Reza Aslan and Sam Harris discuss religion and reason.
God bless C-Span. Last weekend, the paparazzi of the smart-set broadcast the debate on religion between Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Reza Aslan (No God But God) at a public library in Los Angeles. A debate on religion is always a quarrel, so I promptly hit record on the remote to watch it all in slo-mo later.…
Article comments
26 - troll
but its non rational kernel of intuitive knowledge and will remain I guess
27 - Anil Menon
Baronius, ref to Ramayana: My understanding is that most devout Hindus believe something of the sort happened. Besides, there is some flexibility since there are some 300 versions of the Ramayana; different communities tell very different stories. The Jain Ramayana, for instance, inverts the roles of the major heroes and villains. Most Hindu texts have this Banyan tree quality; this is a religion where atheism is as much a way to God as anything else. Of the six major schools of Hindu philosophy, two (Smakhya and Mimamsa) are explicitly atheistic.
D'oh: agree with you on the problem with claims of literal truth. Add to that the claim of divine sanction and you have a perfect storm.
28 - Anil Menon
Um, small correction. It's not "Smakhya." It's Samkhya.
29 - D'oh
Anil says - "on the problem with claims of literal truth. Add to that the claim of divine sanction and you have a perfect storm."
Quoted for Truth
30 - Randy Kirk
My faux pax on my original post at this spot was not the failure to fully introduce myself, I'm easily accessed on Google. It was my failure to take the time to determine who the audience was. For that I asked the commentors to forgive me. It was a huge mistake.
A later post resulted in many hundreds of comments over several weeks. I thought I had overcome my sad beginning. But alas.
As to the divinity of the Bible, we may none of ever know for sure. However, my point continues to be that wisdom and reason generally look to evidence, review it, and then folks make up their mind. You may be the one person on the jury who has looked at the evidence and decided it isn't compelling enough for you. Five others might feel that there is enough for a decision. Maybe 6 decide that their voting for Divinity. Whose right?
31 - D'oh
Randy - my take is that as long as each are free to make their choice, it's all good.
Certain dogmas do not allow such choice, and such is why the secular organization of government must stay apart from any sect of faith to allow such choice to be made unfettered.
That's a corollary to my earlier bit about "literal word of god" and the dangers inherent in such a postulate.
32 - Randy Kirk
I should think that you are far too worried about the religion of Jesus informing the state more than in the past. I should be more concerned that the religion of secularism is now attempting to inform the state into the future. Faith is faith.
33 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Gentlemen,
As a child, I walked away from religion and considered myself an atheist. It was probably my reaction to being forced to attend synagogue on Saturday mornings for a grade.
That something might be wrong with my view of the world first got tossed in my face when I was a teenager visiting Bagel Beach, and two old women with whom I was arguing managed to shut me up cold with. "if you don't believe in G-d, you can't be a Jew!"
It was far more important for me to be a Jew than to believe in G-d. That does not make sense. I should have just shrugged off the Jew part along with G-d and gone on my merry way. I couldn't.
So I backed off and considered myself an agnostic. So long as I called myself an agnostic, my membership card in the Tribe would not be cancelled.
So I figured...
Even the world of an agnostic gets disturbed by the fellow who can point the stick and find water, what had been the modern equivalent of a prophet. But you can reason your way out of that.
But the world of an agnostic really gets messed up when you look above the hospital bed of your dying father and see a cloud disappearing into the ceiling, while as you glance down, your father becomes grey and lifeless.
Some people, and they can be found en masse here at this magazine, will roll their eyes and dismiss this as a delusion.
But I do not and never did drugs for entertainment. I've always been cold sober. I don't have hallucinations either.
It didn't register fully at the time, but from that point on I became aware that as little as I liked the cliquish and snobbish Jews in the synagogue I occasionally went to then, the scholars who talked about a soul were onto something I didn't understand - and that they did.
Events in my life have pushed me little by little, further and further, into the position of giving Trust to an Entity beyond my understanding. And while I have not always gotten what I wanted, this Entity has not failed me. My life is ruled by the maxim, "blessed is the man who has trust in G-d, and G-d will be his security". This is why I follow those who talk about the convergence of religion and science, rather than positing the two to be opponents of each other.
