14 responses so far ↓

• 1 John // Sep 25, 2006 at 10:59 pm

  Chapter One, p. 37:

  You could die at any moment. Yo might not even live to see the end of this paragraph…

  I was greatly relieved when I reached the end of this paragraph.

• 2 John // Sep 25, 2006 at 11:08 pm

  Chapter One, p. 16:

  This is not to say that the deepest concerns of the faithful, whether moderate or extreme, are trivial or even misguided. There is no denying that most of us have emotional needs that are now addressed–however obliquely and at a terrible price–by mainstream religion. And these are needs that a mere understanding of our world, scientific or otherwise, will never fulfill. There is clearly a sacred dimension to our existence, and coming to terms with it could well be the highest purpose of human life.

  This is an acknowledgment that many secularists and rationalists fail to consider. I think it promising that Harris highlights it.

• 3 Elise // Sep 26, 2006 at 6:34 pm

  Chapter 1, Page 36:

  “….Man, in fear of losing all that he loves, [has] created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.”

  Cheers to this because I think it is true. Speaking as someone who with faith/hope that God is real, I find myself faced with the dilemma of wondering what parts of my image of God are correct and what part have been created by my society (and me) as a reaction to fear of loss.

• 4 Jonathan // Sep 27, 2006 at 7:54 pm

  Chapter 6 (A Science of Good and Evil) p. 179

  The general retort to relativism is simple, because most relativists contradict their thesis in the very act of stating it.

  This is very true. Big cheers to this one. I’m a fan of absolute truth.

• 5 Miko // Sep 28, 2006 at 10:24 am

  ch. 1, pg. 23:

  …[E]very religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable. (emphasis original)

  For me, at least, religion is what I know to be true in my…heart? soul? some non-rational thinking part of me. Many family members have appealed to my rationality to prove to me that, not only does God exist, if God exists (which He does, as proven), Catholicism is The One True Faith®. But religion doesn’t happen in your mind. If it did, we wouldn’t need religion. Harris equates humanity’s need of religion to humanity’s fear of death (pg. 43); but if we could be perfectly rational about religion, we would understand the irrationality of fearing that which we have no control over. (QED!)

• 6 Miko // Sep 28, 2006 at 10:30 am

  ch.1, pg. 26:

  Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources.

  I think that’s the heart of it, right there: it’s not so much the diverging or even irreconcilable differences, it’s the living together with limited resources. As he mentions elsewhere in the book, the world is shrinking. I think that, where once we could escape to another continent to practice our religion in peace (once we got rid of those pesky locals), we can no longer live in isolation. The inherent incompatability of religions has always led us to kill each other (pg. 12); this is not something new. What is new is that we can no longer ignore, or pretend to ignore the existence of heathens in our midst. Where once we dispaired at the existence of Jews & Muslims in our (Christian) Holy Land, we must now dispair at the existence of everyone (Jews, Muslims, Atheists, &c.) on our (God’s Chosen People’s) earth.

• 7 Miko // Sep 28, 2006 at 10:41 am

  ch. 1. pg. 44:

  As a man believes, so he will act. Believe that you are the member of a chosen people, awash in the salacious exports of an evil culture that is turning your children away from God, believe that you will be rewarded with an eternity of unimaginable delights by dealing death to these [unbelievers…]

  I like that, until he says “infidels” (which I replaced, above), this could be any of the major religions. “Infidel” has become a very charged word, generally meaning “not-Muslim” although it has been used by just about every religion. This brings to mnd the oft-misquoted (and possibly apocryphal) Bishop regarding the slaughter of the particular infidels of his day: “Kill them all. God knows his own.”

• 8 Elise // Oct 1, 2006 at 1:33 am

  If perfect coherence is to be had, each new belief must be checked against all others, and every combination thereof, for logical contradictions. But here we encounter a minor computational difficulty: the number of necessary comparisons grows exponentially as each new proposition is added to the list. How many beliefs could a perfect brain check for logical contradictions? The answer is surprising. Even if a computer were as large as the known universe, built on components no larger than protons, with switching speeds as fast as the speed of light, all laboring in parallel from the moment of the big bang up to the present, it would still be fighting to add a 300th belief to this list. What does this say about the possibility of our ever guaranteeing that our worldview is perfectly free from contradiction? It is not even a dream within a dream.”

