Tag Archives: religion

Carl Jung’s observations about Hitler and the “madness of crowds”

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What Carl Jung had to say about the leadership and characteristics of large groups of people would also seem to apply to social groups linked together by the Internet and bonded by religious causes such as Islamic Fundamentalism:

“There is no question but that Hitler belongs in the category of the truly mystic medicine man…since the time of Mohammed nothing like it has been seen in this world. This markedly mystic characteristic of Hitler is what makes him do things which seem to us illogical, inexplicable, curious and unreasonable….Don’t you know that if you choose one hundred of the most intelligent people in the world and get them all together, they are a stupid mob? Ten thousand of them together would have the collective intelligence of an alligator…. In a crowd, the qualities which everybody possesses multiply, pile up, and become the dominant characteristics of the whole crowd. Not everybody has virtues, but everybody has the low animal instincts, the basic primitive caveman suggestibility, the suspicions and vicious traits of the savage age. The result is that when you get a nation of many millions of people, it is not even human. It is a lizard or a crocodile or a wolf.”

~Carl Jung interview with H.R. Knickerbocker in Cosmopolitan [1938] See: C.G. Jung Speaks; Pages 115-135.

Quotes from the physicist Steven Weinberg that seem to be topical to the recent events in France

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Some quotes from the physicist Steven Weinberg that seem to be topical to the recent events in France:

“I have a friend — or had a friend, now dead — Abdus Salam, a very devout Muslim, who was trying to bring science into the universities in the Gulf states and he told me that he had a terrible time because, although they were very receptive to technology, they felt that science would be a corrosive to religious belief, and they were worried about it… and damn it, I think they were right. It is corrosive of religious belief, and it’s a good thing too.”

“There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect their views and I understand their motives, and I don’t condemn them, but I’m not having it. To me, the conflict between science and religion is more important than these issues of science education or even environmentalism. I think the world needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief; and anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done, and may in fact be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Today these religious fanatics are murdering satirical cartoonists. I would not be surprised if in the future they turned their attentions to attacking intelligent atheists who express themselves as eloquently as Steven Weinberg does.

Superstitious Pigeons – Richard Dawkins & Lawrence Krauss (video) and Mr Hug and Luv and the Pigeons

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In this video  Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss  discuss experiments with pigeons that Richard Dawkins believes shed light on superstitious behavior in humans.

Depiction of “Mr Hug and Luv” as a God of the Pigeons
(photography by me)

I think that these pigeons were frightened by “Mr Hug and Luv”. I put some food close by him, and the pigeons were initially reluctant to go after it. Most of the time pigeons and sparrows will voraciously go after whatever food one throws on the ground. But after a time they had coaxed the food far enough away from “Mr Hug and Luv” for the pigeons to be comfortable consuming it.

This image (below) of pigeons being fed baloney that has a humorous/ satirical tie in to the post, as “baloney” is slang for foolishness or nonsense, “pigeon” is slang for one who is easily swindled or a dupe, and “it’s for the birds” is slang for something that is considered worthless.

Feeding Baloney to the Pigeons