miraculous idea. This early form of God seems like a fatherly character with qualities of love for mankind, steadfastness, responsibility and long-life. One can imagine centuries of time when this benevolent image sat on his throne in the sky, bringing down heat, life and love to mankind. People under his gaze would have been secure, centered on life and happy – all due to the “love” of their wonderful god. One can also imagine this form of god to be a hopeful one that brought good luck. When good things happened, one could thank god, when one wanted good things to happen, one prayed to god or used god’s image as a good luck charm and as an indication of their being good people, mindful of god.

At some point in time, the image of god changed. He became cruel and punishing. He participated in and perhaps even instigated wars between tribes and nations. He chose to support some tribes and destroy others. Many assumed that god’s change from benevolent to war-like was caused by man’s sinfulness which caused the new angry god to destroy cities, bring tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes. To appease him, human sacrifice was instituted.

According to virtually every religion, God was considered to be the source of all knowledge and truth. The various documents that he supposedly authored were considered the unquestionable truth and to disagree with them was blasphemous and punishable by eternal suffering. The correct way of thinking was to take the word of God and draw conclusions about the nature of reality. Looking at reality as a source of knowledge without the filter of God’s will was the source of rationalism.

Rationalism[1]represents a foundation of words, ancient documents and floating abstractions that man is told to accept without a validating standard. A common example of rationalism is when one uses statements that are found in an ancient document in order to understand events in the world today. The implication is that the “words of God” have a mystical relationship with the real world and we can learn something about God’s plan by applying God’s statements to modern events. Another example is when someone uses the Bible as literal truth. Any time a faith-derived idea or principle is used as the foundation for drawing conclusions about reality, we are engaged in rationalism.

Faith is a concept that has a very positive reputation. People protect their faith, insist that no one criticize it; insist that others honor it as a sacred aspect of human thinking. Yet, from a logical perspective faith is the acceptance of ideas without proof or without connection to a logical process of induction. When one takes one’s faith as the foundation for all of his knowledge, we have the idea that knowledge of the real world can be gleaned from ideas accepted on faith.

Religion has dominated centuries of life. The squalor of the Dark Ages, the perverted cruelties and death of the Inquisition, almost constant bloody religious wars, meaningless political conflicts over minor philosophical disagreements and open treachery are the hallmarks of rationalism. These are a direct result of the premise that religion, being the representative of the deity, has a right to impose itself on all people. In the view of religious leaders, there is no argument against the priority of God so therefore there should be no restriction on implementing God’s plan.

Rationalism assumes that the existence of God or divine beings is unquestionable and that any thought validly deduced from that being provides knowledge that can be counted upon in reality. The philosophical source of religious rationalism is the idealism of Plato who held that all concepts were dependent on a memory from another dimension where all prototypes exist. For Plato, these “essences” were the only reality whereas what we see in the world is only an imperfect reflection of them. Western religion merely took Plato’s essences and assigned them to God.

Man, before he became modern man, did not have religion to tell him how to survive; he relied upon his sensory mechanism and his advancing mind; he began to develop tools, language, social organizations, agriculture and abstract thinking, all without the help of any form of religion. In fact, when man became man, he relied upon thinking, communication, reality and cooperation for mutual advantage – not on any requirement to sacrifice his mind to a god. It is only the advent of religion, which included the injunction to faith (which is especially not required for survival) and the development of ritual (role playing and appeasement of the gods) that began to undermine the fabric of the proper, voluntary forms of society that early man had pioneered.

Religion destroyed the proper development of a social existence by introducing faith, human sacrifice, collective joining and ritualized self-abasement. In effect, religion and rationalism told man not to evaluate the facts of reality but to ignore them in favor of the conclusions of other men. These conclusions were deemed to be the word of God and sacred. Further, these men told him that the sign of certainty was not one’s analysis of the facts but acceptance of “God’s Word.” They told him that the sign of a virtuous man was his relinquishing of his ability to think for the sake of the pronouncements and feelings of others.

