Tuesday, January 25, 2011
hitch on belief
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, open mindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Sam Harris end of faith excerpt...
What if all our knowledge about the world were suddenly to disappear?
Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in
a state of utter ignorance and confusion.
Our books and computers
are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We
have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What
knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business
about growing food and building shelter that we would want to
get reacquainted with.
We would want to relearn how to use and
repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and
written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills
are necessary for acquiring most others.
When in this process of
reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was
born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we
relearn these truths, if they are indeed true'? By reading the Bible?
Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive
pair of cow horns.
Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries
a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a
dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our
resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to
relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be
stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment
of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who
begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in
that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?
Imagine that six billion of us wake up tomorrow morning in
a state of utter ignorance and confusion.
Our books and computers
are still here, but we can't make heads or tails of their contents. We
have even forgotten how to drive our cars and brush our teeth. What
knowledge would we want to reclaim first? Well, there's that business
about growing food and building shelter that we would want to
get reacquainted with.
We would want to relearn how to use and
repair many of our machines. Learning to understand spoken and
written language would also be a top priority, given that these skills
are necessary for acquiring most others.
When in this process of
reclaiming our humanity will it be important to know that Jesus was
born of a virgin? Or that he was resurrected? And how would we
relearn these truths, if they are indeed true'? By reading the Bible?
Our tour of the shelves will deliver similar pearls from antiquity like the "fact" that Isis, the goddess of fertility, sports an impressive
pair of cow horns.
Reading further, we will learn that Thor carries
a hammer and that Marduk's sacred animals are horses, dogs, and a
dragon with a forked tongue. Whom shall we give top billing in our
resurrected world? Yaweh or Shiva? And when will we want to
relearn that premarital sex is a sin? Or that adulteresses should be
stoned to death? Or that the soul enters the zygote at the moment
of conception? And what will we think of those curious people who
begin proclaiming that one of our books is distinct from all others in
that it was actually written by the Creator of the universe?
Thursday, January 20, 2011
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