MiloCast

There was a story in the news this week about a preacher in Uganda who has been arrested and accused of using a magic prop to dupe his followers into believing he could perform miracles, and thus was able to collect a huge amount of money in donations. Don’t worry — this blog is still about my original writing, not a rehash of the same stories everywhere else like in other blogs. I bring this up because it led to another phenomenon I see way too often.

I am a member of several magic forums, where magicians discuss ethics and share their opinions and reviews on magic books and favorite magicians. I posted a link to a Reuters story about the Ugandan priest in two of those forums, hoping to start a discussion. On one of the forums, the owner of the site asked us not to get into a religious debate after people began discussing how religious and “spiritual” leaders have used trickery to control people. On the other forum the thread was simply erased from existence.

Now why should that be? Not only on forums where the subject could veer toward “off-topic” status, but we are even taught from an early age to avoid the topic of religion in “polite conversation” at work or in public. People pretend that we do this out of “respect” for the beliefs of others. This is a lie. The real reason the subject is taboo is that it nearly always ends in anger, and practically never ends in agreement. Read any news source, and you’ll find that nearly 100% of the violence taking place on the planet on any given day is over religious differences.

Once again, I believe the question “Why?” is in perfect order. The answer is simple. You simply can not have a reasonable conversation or debate about beliefs which have absolutely no evidence to back them up. Every religion falls into that category. Therefore, people who truly believe those things are incapable of having a normal conversation about those beliefs. They lack a necessary component of reason regarding those topics, which is that you must always be willing to change your mind about anything if the evidence is against your current position.

The sad part is that many of these people are intelligent, educated, and perfectly capable of holding their own in intellectual debates about topics where they have expertise which has come from the study of evidence. It is only in this one area that they refuse to be intellectually honest. If only we know how to get people to treat their religious beliefs like everything else they have ever read or been taught, we might find ourselves in a world of peace.