Briefly, I was an anarchist. Not in the angry punk rock kid way, but in more of a utopian socialist model. It’s a beautiful image, this imaginary world where we can progress to the point that each person functions for the common good and that we have no need for rule of law because morality controls our movements. But I have to admit, I never considered it something we could actually attain.

One of the common complaints about the atheist movement is that we are liberals and we believe science will solve all of our problems. I can safely say that neither is true for me. I do not subscribe to a particular political ideology because I believe that each problem we face has a variety of solutions, and many of them could easily fit as the best possible solution. To assume that one world view is the only one that can present a reasonable solution to a problem is to attack politics with blinders on, and to be guided by an ideology rather than the best solution to a problem is foolish.

As far as science solving all of our problems, that is equally as foolish. Science can and has made our collective lives better. As I write this I am sitting in an ergonomically-designed chair at a massively powerful personal computer some 110 feet in the air, a feat which would be impossible (and bloody cold) without the benefit of science. Science has reduced our infant mortality rate, given us nearly limitless access to information, and helped in the war to keep our cities safe in a plethora of ways.

But it can’t do everything. People are damaged. We are a social animal with a massive ego problem. We love the idea that something can fix us, and so we grab on to the likes of religion, science, multi-level marketing, Oprah Winfrey, and natural healing to be the thing that, if we only all did it and did it right, things would be better. But they won’t.

This is because we are all, thanks to evolution, physiologically different at the deepest level. Add to that the impact of environment on our childhoods, the way our parents treated us, the way our schools nurtured or destroyed us, the people we encountered, and the way our brain chemistry reacted to all these and so many more stimuli and you come up with the potential for massive variance in who we are as individuals. It’s not that people are inherently good or evil, it’s they’re inherently different. Sitting around a bottle of wine on the table at some expensive restaurant with a bunch of like-minded people, it is easy to assume you can understand how people are, but it’s just as easy to do so if you’re a mercenary living in war-torn Somalia, and something tells me the answers would both be valid and be absolutely different.

My point in this is there really isn’t a single solution for everything, and assigning that kind of faith (and it is faith) to anything, be it an ideology, a religion, a scheme, or a cartoon duck is a setup for failure. Reason has greatly helped me to understand this, but reason alone will not resolve our problems either. In facing all of our problems, the best thing we can do is look at them with an open mind and see them for what they truly are. Only then can we find the right solution for the job.

Jim