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4 hours ago
Malignant Fantasy
originally posted Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tonight I found this on the Link station and was riveted to my chair for the hour and a half it was on. I've read Sam Harris' books and have to say that afterwards I wanted to be an atheist...but decided I didn't want to give up the beauty of ritual and mythology the Craft affords. Shame, too, I would've made a good one.
It is his closing statement that propelled me to type it up and blog it for all of you to read. Let me know what you think. I personally loved it!
Truthdig Debate "Religion, Politics and the End of the World" on May 22, 2007.
Sam Harris' Closing Statement
"Let me give you a sense of what it's like to be me having this conversation. It seems to be we could have been having this conversation 500 years ago. Life was difficult 500 years ago, there was a lot of despair. There are crops [that] failed, disease spread, people suffered just instantaneous and catastrophic changes in their fortune and it well under the cause of all this, actually was well understood 500 years ago.
It was witchcraft.
And happily the church had produced some very energetic men who had the gumption to deal with this problem and so every year, some hundreds and sometimes thousands of women were burned alive for casting spells on their neighbors.
Now, imagine what it would be like to be among the 5 or 10 percent of people, at most, who recognized that the very belief in magic, the very belief in witchcraft, the very belief in good witches or bad witches was a malignant fantasy. That the white witches who were helping people with medicinal herbs and practicing midwifery were on no firmer ground than the black witches who were casting the evil eye. The whole belief system was at fault. Imagine the kind of criticism you're going to get.
"No, no, you're problem is with a kind of fundamentalist witchcraft. The reality is witchcraft is more far nuanced than that. There's no conflict between science and witchcraft. Science deals with physical law and physical causality and witchcraft deals with potent spells and the internal connections between things."
This idea that somehow we shouldn't call into question these patently bad ideas for fear of offending people, for fear of glossing over their despair, for fear of not criticizing other problems in the world - I would never argue that religion is the only problem in the world or the only source o f human conflict-but it IS a source and we are mightily attached to it, emotionally attached to it and we are loathe to criticize it even when it is declaring its ugliest intentions and its ugliest certainties. The problem with the bible is however you pick and choose; whether you're a literalist or a selective literalist, the problem is there's just a mountain of divisive nonsense in there and that's where people get ideas about homosexuality being an abomination and why our country in the 21st century debates gay marriage as though it were the great moral issue of our time. This is coming from religion and it seems to me it's time we had an honest conversation about that."
originally posted Thursday, September 13, 2007
Tonight I found this on the Link station and was riveted to my chair for the hour and a half it was on. I've read Sam Harris' books and have to say that afterwards I wanted to be an atheist...but decided I didn't want to give up the beauty of ritual and mythology the Craft affords. Shame, too, I would've made a good one.
It is his closing statement that propelled me to type it up and blog it for all of you to read. Let me know what you think. I personally loved it!
Truthdig Debate "Religion, Politics and the End of the World" on May 22, 2007.
Sam Harris' Closing Statement
"Let me give you a sense of what it's like to be me having this conversation. It seems to be we could have been having this conversation 500 years ago. Life was difficult 500 years ago, there was a lot of despair. There are crops [that] failed, disease spread, people suffered just instantaneous and catastrophic changes in their fortune and it well under the cause of all this, actually was well understood 500 years ago.
It was witchcraft.
And happily the church had produced some very energetic men who had the gumption to deal with this problem and so every year, some hundreds and sometimes thousands of women were burned alive for casting spells on their neighbors.
Now, imagine what it would be like to be among the 5 or 10 percent of people, at most, who recognized that the very belief in magic, the very belief in witchcraft, the very belief in good witches or bad witches was a malignant fantasy. That the white witches who were helping people with medicinal herbs and practicing midwifery were on no firmer ground than the black witches who were casting the evil eye. The whole belief system was at fault. Imagine the kind of criticism you're going to get.
"No, no, you're problem is with a kind of fundamentalist witchcraft. The reality is witchcraft is more far nuanced than that. There's no conflict between science and witchcraft. Science deals with physical law and physical causality and witchcraft deals with potent spells and the internal connections between things."
This idea that somehow we shouldn't call into question these patently bad ideas for fear of offending people, for fear of glossing over their despair, for fear of not criticizing other problems in the world - I would never argue that religion is the only problem in the world or the only source o f human conflict-but it IS a source and we are mightily attached to it, emotionally attached to it and we are loathe to criticize it even when it is declaring its ugliest intentions and its ugliest certainties. The problem with the bible is however you pick and choose; whether you're a literalist or a selective literalist, the problem is there's just a mountain of divisive nonsense in there and that's where people get ideas about homosexuality being an abomination and why our country in the 21st century debates gay marriage as though it were the great moral issue of our time. This is coming from religion and it seems to me it's time we had an honest conversation about that."
(1510 Woodcut Illustration)
Here are some more quotes I found to be great. There's a lot more but it's late and I'm tired so maybe more later.
"I'm extremely worried about the role religion is playing in our world. I happen to think that faith based religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology we have ever concocted and it keeps me awake at night. As someone who has been doing this for awhile, ever since 9-11 when those 19 guys showed our pious nation just how socially beneficial religion certainty can be I have argued against the role that religion is playing in our societies. "
"Even if we knew that one of our religions was perfectly true; even if we knew that this was God's multiple choice exam:
"Is it A: Judaism B: Christianity C: Islam?"
Even if we knew one was perfect-given the bewildering profusion of doctrines on offer; given their mutual incompatibility; every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability. It seems to me that this should give religious people pause when they espouse their certainties. It never does, but it should."
