DEI SACRIFICIUM INTELLECTUS
DEI SACRIFICIUIM INTELLECTUS
By Deborah Long
In our America where the Catholic Church, with over a billion adherents worldwide, preaches “dei sacrificium intellectus” – the sacrifice of the intellect - while enabling the sexual molestation of helpless children by its priests; where Christianity has rejoined government through its champion, the vampiric Mike Pence and his handmaiden, Karen ….isn’t it time for a little genuine humility?
In the Bronze Age, religious explanations of what we are and how we got here were sufficient for a species of primate that had evolved into modern Homo sapiens only ~200,000 years prior. Only 10,000 years ago, modern Homo sapiens emerged from exclusively hunter-gatherer societies and were endeavoring for the first time in human history to live in groups that were not kin related - not exclusively tribal.
The laws set out in the Bible were an important framework for establishing civil societies 3,000 years ago. Many other largely similar systems of thought, many other religions and philosophies, emerged across the world during the 6th Century BC, as well. It was an important period when the tradition of traveling scholars permitted the exchange of ideas, and the social systems of empires gave way to the notion of personal values.
But today, disciplines that use the scientific method to answer the profound questions we ask are the foundation of our modern world and have given us a sophisticated understanding of our place as humans in a magnificently complex and beautiful universe. To immerse oneself in the belief-centered world of the Iron Age in lieu of the infinitely more interesting world revealed through empirical analysis and scientific discovery is an unfortunate squandering of the very intellectual gifts that humans have evolved over hundreds of millennia. During the Enlightenment, the same tools that crafted our American government gave us the keys to explore our most profound questions concerning our personal existence. While the Age of Reason gave us an open system of intellectual exploration, our ancient religions fight to maintain their closed system by presuming the answer before asking the question.
It's time for us to exercise the genuine humility that directly follows our understanding of our place in this vast universe - to celebrate our scientists, our researchers, our thinkers, and not to worship costumed men who profess unique access to some divine force personified, to an imagined immortality – to the idolatry of divinity.
