Archive for March, 2007

Thank technology!?!

Thursday, March 1st, 2007

I was reading this article about a miracle that occured involving an infant who had a heart-attack and came back to life after a half hour, well after the docters stopped their attempts to recessitate the boy.  It’s an amazing little miracle and one that, as most commentors on the story noted, deserves the praising of God.

But the first comment (at least when I visited the site) suggested there is at least one person who felt otherwise.  Their simple comment was “Thank technology!”

Are you kidding me!?!

For me this is further proof of what I’ve known ever since I converted from being an Atheist to being Catholic, that Atheism is just as much of a religion as Christianity is.  How else could you take that story and proclaim that the miracle was the result of “technology”.  While I won’t deny that technology played a part in this infant’s being alive today, the story of his coming back from the dead (and that’s medically speaking) had nothing to do with technology.

No, it is only by having a obsessive commitment to attributing everything to technology that one could look at that story and say “thank technology”.  It’s no different than the overly zealous Christian who believes that his car starting on the second try one morning was the direct intervention of God when the car starts every other morning on the first try.

The reality is that as humans we lack the knowledge necessary to KNOW the answer to very much at all.  Just about everything we think is a mixture of understanding, intuition and faith.  This is just as true for the Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Humanist, Agnostic or Atheist.  To claim otherwise is an exercise in foolishness.

What differentiates the various religions from the Atheist is that the average Atheist denies that they too are making decisions based on intuition and faith.  This can be very dangerous because they are blind to an aspect of their decision making process so they can believe that their decisions are based on logic when in reality they are just as based on their personal dogmatic beliefs, sometimes more so because of their blindness, than a person of faith.