Sadly, although I thought I was finished reading for my own book, I’m having to plow through two newer books, both of them dire. The first, which I just finished, is Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God. The less said about this discourse on apophatic theology the better. Well, let me just say that she claims that:
- Religion is not about belief, but surrendering yourself to religious emotions, and only then, after hard work, will you get what it’s about.
- We have no idea what God is (though apparently she has no doubt that there is some kind of god), so we shouldn’t speak about god or its nature or how said god is manifested in the world. One reviewer wrote something like “Karen Armstrong thinks we shouldn’t say anything about God. She feels so strongly about this that she has written fifteen books on the topic.”
- The older theologians—church fathers like Augustine and Aquinas—were apophatic too, and didn’t take the Bible literally (in this she’s wrong). Then modern theology, with its emphasis on belief and some Biblical literalism, corrupted the original apophatic theology, which we must now re-embrace.
That is the most sophisticated of Sophisticated Theology™, and of course she uses it to attack New Atheists, who, she says, have a juvenile and unsophisticated emphasis on Biblical literalism. Her vision of the true religion isn’t subject to attacks like theirs.
I’m about to start reading another critique of the new Atheists, the infamous The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers by Curtis White. It’s an anti-scientism book as well, and since I haven’t read it, here’s the Amazon blurb:
One of our most brilliant social critics—and the author of the bestselling The Middle Mind—presents a scathing critique of the “delusions” of science alongside a rousing defense of the role of art and philosophy in our culture
The so-called new atheists, most famously Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, made a splash in the new millennium. They told the evangelical and the liberal believer that they must give up religion and submit to science.
More recently, neuroscientists and their fans in the media have delivered a variation on this message: the mapping of the human brain will soon be completed, and we will know what we are and how we should act. Their faith is that the scientific method provides the best understanding not only of the physical world but also of art, culture, economics, and anything left over. The message is nearly the same as that of the new atheists: submit to science.
In short, the rich philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have been nearly totally abandoned, argues Curtis White. An atheist himself, White fears what this new turn toward “scientism” will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. After all, is creativity really just chemicals in the brain? Is it wrong to ponder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on Earth?” These were some of the original concerns of the Romantic movement, which pushed back against the dogmas of science in a nearly forgotten era.
White published an excerpt of that book in Salon a while back, “Christopher Hitchens’ lies do atheism no favorites,” which is a deeply misguided critique of Hitchens, accusing him of (as usual) lack of theological sophistication, ignorance of Eastern religions (true; he concentrates more on Abrahamic religions) and having his own metaphysics and code of conduct which, being faith-based, is precisely the same as what one gets from religion.
You can read it for yourself, but Salon just published a nice rebuttal of White’s piece by Carlo Dellora, a student at the University of Melbourne: “God is not great”: Christopher Hitchens is not a liar.” While admitting that Hitchens was indeed Eurocentric and didn’t deal with Eastern religions in God is not Great, he nevertheless defends him against the charges that he was a liar, and had no good secular system for ethics.
Just a couple of quotes from Dellora’s piece:
As White points out, Buddhism may in fact be a solid ethical framework, but this is not the point. Buddhism is yet another fiction, another deep sleep that convinces adherents that life is only an appetizer for the next incarnation; whether or not their ethical structures have more in common with Western notions of “decency” or violent Wahhabism remains irrelevant so long as Eastern religions preach that life here and now is merely foreplay before the real thing, and that more than anything provoked Hitchens’ ire.
As for the charge that there’s nothing wrong with moderate religion, and Hitchens is just attacking a fundamentalist caricature of faith. As did Sam Harris, Hitchens sees moderate faith as enabling more extreme forms of religion, and I have to agree with that:
Like many before him have done, White suggests that Hitchens’ visceral resentment for all religions ignores “an important source for correcting the very real shortcomings of fundamentalism.” In a subtle reworking of the stale “why focus on the extremists argument” White suggests that only by accepting religion can society attempt to redress its excesses. Hitchens has consistently refuted this line of argument, contending that even seemingly moderate religions are in essence a kind of extremism as they reject the most basic forms of reason and instead trust a faith that praises an unseen creator and runs counter to most objective notions of reality. Furthermore, Hitchens saw moderates as facilitators of the abhorrent extremist brand of religiosity that threatens abortion clinics and blinds “adulterous” women with acid. When the Danish cartoon controversy erupted in 2005 Hitchens was shocked to see that moderate adherents to Christianity and Islam spent their time decrying the cartoons but not the violence itself, ignoring the murderous mobs who had taken to the streets in reply. This was illustrative of a broader issue, namely, that moderate religiosity provides a plinth upon which a firebrand version of any faith can be constructed, moderation in essence creating the environment necessary for extremism to survive.