Faith has two corollaries: force and feelings. When you reduce all of man’s thinking to deduction from the principle of God, then you have no guide for understanding reality. You can only hope to arrive at approximate knowledge. This approach produces no tangible knowledge that is derived first from reality. Since all knowledge is based on God’s will, there is no measure for evaluating the real world and all thinking devolves to feelings. One man’s feelings are just as good as any others’ and the only way to arbitrate between them is by means of force. Polarization and conflict can be the only result of this approach. If my interpretation of God’s plan is different from yours, the only way to reconcile the two views is through conflict, hatred, war and genocide.

Epistemological “equivalency” is the idea that an idea developed without proof is just as good as an idea developed by induction and rational proof. This sort of equivalency results in the acceptance of any idea, and more importantly, it leads to the use of mystically derived concepts as if they had cognitive value. From another perspective this equivalency seeks to blur the distinction between the arbitrary and the true. And from the religious perspective, we see that it created the opportunity to declare that mystical and “other-worldly” ideas could be elevated to superior status. The consequence of this is the diminishment of objectivity and rational thinking.

Prophesy and Revelation are dead ends that distort thinking, destroy the mind and turn each believer into a promiscuous follower of ideas that have no basis. From the very beginning, rationalists have fought against man’s mind by means of the institutional establishment of faith and sacrifice. When man does not question his cognitive foundation, when he rationalizes the institutionalization of irrationality, the only result is the inability of man to function in this world, to think, to act and to plan the future. The only thing for him to do is to follow the path of the lowest common cognitive denominator, the acceptance of miracle, arbitrariness and chauvinism.

The question for each individual is how deeply does rationalism get into a person? How much philosophical corruption does it inject into this life? What are the seldom known consequences of rationalism?

Not every rationalist is consistent or he would not be able to live. Every person, to at least the degree that he focuses on reality, must do so in order to survive. This means that most people contradict their rationalist base or live in such a way that they move between rationalism and “objectivism” on a regular basis. This is because consistent rationalism requires the complete subjugation of the mind and only a contradiction of that subjugation will enable man to survive. It is also true that some rationalists don’t see the contradiction because they accept the existence of God but they draw few conclusions from that acceptance. To a large degree, they function in the here and now and don’t see that their acceptance of rationalist ideas is a contradiction of their reality focus. They compartmentalize their lives and function contextually in two different realms: one, their rationalist realm which has little influence on their lives and, two, their objectivist realm where they function in reality. These people are what I call subconscious religious secularists and they are the least dangerous of the religionists. However, to the degree and extent that they accept rationalist ideas, miracles, prophesy and faith they can’t consistently function in two separate realms and because bad ideas inevitably drive out good.

The times in which religion ruled the world were times that led to the utter despair of millions of lives. Most of us are not able to connect that despair to the very ideas that are its source. But if you examine the role that ideas play in life, you can see the connection between the idea that God rules the world and the actions (or lack of action) that show their results in the lives of people.

For instance, if you believe that everything is predestined, you must also believe that nothing that you do makes any difference. You will not act because you think that God will take care of everything and that his plan will prevail.

If you believe that you can prove the existence of God by means of deduction from an idea that has no basis, let’s say from design, then you lose the ability to think logically about things in the real world. When the fundamental principle of your logical deliberation is that miracles are possible, there can be no standard for understanding the world that requires rational evaluation. If you think that your only moral act is to live for others, the entire history of the world, especially the dictatorships, war and genocide of the 20^th century are the result.

Today, many people have been rewarded with short-term benefits for suspending their judgment. They are rewarded with praise for being altruistic or for believing in God. Imagine the wasted educations of millions of people today attending classes whose basic premise is that there are two realms, a spiritual and an appearance of the real. Imagine the hours of time wasted in endless discussion about the relationship between this spiritual world and the real, the lives wasted and the ineptitude created in the minds of millions during the last several centuries.

I am often struck by how often we assume that positive values such as love, generosity and the clean, happy faces of the American people are derived from religion and/or God. These values, though positive when based on a rational foundation, lose their value when based upon scripture and God. They impart to religion, made up of institutions that have exploited and dominated men for centuries, an aura of goodness. In fact, the practitioners of religion have been adept at attaching that aura of goodness to faith by means of granting solace to those whose lives have suffered. Yet, religion does not care to improve the lives of people by educating them about how to live successfully; it seeks instead to use the trappings of altruism in order to create a class of people that “deserve” loving treatment, not for their positive qualities, but for their suffering. People should be loved, according to this view, because they suffer, not because they have achieved positive values. This attitude creates that suffering by forcing human action into the area of sacrifice rather than self-interest.

