Saturday, April 16, 2011

Philosophy/Religion Song of the Day: "New Dark Ages" by Bad Religion


Yeah can you hear the call in our rambling land
Susurrations that can expand beyond all hope of light
and plunge us into into unrelenting night

A pall on truth and reason,
It feels like hunting season

So avoid those lines of sight
and we'll set this right

Welcome to the new dark ages
Yeah, i hope you're living right
These are the new dark ages
And the world might end tonight

Now come ye children one and all, let's heed Ezekiel's call
And bide until the word is good and ripe and get plucked clean out
of sight

The world will be erased
Our kin will be immaculate ejaculate in space
Before the kind of king's love, he'll snatch us
From above, brothers help me sing it

Welcome to the new dark ages
I hope you're living right
These are the new dark ages
And the world might end tonight

So how do you sleep? “ there's nothing to keep“
This is deep
Because we're animals with golden rules
Who ... who can't be moved by rational views
yeah

Welcome to the new dark ages
I hope you're living right
Welcome to the new dark ages
And the world might end tonight


"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." -- James Michener


6 comments:

CyberKitten said...

I have that motivational poster in the stack.... [grin]

It's interesting to speculate on where we would be without the Dark Ages..... and what a world it would be if the Industrial Revolution happened in Ancient Greece like it might have done....

wstachour said...

Love the graphic!

dbackdad said...

CK -- Yeah, you have a pretty good pipeline of the ersatz motivational posters.

It truly is interesting to think where we would be without the societally-induced hiccups in scientific development. I know some (of the religious persuasion) would say that we were not morally ready at the time for advancements. But I say that we were perhaps even better prepared back then. And it's not like religion has made us more morally prepared. If anything flat-Earth attitudes and proclaiming "every sperm is sacred" (thx to Monty Python) have stunted us.

Wunelle -- I was just looking for some kind of Dark Ages graphic to go along with my song lyrics and I found this one. Needless to say, I was amused and pleased ... and saddened all at once. It's funny because it's true.

wstachour said...

What I find particularly intriguing is the notion that the same religions that gave us repression and the Dark Ages (and still give us anti-rationalilty that obviously stunts societal forward movement) MUST have conferred some adaptive advantage in the ancestral environment, no?

Was it just a societal cohesion thing? Did it evolve into its present form to give the leaders some "iron-clad" mechanism for controlling those beneath? We know we are social animals, and that we are primates who share a genetic predisposition toward hierarchical social structures with an Alpha at the top; is this just the ultimate expression of that, the Mother of All Alphas?

In theory, if it didn't help us survive, it should have been weeded out.

wstachour said...

PS drop me a line at wstachour [at] gmail, etc.

CyberKitten said...

I really don't believe that we are genetically or evolutionarily predisposed to be religious. At best I'd say that religion (actually *all* ideologies) piggy-backed onto something in the structure of the brain. I certainly don't think that we need to physically evolve beyond religion - that'll just take far too long!

All ideologies are basically social constructs (built by humans for humans) and are therefore capable of deconstruction too. It will still be a slow process but a damned sight faster than waiting for our genes to catch up!