Finally, I have to quote Dellora’s defense of Hitchens’ secular ethics against the charge that it’s religious. It includes a wonderful quote from Hitch (I’ve put it in bold) that I’ve not heard before:
It is here that White finally comes to the point that he and many others like him have been making for at least the last decade – that the “new-atheist” movement is just another religion. A contention that echoes the twist at the end of the mediocre Hollywood blockbuster, atheism is religion. White asserts that Hitchens’ reliance on enlightenment reason is a metaphysical claim and tantamount to the faith-based logic of the religiously inclined. White asks: “What is “reason” for Hitchens? Your guess is as good as mine. Is it the rules of logic? Is it the scientific method? Is it Thomas Paine’s common sense? Some combination of the above?”
Yes, here White is correct. We should understand what made up Hitchens’ irreligious principles and ethical framework. How can we possibly be expected to trust a man who decries religion yet offers very little in the way of a description or framework of ethics as an alternative? Except, he does. On the very same page, in the very same paragraph that White quotes, Hitchens succinctly and brilliantly outlines his own version of an ethical and principled kind of reason: “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.”
Into the fray.
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But nothing will make you sadder than reading the Amazon reviews.
“it is an excellent book for those among us who can see through the hype of Scientism”
“Curtis White nails it..”
“A Wise and Powerful Understanding Of What Makes Us Human”
“A Triumph Over Scientific Triumphalism”
and on and on.
As I noted in a previous post, Curtis White’s main purpose in ‘The Science Delusion’ is to belittle the Enlightenment in favor of Romanticism. This would be fine, were the metaphysical foundations of Romanticism–i.e., Transcendentalism–actually the case. But they are very probably not. Science and scientism have knocked the props from under Romanticism by showing that there is no way to transcend (or to be ‘ecstatic’ in the literal sense) because there is nothing to transcend to: no ideal realm. It’s the ancient war of Plato against Aristotle, and Aristotle wins.
The screed contra Hitchens was bound to be what ‘Salon’ published because it is a devil’s advocate’s work aimed at demolishing a secular saint (won’t work, Curtis, and ironically you’re doing the ‘lord’s work’ by trying). Many folks hated Hitchens because he was so good at showing why he was so right. None of his critics could meet his arguments fairly and squarely. Now that he’s dead, they are piling on to beat up his memory.
Jeez, don’t just give it away, man! Next time, a spoiler warning, maybe?
b&
It all boils down to the ol’ “there’s more to life than science can reveal” argument.
The scientific method has by far been the most succesful way of observing and predicting the universe ( including us ) that surrounds us, and it continues to baffle me that people are afraid of the truth as it appears to be.
Why do some people fear the fact that we can predict certain patterns in human behaviour?
Abraham Maslow: “The more a person’s processes are outside his awareness, the more likely it is that those processes are dysfunctional.”
His famous hammer just might have hit the nail on the head on that one. 🙂
“Religion is not about belief, but surrendering yourself to religious emotions, and only then, after hard work, will you get what it’s about.”
lol.
I wonder if the only way one can understand how enzymes catalyze biochemical reactions is when one surrenders him/herself to the emotions of enzyme kinetics
As the Amazon blurb quoted above says (twice), New Atheists want people to “submit to science”. lol.
I wonder what that even means, to submit to science. I think this is some religious concept of servility that doesn’t translate into science. The author’s religiosity is revealed in that word choice.
If one decides that evolution is more true than the Genesis account of the origins of life, this entails “submission” to science?
I guess thinking for yourself is not an option for the religious. They must think that you must take science’s word on authority, a totally unscientific concept.
lolz!
