What is true about elite attitudes to WikiLeaks also applies to religion and censorship. I am pretty confident that many of the elites in society are convinced that there is no god and that religious books like the Bible are fiction. As James Mill said to his son John Stuart Mill, “There is no God, but it’s a family secret.” But they do not share this fact with ordinary people either because they think they cannot handle the truth or they think that religious belief is a good mechanism for social control.
Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002, p. 131) quotes neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol on this firm belief amongst the elites that people should be shielded from the truth. Kristol said in an interview:
“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”
In an interview with Humanist Network News (HNN), Pinker says that Kristol thought that atheism is true but should be kept a secret, reserved for just a few. These people even advocated ‘intelligent design’ as a strategy for keeping the atheistic implications evolution by natural selection at bay, even though they realized that it lacked any evidence in support.
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