The World Beyond BetterMost > Anything Goes
Atheists: Come out, come out, wherever you are
Impish:
I found a lecture by Sam Harris (of the Atheist Manifesto above and book "The End of Faith") available online. It is truly amazing... this man is rocking my world in a big way.
The MP3 file is 1 hour 20 minutes long, but his lecture last about an hour and then there is a Q & A session after that.
So if you're doing busywork at your computer, or jogging with your iPod, give this a try. I guarantee that you will not be bored. You may or may not agree, but you will NOT BE BORED!
You can go to this page http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/radio/ and download the lecture titled "The View From the End of the World." To download, right-click the link and choose "Save Link As."
If you want to listen without downloading, click this link:
http://longnow.chubbo.net/salt-0200512-harris/salt-0200512-harris.mp3
I really hope someone will give this a try....
delalluvia:
--- Quote from: ednbarby on June 02, 2006, 02:30:30 pm ---Wow. This has been my husband's view all along, though not so thoroughly covering all angles. He's often said that the fact that there is so much evil and suffering in the world just goes to show that if there is an all-seeing being, he watches us from a distance like a grand experiment in a petry dish and does nothing to intervene either because he cannot or because he will not. In either case, such a being does not deserve worship. He doesn't buy that he only intervenes every so often, and those are miracles. Nor do I. Why does one person suffering from cancer get the cancer irradicated, and that's proof God exists and hears our prayers, while a couple hundred thousand die in a massive tidal wave? How arrogant to think that God hears *you* or your loved ones and not all those other people.
--- End quote ---
The counterargument from the ancients wasn't that one 'worshipped' these gods, but that one placated them. They had the power to avert disaster and evil, but you - the suppliant - had to make it worth their while. Christianity has so 'flavored' our idea of gods that we imagine that a god must be loving.
Some of these gods aren't/weren't loving.
Indeed, one of the typical invocations of the ancient Romans was Do ut des "I give so that you may give".
Let's make a deal, in other words. I scratch your back, you scratch mine. The gods were capricious and tempermental, but in the minds of the ancients, worthy of trying to placate since they controlled the elements and you didn't.
Shuggy:
--- Quote from: Shuggy on June 01, 2006, 06:20:33 pm ---I often refer to Abe Lincoln, who said, "When I do good, I feel good. When I do bad, I feel bad. And that is my religion."
Which reminds me of Tom Paine: "My country is the world and my religion, doing good" (That, incidentally, was told to me by my (pro bono) lawyer who represented me when I was a Conscientious Objector to Compulsory Military Training in 1965.)
I should put those on T-shirts, etc.
--- End quote ---
The Paine quote is now up at http://www.cafepress.com/wero/1440313 (one page out so you can see the others on this theme - I've also made them more legible). I've created the Lincoln image, but there's a gay film festival on at the moment and I'm staying at my man's place most nights, so it'll be a day or two before I put it up.
Impish:
As I continue reading "The End of Faith" I came across a section that shows that author Sam Harris does see the value of spiritual experience, in the way he defines it. He is not one of those cynics who can do nothing more than gripe about dogma.
I thought I'd present a passage that impressed me last night:
___________
The World beyond Reason
As we will see in the last chapter of this book, there is little doubt that a certain range of human experience can be appropriately described as "spiritual" or "mystical" --experiences of meaningfulness, selflessness, and heightened emotion that surpass our narrow identities as "selves" and escape our current understanding of the mind and brain. But nothing about these experiences justifies arrogant and exclusionary claims about the unique sanctity of any text. There is no reason that our ability to sustain ourselves emotionally and spiritually cannot evolve with technology, politics, and the rest of culture. Indeed, it must evolve, if we are to have any future at all.
The basis of our spirituality surely consists in this: the range of possible human experience far exceeds the ordinary limits of our subjectivity. Clearly, some experiences can utterly transform a person's vision of the world. Every spiritual tradition rests on the insight that how we use our attention, from moment to moment, largely determines the quality of our lives. Many of the results of spiritual practice are genuinely desirable, and we owe it to ourselves to seek them out. It is important to note that these changes are not merely emotional but cognitive and conceptual as well. Just as it is possible for us to have insights in fields like mathematics or biology, it is possible for us to have insights about the very nature of our own subjectivity. A variety of techniques, ranging from the practice of meditation to the use of psychedelic drugs, attest to the scope of plasticity of human experience. For millennia, contemplatives have known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call "I" and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe. This phenomenon, which as been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported by a wealth of evidence --neuroscientific, philosophical, and introspective. Such experiences are "spiritual" or "mystical," for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative. They also reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity. There is no doubt that experiences of this sort are worth seeking, just as there is no doubt that the popular religious ideas that have grown up around them, especially in the West, are as dangerous as they are incredible. A truly rational approach to this dimension of our lives would allow us to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.
pp 39-41.
delalluvia:
--- Quote from: Shuggy on June 03, 2006, 02:31:54 am ---The Paine quote is now up at http://www.cafepress.com/wero/1440313 (one page out so you can see the others on this theme - I've also made them more legible). I've created the Lincoln image, but there's a gay film festival on at the moment and I'm staying at my man's place most nights, so it'll be a day or two before I put it up.
--- End quote ---
The 'WWJD? What would Judas do?' is just too deliciously wicked!
Better than my personal fav 'WWJD? What would J-Lo Do?'.
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