Yeah religious people are pretty much slaves to their emotions.
They like to be coddled.
I will now brush up on Michaelis-Menten kinetics so that I may surrender myself to the emotions of enzymology!
hahhahhahah
Yes indeed, the author’s religiosity, and so much more, is revealed in that word choice.
New Atheists don’t want people to submit to science, but merely to understand what science is. Of course, the anti science pro religion / spirituality critics typically believe that they do understand enough to justify their position. And too many people who really should know better give them a pass on their ignorant, sometimes embarrassingly so, understanding of science because they are sympathetic to a religious / spiritual world view.
Many changes would follow just from that alone (an accurate understanding of what science is). I haven’t seen a single anti science screed, even by a scientist, that didn’t reveal a critical misunderstanding of some aspect of science, or an obviously faulty rationalization motivated by desire to believe a certain thing.
The way I submit to the hard fact of missing the nail and hammer my thumb is to modify “the experiment” (e.g. nail guns). It is never to stop experimenting as they suggest.
Perhaps the lesson is that one should attend to the method rather than the intent — eg, the unfortunate Austrian gentleman who nail-gunned his scrotum to the roofing..
“… the Genesis account of the origins of life …”
Don’t forget that there are two incompatible Genesis accounts of the origins of life: the first involves the intelligent, foresightful god Elohim, while the second involves the bumbling idiot JHVH.
Bearing in mind that ‘science’ is generally a synonym for ‘reality’, this would mean we should submit to reality. Hard to see you can do otherwise really.
When faced with the critics of the gnu atheism I feel like repeating the same mantra over and over: “It’s the supernatural, it’s the supernatural, it’s the supernatural…”
Both Armstrong and White seem to be heavily into the tactics of diversion. Forget about the unique factual claims which define religion as religion. Ignore the supernatural. Instead — look out the window over there! Religion is … emotions! Religion is … art! Religion is … values! Religion is …. ethics! Religion is …. community! Religion is … a way to live and be! It’s just like all those things! So that’s the way it needs to be approached and treated.
And that’s especially the way it needs to be approached and treated by atheists. After all, this is how we shore up our own faith. The diversionary technique then should shore up faith in faith itself. It should successfully do this even if you personally choose not to believe (because you’re the cold, low, narrow sort of person who makes that choice, thus we don’t judge you for that.)
As you say, the real issue comes down not just to the supernatural, but to faith itself. How the hell do you draw a line on what is “reasonable” and what is not if the guiding rule is “yea! we go beyond reason!?” Insisting that God is a secular humanist (so human secular humanists shouldn’t be) is ultimately unworkable on many levels.
Makes you wonder why so few of them (do any of them?) back up their uber liberal religious claims by actually behaving as if they believed them. If they believe them why are they so busy criticizing the relatively few gnu atheists and yet neglecting to criticize the giant masses of much less liberal religious believers who are apparently doing it all wrong?
I think a lot of the ‘uber liberals’ are really only uber when it’s convenient. They contradict themselves left and right (“We can know nothing about God … God exists … God is not like this or that … God is like this”) and then tell themselves they’re being deep.
They will often sneer delicately at those who try to insert religion into politics or science, sure — but they also have nothing but sympathy, empathy, and admiration for the simple folk with their simple faith in a simple God. When push comes to shove the details of God don’t matter (how could they when the only way to describe God is with vague glittering generalities?) What matters is that you take part in the grand pageantry of belief and are therefore different than if you didn’t.
Yeah, that does seem to be the case. I do wonder if folk like Armstrong are myopic just out of white tower narcissism (as in: *I* don’t consider such folk supernatural religious beliefs important or worthwhile to talk about, so why should anyone else?), or if they’re strategically myopic (as in: I want to defend religion, but I can’t defend the ridiculous bits, so I will focus attention elsewhere).
In some sense, what we have here are two different groups of believers vying for the attention of the secular community: (1) academic theologians who want to argue for the logical possibility of some conceptual god or the personal enrichment value of some open philosophy. (2) politically active believers who want prayer back in public schools and creationism taught in science classes (or at least, evolution out). These groups do not share many members. Secularists tend to give group 2 most of their attention – and this seems no really really P.O. group 1.
