Time to throw down the gauntlet...
Few threats to human and global well being are more pressing than religious fundamentalism. At least in North America, no social force is more closely associated with such anti-humanist phenomena as science denial (environmental, medical, etc.), authoritarian politics, persistent racial inequality, denial of rights and equality to gender-nonbinary people, and women's bodily autonomy. And I have been watching this force unfold in real time since the late 1970s and the days of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. I've watched the Religious Right attain a degree of political and social clout that threatens virtually every forward movement that society has made in the last couple of centuries, and that has already undermined education to such a degree that the majority of North Americans must now be considered scientifically illiterate. We are now witnessing the cost of that scientific illiteracy as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds in a once-great society where the idiot fringe has become a mainstream loudmouthed gun toting disease vector. This ideology therefore constitutes a clear and present danger.
As for this episode, it is here where I dive into full blown opposition to the religious right: the single cause to which, for my entire thinking life, I have been most consistently and completely committed. Accordingly, this piece is the first in a linked sequence that traces the rise of modern Christian Fundamentalism as a response to both the epistemology and the findings of the Scientific Revolution. This episode sketches out the Scientific Revolution itself, from Copernicus through Bruno, Kepler, Bacon, and Galileo, to Sir Isaac Newton, chronicling the process by which the view of the Cosmos inherited from the Medieval world and clung to by early modern Church is demolished and ultimately replaced. The next episode will turn closer to home, exploring such Earth-centered discoveries as geological deep time and Darwinian evolution, and getting into the specifics of the Fundamentalist backlash agaisnt the discoveries arising from three centuries of modern science. The third episode (and perhaps a fourth) will address the rise of Protestant Fundamentalism as a political force, and culminate in a discussion of one of the most virulent religio-political ideologies currently threatening both human and global well being: Christian Dominionism.
I hope you enjoy the ride.
P.S. I apologize for my mispronunciation of Epicurus's name. I didn't catch it until the final edits were done, and the episode is already late going up, so I don't want to compound the delay with another recording session.