  Response is here.

• 9 Elise // Oct 1, 2006 at 1:40 am

  “It should be clear that if a person believes in God because…the Bible makes so much sense, or because he trusts the authority of the church, he is playing the same game of justification that we all play when claiming to know the most ordinary facts.”

  This is so true. Using an example directly rendered from the book itself, how many of us know that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part of oxygen because we’ve actually studied it and done the necessary experiments to prove it? Most of us trust chemists/scientists and don’t really question such a basic fact. Cheers for Harris for pointing out that most of us rely on other authorities for many of our basic beliefs - not just religious beliefs.

• 10 Elise // Oct 2, 2006 at 8:55 am

  Miko said:
  “…religion doesn’t happen in your mind…..if we could be perfectly rational about religion, we would understand the irrationality of fearing that which we have no control over.”

  Miko - I really like the way you said this. When I was younger (I know I’m not that old, but what I mean is when I was fresh out of high school) I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile religion logically in my mind. Within the past couple of years, I’ve started to appreciate my spirituality more for its “heart” and less for its “rationality”. As this occurs, I find myself more concerned with the fruits of spirituality - is my faith making me feel more compassionate? is it causing me feel more loving? is it helping me be more tolerant and accepting? These questions seem more rational than “is this true” and the answers to these questions are something I feel I have control over.

  I wonder if this type of “spiritual” worldview that Miko describes so well would fall under “religion” according to Harris?

• 11 Reg // Oct 11, 2006 at 2:52 pm

  ch. 2, pg 78:

  The fact that faith has motivated many people to do good things does not suggest that faith is itself a necessary (or even a good) motivation for goodness.

  Thank you! This ties into other conversations going ’round here at MoF and, as I said before, I’ve found more hypocracy around those who claim to be holy and more goodness around those who claim no creed. In the experience of a child trying out newly-formed-and-taught reason, it was never the case to me that religion made someone good (if anything, I found the opposite). One of my sisters once admited surprise that people reacted so strongly against the Catholic Church in the midst of all the pedophilia allegations. “Jesus,” she said, “always found himself in the company of sinners. Why should we, too, not welcome them into our fold?” Yes, Jesus hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors but the former were often repentant and the latter he claimed were simply trying to make a living. Admitting sin, or loving the sinner but hating the sin, is no excuse for not punishing the sinner or for hiding the crimes of an ostensably “holy” person. [sorry, that turned into a rant…]

• 12 Reg // Oct 11, 2006 at 3:01 pm

  ch. 3, pg. 83:

  […]nothing can be less reprehensible [than the heretic Cathars]…andwhat they speak, they prove by deeds. As for the morals of the heretic, he cheats no one, oppresses no one, he strikes no one[.]

  me quoting Harris quoting St. Bernard. This, too, ties to the prior discussions about “godly”, for want of a better word, atheists and to the above quote.

• 13 Reg // Oct 11, 2006 at 3:18 pm

  ch. 3, pg 91:

  As late as 1718 (just as the inoculation against smallpox was being introduced to England and the English mathematician Brook Taylor was making refinements to the calculus), we find the madness of the witch hunt still a potent social force.

  Even as a historian (or, if you must, an historian), I often find it difficult to maintain this perspective. It is so easy to get lost in the civilizeder-than-thou mentality that is natural to the discussion of atrocities and forget that, even while we were burning witches, we were gaining scientific advances. I’m glad that he brought this to mind: I think it is important to remember that we are a product (okay, me are a product, being mostly white and of European extraction) of those witch-burning-calculus-inventing people of yore. We are where we are because of our history‚Äîgood history and bad history.

• 14 Reg // Oct 15, 2006 at 11:26 am

  ch. 3, pg. 106:

  Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm.

  Hear, hear. So often, we allow atrocities to be commited while we stand idly by. This is usually because we have convinced ourselves of the inhumanity of the victims. In order to train humans to kill other humans, you must first convince the killers that the killed are less than human; either because of their beliefs, location, actions, skin or gender differences, atrocities can only be committed against people who are no longer as human as the people committing them.

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