Readers Letter: The Supreme Law
BackDaniel Deckers: "The Supreme Law" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 12.12.2009, Nr. 289, S. 1)
Daniel Decker has the courage to call things by their name. He could have quantified things a bit more as the FAZ archives are quite rich for this problem area: there are more than a thousand cases of child abuse in San Diego alone. About 3 billion $ have been paid in the U. S. for cases of catholic brutality of the kind. What are the hands of a polish archbishop searching for in the flies of polish seminarists? The catholic truth?
As far as I know, the celibacy has become a rigorosum only with the council of Trentino, when the Vatican had lost the monopoly of belief in Europe. Popes didn't care: Why the essays of Montaigne (a collection of proverbs with philosophical considerations) were put on the index? Because Montaigne (Apology from Mr. Sebond) quoted a report that pope Jean XXII had died between the legs of a lady. His tomb chapel remains closed to the public. I would have loved to bring flowers to the most honest pope of the entire line.
Why does the Vatican restrict catholic priests to wet dreams and/or masturbation and or fumbling under the bed covers of youngsters of both sexes and yet prescribe for a billion of ordinary Catholics in the world how to perform sexus? Aren't there uncurable clinical cases of psychotherapy operating?
In the end the basic problem of theological credibility is the myth stamped to be absolute truth. Folks have to believe it even if they know better, and this is full-fledged hypocrisy. Today we know more and better than the fathers of the church (Augustinus etc.), and we need much less to believe. “Belief” is not “knowledge”. Jesus Christ was a human being with a diploid set of chromosomes, half from a physical mammy and half from a physical daddy (set aside the genome of extra-nuclear mitochondria, supplied by the mammies). Christ was made according to a procedure running conform with creation and its inexorable biological laws since billions of years (biological sexuality), the procedure providing pleasure of the deepest joy for those with knowhow. Arianus supplied the better, clearer and much more intuitive theology: Christ man no god.
The motor behind creation and evolution is the electrodynamics of valence electrons throughout the universe at the atomic and molecular level. That fact steamrolls all theologies, because there is no need for a creator god or “somebody at the wheel” (Obama). Through the entire history of mankind gods and goddesses have been brought to spiritual life powered by the ignorance of their inventors facing the facts of the universe. Virtually all of these thousands of inventions carried anthropocentric features: they punished, they rewarded, they smiled, they were sad …, and associated with their worshipping was always business and easy and attractive income. Xenophanes found these human traits already ridiculous 2500 years ago.
Today we have the four fundamental forces of honest, critical, serious and reliable physicists: their truth value exceeds by far anything that theologians advance as ideas about creation. Creation taken as the facts of the universe. Exceptions like Mendel and other theologians confirm the rule.
Presocratic philosophy was an effort to move away and emancipate from Homerian mythology. Asking natural questions and trying to find natural explanations. On these lines of thinking there once evolved a metaphysical conflict between Heraclitos of Ephesos and Parmenides of Elea. One of the three solutions offered was the one developed by Leukippos of Abdera, the atoms and the void, the “something” and the “nothing”. Leukippos' pupil Demokritos elaborated this initial idea to the first philosophical materialism which was taken up and further developed by Epikuros. This Greek system was then introduced into the Latin world of Rome by Lucretius who in a very beautiful poem “De rerum natura” explained the facts of the universe on the basis of an atomic theory. Evidently this was not quantum mechanics but it is the most modern world view which the antiquity has left to us.
“Corporibus caecis igitur natura gerit res” (I, 329): It follows that nature is running business with blind particles. This was written about the time when Caesar was fighting in ancient Gaule, 2000 years ago.
Lucretius, with this genius statement, was thus classifying Plato and Aristotle as bumblers, regarding their natural philosophy. A tragedy for philosophy when Plato (Phaidros) had his Socrates say: “Only man can teach me something”, leaving a tremendous subset of facts of the universe outside of philosophical consideration. A step back behind the presocratic philosophy. Philosophy wanted to restrict itself to the soul, the spirit, the immaterial, all of creation that was labelled “noble”. Matter didn't share that status of nobility, The dirt was left to science which later established not only its nobility but fetched the noble areas of philosophy like spirit, soul, mind into systems of biochemical hardware, chemistry linked into matter systems. Again: valence electrons. Lucretius again: soul is born with man and dies with man.
Let us recall here that the term materialism was coined by philosophers who didn't have the slightest idea what matter is. Let us recall, too, that in quantum mechanics the material and the immaterial are intimately identical. During the development of quantum mechanics, the Planck, Einstein, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, Bohr, Dirac had to dig their own basis of thought for the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. The philosophical faculties were unable to help, a lack of philosophical competence.
In 1542, Kopernikus (in a letter, dedicating his opus to pope Paul III) called those who would condemn his opus “Mattaiologoi”, babblers, the term conserved even into modern Greek, a related verb “speak empty”. Kopernikus was not only sure that his opus would be condemned but he very precisely foresaw the case of Galilei. His babblers were on the highest chairs in the Vatican on 6 March 1616, condemned his opus and put it on the index. The opus was the basis for the Gregorian reform of the calendar. A healthy logic would have been to put that reform on the index too. The Vatican was lacking logic.
Science and theologies can be chained together only through schizophrenia. The suppliers of world images leaving aside the facts of the universe as established and secured by natural sciences and mathematics do not give reliable navigation aids, not even for dead end roads. The absolute truths of theologies stand irreconcilably against the probable, improvable and more reliable truth of the sciences.
Theology assessment should be given a number one political priority: It is high noon that the theologians of the globe take the responsibility for the consequences of the inventions made by their instrumental reason. This could offer a chance to control large scale ideological conflicts.
Brussels, 24.12.2009