The Average of Stupidity is Still Stupidity
2026-07-28_b5-religion

#phil #sf

I'm currently watching Babylon 5. While it's mostly enjoyable, it's much worse than it ought to be owing to its fixation on "spirituality". (Oddly, Deep Space 9, another scifi series about a numbered space station that aired at the same time, has the exact same issue.) Souls are real. The afterlife is real. The angels were just asshole aliens, but it seems like god is probably real. It's the worst part of the show, excepting perhaps its Tolkien fetish.

The show's religious ideology takes the form of what might be called "tepid universalism": there really is something to all this spirituality stuff, and all religions though flawed reach toward the same transcendental truth. This was made quite explicit in the Alliance principles G'Kar rewrote to please the Drazi: the universe has a voice, we all hear it a little differently and speak it back in our own way, etc.

The idea is that we can average out all the religions, and whatever they all agree on must be the truth. It's such a common idea that I think we forget how dumb it is. It doesn't matter how many fools agree with each other they're still wrong. You can't take one million lies, add them up, divide them by one million, and get a truth. There is no quantity of religious belief at which it becomes more than myth.

If a hundred stupid people agree with each other on something, it's probably not true.

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