dear m.m. rosenblattit's interesting that you continually stress your atheism and faith in the progress of medical science. it seems to me that the secular rationalism of post-Enlightenment thought must be a great deal of responsibility for the current social and environmental mess we find ourselves in... science since the enlightenment has always been about controlling nature, e.g francis bacon, father of scientific rationalism, talked of 'torturing nature' until she yielded her (sic) secrets, or treating her 'like a slave.' (it's not hard to see why ecofeminists compare man's attempts to dominate nature with the domination of women). believing that we know best, that science can uncover all the mysteries of the universe, and that it is a value-free process, has led to problems such as the production of nuclear waste which we don't know what to do with. we should accept that there are some consequences of our actions which we cannot predict, no matter how much faith we place in science, e.g. long-term effects of new technologies...atheism must bear some responsibility for blinding us to the failures of scientific utilitarianism, for by displacing god as the centre of the universe and source of all knowledge and power, it has promoted us humans as the ultimate rationalists able to use the world as we wish (leading to resource depletion, appalling and unnecessary cruelty to animals, and pollution).
the question we need to ask is 'who determines what is to count as rationality?' surely the concept of rationality is not some value-free absolute, but a social construct of your community, and thus justification of e.g. animal cruelty in medical testing on rational grounds will be coloured by those who have more influence in setting the bounds of rationality, e.g. powerful companies with a vested interest in testing who marginalize protesters by labelling them irrational hippies, whilst concealing the often misleading results of testing which has led to social disasters, e.g. thalidomide, which did not cause abnormalities in animals but did in human babies. whose rationality is being promoted, and why should it take precedence?
dan mobley
p.s. i am an atheist, and i believe that i can justify my veganism on 'rational' grounds!