There is nothing loving about helping a starving person if the other side of that love requires that you destroy the person providing the aid. In another part of this document I show how altruism does just that. The key point here is that rationalism requires that you sacrifice something far more important than your money; it requires the sacrifice of your mind for the sake of others. To be a rationalist, you must accept the idea that truth and knowledge comes at the expense of suspending judgment. Once they get an individual to sacrifice his mind, all else is a logical extension. Why not your time, your money, your future? You are already a dutiful slave whose mind is theirs for the filling.

The solution to rationalism is for the individual to develop a passion for what he knows, to develop his knowledge based on reality and not on what he is told to accept on faith. When one discovers how personally important it is for his life that he use his mind, learn how to understand the real, how to discover the facts and express the truth, then one will feel anger at anyone who demands his acquiescence to the unproven pronouncements of mystics or the acceptance of mere words in a book. Through his own experience, the individual must learn that induction leads to valid knowledge and religion leads to anti-knowledge.

Reason is not a religion; it is not the enemy of religion; it is simply a way of arriving at truth. And because it is such a method, you have to wonder at the mentality of men who would denigrate reason in favor of blind acceptance of blind prophesy. Without reason, those men who consider themselves “paragons of virtue” are free to engage their whims and to fake the “certainty” that makes it possible for them to blindly dictate the right and correctness of faith and altruism. Reason is a method of learning about reality while faith and altruism are evasions of reality.

You might say that many religious leaders are advocates of reason and their pronouncements during some periods of our history are replete with praises to the power and value of reason. However, this advocacy of reason was due to the influence of the Enlightenment which swept aside mysticism in favor of a knowable reality. The advocates of reason who sprang up among the religious men in America did so upon a foundation that accepted reason but with a fundamental contradiction that saw reason as God’s gift rather than as man’s faculty for perceiving reality. They accepted the existence of God but, in this view, He had left the theater to reason. To many of these thinkers, God had given man reason in order to enable him to understand reality, but it was still God who ruled the world, who came down from heaven as Jesus and who intervened in global events. In other words, reason had its place which was to understand the world that God had created; ignoring the basic fact that reason accepts nothing on faith.

It is true that so long as a religious person focuses on reality and so long as the area of his focus does not touch on matters influenced by faith, that person is capable of reason within that delimited sphere. In fact, there have been some extremely valuable discoveries and much new knowledge developed by such men. However, their views are only limited to the range of their focus. The wider range, the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical fields must be ignored by these people because they have no ability to resolve the contradictions inherent in faith and the rationalism that it breeds.

The only solution to the problem of rationalism is an objective approach to knowledge where reality is a seen as a metaphysical unity and truth can be validated by checking reality. The key issue for any individual who wants to use his own mind is to ground thinking only on what he knows and only on what can be demonstrated by a method that seeks true knowledge. The worst thing (the most evil thing) that another person can ask you to do is to accept something on faith. The worst scam for which you can fall is the scam that tells you it is good to accept things on faith.

Rationalists ignore the fact that true values, those derived from reality and from man’s relationship to it are the only real values. They are the only values chosen by a mind that understands that reality cannot be ignored, that the real is the real and that the good is that which is true.

[1] There are some rationalists who claim to adhere to reason as opposed to religion and to a great degree these rationalists are not strictly rationalists in the sense that we mean here. In my usage of the term I refer to thinkers who found their ideas upon deduction from religious concepts. To the extent that they are logical in any sense, they are logical in their use of the principles of proper deduction from the floating abstractions ascribed to God.

It is also possible that a rationalist can start with a floating abstraction that is accepted without proof and proceeds to draw conclusions from the abstraction. The source of the floating abstraction, in this case, need not be religion. This is secular rationalism. The best examples of this are the “empiricists” who start with Hume’s basic premise that man cannot understand reality because he cannot understand reality; a form of circular reasoning. See chapter on Empiricism.

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