“Don’t look at the dogma behind the curtain!”
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The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers
Sounds more like Pissing Around in our Modern World: Asking Questions That I Can Make Up Answers For in a Culture Enjoying the Benefits of the Big Questions that have been Answered Through Painstaking Research and Analysis
Armstrong’s nebulous language provides strong evidence that those who enjoy modernity but still feel the need to cling to a god, have no other choice but to strip their god of tangibles and shove he/she/it into the ephemeral nowhere.
I hope it’s a sign the he/she/it will soon shrink away altogether like the melting witch in Wizard of Oz. 🙂
We appreciate you taking some for the team by reading through these and commenting on them. I don’t think I’d be able to tolerate it.
I guess it’s always good to see people such as Armstrong defending non-literalism.
“Religion is not about belief, but surrendering yourself to religious emotions”
Does Armstrong ever actually speak to any, you know…real religious people? Or does she stick to the company of fellow Sophisticated Theologians? The really religious are obsessed with “belief”, in Christianity most of all. That’s why they’ve spent the best part of two millennia splitting, schismatizing, expelling, condemning, arguing, persecuting and fighting each other. That’s why they have creedal statements which you’re expected to sign up to, jot and tittle. “Belief” is everything to these people.
Proverbial nail on proverbial head. Not only that, but the few verses that christians actually know (John 3.16, Ephesians 2.8-9, Romans 10.9) are all about believing, believing specific “facts,” and linking that believing to salvation.
Karen Armstrong is just wrong (at least as far as evangelical christians are concerned).
But, as I’ve posted here before, and probably will again, Richard Dawkins nailed it, in the God Delusion. In response to the question, “You always attack the worst of religion and ignore the best. You go after rabble-rousing chancers like Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, rather than sophisticated theologians like Tillich or Bonhoeffer who teach the sort of religion I believe in.” he replied:
“If only such subtle, nuanced religion predominated, the world would surely be a better place and I would have written a different book. The melancholy truth is that this kind of understated, decent, revisionist religion is numerically negligible. To the vast majority of believers around the world, religion all too closely resembles what you hear from the likes of Robertson, Falwell, or Haggard, Osama bin Laden or the Ayatollah Khomeini. These are not straw men, they are all too influential, and everybody in the modern world has to deal with them.”
As to the charge that the gnu atheists just pick on fundamentalists, let me submit that in one crucial respect almost all of these apologists are very much like the most extreme young earth creationists: no matter ho many times and how thoroughly you refute an argument, they still make the argument. They still flog the argument that “atheism is just another religion” with all the intellectual dishonesty of the most ardent creationist.
Well, to be fair, that’s pretty typical of how any side of any debate feels – be it over free will, political issues, you name it. It’s pretty normal for each side of the debate to think “I’ve pointed out the fallacies in the other guy’s argument over and over, yet he STILL keeps using them.”
It’s not necessarily dishonesty in action; it’s kinda how things go when you think you are right and the other guy is wrong.
Vaal
I understand that. Nevertheless, the facts supporting our case are not addressed either. You can show how many people believe in angels, you can show how many people think there really were an Adam and an Eve, you can show how many people think there really was a fellow named Noah and he really did build an Ark,…
The charge that the gnu atheists just pick on fundamentalists loses its potency entirely if gnu atheists can demonstrate that large numbers of people (sometimes majorities) do indeed believe what fundamentalists believe. The Karen Armstrongs of the world know that as well as we do, so she keeps flogging that charge without acknowledging that her guazy form of religion has little do do with what most religious adherents believe.
Your point is well taken though. Perhaps we should spend more time discussing dumb arguments made by (some) atheists or salient points made by theists (if there are any) just to sharpen our case.
Oh, believe me, I find myself infuriated to see theists use the same bad arguments, especially easily refuted arguments, over and over.
The one that probably gets my blood boiling the most is that “if we are ultimately just matter in motion, then nothing we do matters, morality makes no sense, we have no reason to trust any of our beliefs – we are fundamentally no different than anything else made of matter and energy.”
The most egregious promulgation of this argument to my mind is Douglas Wilson (Christopher Hitchens’ debate opponent in the documentary “Collision.”) That can be crushed in a way that Wilson ought to feel ashamed to ever raise it again in public, or that at least the public ought to feel shame for Wilson for raising it.
