

A Speech on Science, Knowledge, Human History & Religion (Douglas Adams, 1998)  - netcan
http://www.douglasadams.se/stuff/sand.html

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netcan
I thought this might be relevant to today's links on religion/atheism related
topics.

 _The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of
it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of
who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It’s all
defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar
set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough,
they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice
harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was
determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so
they said, ‘Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much,
much more productive than even you’re, very successfully, doing at the moment.
Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other’. So they
started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but
the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very
shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, ‘Screw it,
we’re going back to the temple calendar!’ and they reinstated what was there
before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It’s all very well to say
that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a
religion is stupid—they should be able to work it out more logically than
that, but they might just as well say to us, ‘Your culture and society works
on the basis of money and that’s a fiction, so why don’t you get rid of it and
just co-operate with each other’—we know it’s not going to work!_

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unalone
That thoroughly fascinated me when I first read this (also, if you liked this,
there's more like it in _Salmon of Doubt_ ). I've used it before in religion
arguments, both in defending religion against people who think it could be
easily disposed of, and in arguing why religion's affecting society isn't the
same thing as proof of a god's existence.

Unrelated: why WERE there so many atheism posts today? There was definitely a
surge, but why? New users? The Mormon issue?

~~~
netcan
Not really sure why.

This piece is something that I find I want to share with people a lot. He had
a great way of thinking about things. And while this is simple really, it has
had an effect on how I think about this issue. It's not often I can say that.