My late cousin Steven, the only blood relative I ever had in Israel, was known to his mother as a top flight geneticist at the Hebrew University. To all those who knew my late cousin in the Old City of Jerusalem, and later in the village of Nevé Daniél, he was Rav Shlomo Seidman.
The convergence of faith and science in a very clear way...
This is why, while I may not have all the details and specifics right, and I'm learning every day, I'm convinced that I'm on the right road.
34 - Christopher Rose
Ruvy, you may well have seen something that day your father died but you simply can't KNOW what you saw.
You leap to the assumption that it was your father's soul but there's nothing to support that interpretation at all. It's entirely possible that it was a hallucination or any one of a million other things.
You refer to events in your life pushing you into a particular position but, given your pre-existing predilection to want to believe this mystical interpretation, it looks like you're pre-selecting stuff to fit your desired outcome.
It's just like your story where you always wanted to have four children. You didn't - and the way you try to reason it out so that you did is entirely human and not divine.
Your conviction that you're on the right road is blinding you - as you'll find out when you die. There is no heaven and your faith, like all these childlike interpetations of the world, do all humanity a major disservice.
Until we all accept that the here and now is what's important and treat each other accordingly, all faith does is divide and antagonize all humanity, to ourt collective loss. The god theory is absolutely the enemy of us all and totally blocks any sincere exploration of the unknown. Faith is blind.
35 - Randy Kirk
"Until we all accept that the here and now is what's important and treat each other accordingly."
I've never understood this concept of a better underpinning of morality. I can understand that if folks are really good at thinking forward, evaluating the chess board of life fully, and putting off fulfilling their wants and even some of their needs, they might act ethically and morally regardless of God, Heaven, Hell, and the fellowship of believers.
But, so many folks I know want their needs and wants met now, not later. Everyone I know is pretty darn selfish, including Christians. So, it would seem to me that within legal limits, I'm better off in your system to "grab" all the gusto I can, and not worry too much about who gets hurt.
I suspect you will want to add a few rules we should live by on top of your "this is all there is" approach, but how do I make sure my neighbor abides by them? My actual neighbor could care less that there 150 pound dog howls at all hours of the day and night. And they are not even generally inclined towards being antisocial.
36 - D'oh
This is as opposed to a dogma that allows one to lie,cheat, steal, kill, invade...and anything else...then at the last moment confess their sins and be "born again" and assured a place in heaven while a child who dies before being baptised is condemned to eternal damnation?
As for earthly enforcement...we call it the secular Rule of Law..it works pretty well.
Probably more later....
the Tao of D'oh.
37 - duane
Hello Randy. Long time.
I should know better than to get drawn into this. I can't keep up with you and D'oh. But I would really like to know your thoughts regarding the implicit claim that morality and ethics cannot be drawn strictly from human interaction and experience, a pragmatic approach in the interest of establishing and maintaining a civilized society, based on human needs for self-preservation, comfort, self-actualization, procreation, and fellowship, without the need for the concepts of eternal joy and damnation.
38 - Randy Kirk
Don't know if any of you are still up for this. I had to take a few days off.
Duane, I think you'll keep up.
I love your list, but I can't imagine we could ever agree on that being a good list, a complete list, how to prioritize within the list, or how to best achieve those things. I would suggest there are more powerful needs like power, sex, aquisition, pain avoidance, purpose, and understanding of origins and life after death. That doesn't even touch on more complex needs such as testing limits, rebelliousness, etc.
D'Oh,
Why is forgiveness a problem. Praciticing shrinks feel that the inability to forgive or to feel forgiven is responsbible for 75% of emotional illness. In my spiritual counseling, I have found that ratio to be almost dead on. Amazing that the authors of the Bible made forgiving others and being forgiven the 2nd most important them if love is #1.
39 - duane
Randy, we can worry about the list later. For now, I'll just repeat my request:
#37 "But I would really like to know your thoughts regarding the implicit claim that morality and ethics cannot be drawn strictly from human interaction and experience..."
40 - Randy Kirk
They can, but each person would come up with their own. That's why I said what I said. With all of your and my education, experience, and interaction, we won't be able to agree on the heirarchy of needs, much less the moral or ethical ways to achieve same.