"Christianity is founded on the claim that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true...Most Christians most of the time take some complement of these miracles as true and most important seems to be the resurrection. Now the problem with this is that the only thing that testifies to these miracles ever having occurred is the gospel. There's no extra biblical description of these events. Everyone agrees that the gospels were written decades after the events they report, the earliest gospels. The problem is is that even if the evidence were much better than that; even if we had hundreds of contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of these miracles-that would still be not-still not be good enough evidence to cash out the claims of Christianity.
Why not?
Well, the problem is that in the 21st century, reports of miracles are still quite common. I have met literally hundreds of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The reports of miracles are quite current. There are Hindu yogis and mystics that reportedly walk on water and raise the dead and fly without the aid of technology and read minds and divine the future. Take someone like Sathya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru. All of these miracles are attributed to him. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which incidentally is not a such a rare claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan was supposedly born of a virgin. Alexander the Great was born of a virgin. Parthenogenesis does not guarantee you're going to turn the other cheek apparently. So consider this, Sathya Sai Baba has these miracles attributed to him by literally thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. He is not the David Koresh of Hinduism. His devotees threw a birthday party for him a few years ago and a million people showed up. There are millions of people who believe he is a living god.
Now, so consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is that miracle stories of a sort that surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba today which are compelling to no one apart from his devotees suddenly become especially credible if you place them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence. Sathya Sai Baba's miracles don't even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel and yet place these miracles in an ancient text and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them does anyone else see a problem with that? "
"When you hear someone arguing for the link between the morality and religion or the fact that it gives people meaning in their lives; this is an argument for the usefulness and this is not an argument for the plausibility of any specific religious doctrine. The other problem with the arguing for the usefulness of religion is that the dangers of religion are testified to now on a daily basis by bomb blasts.
How useful is it that million of Muslims in this world believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? How useful is it that the Shiite and the Sunni in Iraq have such heartfelt religious differences? How useful is it that so many Jewish settlers think that the creator of the universe promised them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean?
How useful has Christianity's anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations?"
Visit Sam Harris' page here: http://www.samharris.org/ or go and watch the whole debate for yourself here:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20070617_religion_politics_and_the_end_of_the_world/
Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood witch, Atheona
Here are some more quotes I found to be great. There's a lot more but it's late and I'm tired so maybe more later.
"I'm extremely worried about the role religion is playing in our world. I happen to think that faith based religion is the most divisive and dangerous ideology we have ever concocted and it keeps me awake at night. As someone who has been doing this for awhile, ever since 9-11 when those 19 guys showed our pious nation just how socially beneficial religion certainty can be I have argued against the role that religion is playing in our societies. "
"Even if we knew that one of our religions was perfectly true; even if we knew that this was God's multiple choice exam:
"Is it A: Judaism B: Christianity C: Islam?"
Even if we knew one was perfect-given the bewildering profusion of doctrines on offer; given their mutual incompatibility; every believer should expect damnation purely as a matter of probability. It seems to me that this should give religious people pause when they espouse their certainties. It never does, but it should."
"Christianity is founded on the claim that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true...Most Christians most of the time take some complement of these miracles as true and most important seems to be the resurrection. Now the problem with this is that the only thing that testifies to these miracles ever having occurred is the gospel. There's no extra biblical description of these events. Everyone agrees that the gospels were written decades after the events they report, the earliest gospels. The problem is is that even if the evidence were much better than that; even if we had hundreds of contemporaneous eyewitness accounts of these miracles-that would still be not-still not be good enough evidence to cash out the claims of Christianity.
Why not?
Well, the problem is that in the 21st century, reports of miracles are still quite common. I have met literally hundreds of Western educated men and women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers. The reports of miracles are quite current. There are Hindu yogis and mystics that reportedly walk on water and raise the dead and fly without the aid of technology and read minds and divine the future. Take someone like Sathya Sai Baba, the South Indian guru. All of these miracles are attributed to him. He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which incidentally is not a such a rare claim in the history of religion or in history generally. Genghis Khan was supposedly born of a virgin. Alexander the Great was born of a virgin. Parthenogenesis does not guarantee you're going to turn the other cheek apparently. So consider this, Sathya Sai Baba has these miracles attributed to him by literally thousands upon thousands of living eyewitnesses. He is not the David Koresh of Hinduism. His devotees threw a birthday party for him a few years ago and a million people showed up. There are millions of people who believe he is a living god.
Now, so consider as though for the first time the foundational claim of Christianity. The claim is that miracle stories of a sort that surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba today which are compelling to no one apart from his devotees suddenly become especially credible if you place them in the pre-scientific religious context of the first century Roman Empire decades after their supposed occurrence. Sathya Sai Baba's miracles don't even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel and yet place these miracles in an ancient text and half the people on this earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them does anyone else see a problem with that? "
"When you hear someone arguing for the link between the morality and religion or the fact that it gives people meaning in their lives; this is an argument for the usefulness and this is not an argument for the plausibility of any specific religious doctrine. The other problem with the arguing for the usefulness of religion is that the dangers of religion are testified to now on a daily basis by bomb blasts.
How useful is it that million of Muslims in this world believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? How useful is it that the Shiite and the Sunni in Iraq have such heartfelt religious differences? How useful is it that so many Jewish settlers think that the creator of the universe promised them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean?
How useful has Christianity's anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations?"
Visit Sam Harris' page here: http://www.samharris.org/ or go and watch the whole debate for yourself here:
http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/20070617_religion_politics_and_the_end_of_the_world/
Brought to you by your friendly neighborhood witch, Atheona
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