But…repeat it he will…
*gnashes teeth.*
Vaal
Actually, the charge that Gnus only attack fundamentalist religion is kind of silly. It can only be made by someone who isn’t paying attention.
I see nothing wrong in Hitchens (or Dawkins and Harris) focusing on the Jerusalem-based religions. Western society and much of the world is either Christian or Muslim because of the propensity of these religions to proselytize.
I belong to India and like to focus on the ‘silliness’ of the vaunted ‘Eastern’ religions.
It is of course true that Hinduism does not easily lead to a cult of suicide bombers. Nor does it proselytize.
But the business of idol-worship of all sorts of gods and goddesses with four and ten hands and four heads is nonetheless silly. I find it ridiculous that educated people can be given to worship the monkey ‘God’ Hanuman or the phallic symbol of Shiva. I find it ridiculous that people of India consider the river ‘Ganga’ to be ‘holy’ and carry its water everywhere and use it for ‘religious’ and ‘purification’ purposes.
I prefer to criticize all of these aspects of Hinduism as I think the people of India are familiar with these versions of religion.
It won’t make sense for me to make fun of the polygamy aspects of Mormons or the silliness of the Amish or the Scientology believers.
The one with the elephant head is my favourite, Ganesha, he seems like a good bloke. 😉
“An atheist himself, White fears what this new turn toward “scientism” will do to our culture if allowed to flourish without challenge. After all, is creativity really just chemicals in the brain? Is it wrong to ponder “Why is there something instead of nothing?” or “What is our purpose on Earth?” These were some of the original concerns of the Romantic movement, which pushed back against the dogmas of science in a nearly forgotten era.”
In defense of scientism: Yes creativity is all just chemicals/neurons, but us monkeys structure our environment (create) in an amazing and endlessly open way as we continue to understand the world and reflect on it and our selves. That is the fortune of our linguistic, conceptual and technological selves, but this capacity to combine ideas and create new social worlds and tools is rooted in a brain developed by evolution and previous cultural developments (and thus is just coolly structured chemicals).
It is not wrong to ponder existential questions, in the end there is not a right or wrong. For me, it is a question that I cannot imagine an answer to, but we can of course continue to be mesmerized by it. The only way we will get better answers to the question is by science and technology, such as understanding physics and our evolved background, or finding other alien life that can give us further clues, that is, by Star Trekking. God and religion certainly does not help us answer such a question, even if some believe that “God is” solved it.
Lastly, humans do not have a purpose. We are fortunate creations from evolution that through language were able to conceptualize our selves and therefore reflect on these questions. We have strong desires to continue to proliferate and to further our understanding, and I argue we should continue to do just that, but there is not some inherent purpose to the human condition. Belief about such and searching for such a phantom purpose encourages us to misrepresent Homo sapiens, their history and their future.
Waxing poetically about humans or postulating properties that do not exist does not lead to a better understanding or, in the end, to a better existence.
But it does enable you to settle for getting your fix of wonder, amazement, “spirituality,” from really bad fantasies instead of the orders of magnitude grander realities of the universe as revealed by the journey of scientific (in the broadest sense) investigation.
While admitting that Hitchens was indeed Eurocentric and didn’t deal with Eastern religions in God is not Great
I’m going by memory here but I’m pretty sure that Hitch devoted a whole chapter of his book on the Eastern Religions. I think it might be called something like – There is no Eastern solution. He basically proved that Buddhism isn’t all that peaceful. I can’t recall what else was in the chapter.
He did, indeed, devote a chapter: There Is No “Eastern” Solution; Chapter
14/10 pages.
Hitchens ignorant of Eastern
religions? Mr. White should read that chapter (again?) and then SHUT UP!
On The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers I’ve already noted that it favors the easy but moldy goddidit above centuries of hard work and shining results from many thousands of scientists.
Though I think anything that is blurbed “the dogmas of science” is anti-science, hunting a dog-tired strawman of empiricism.
Th: “the most useless of useless sophistry”.
Magic beings that manifest are, if they aren’t allowed the special pleading of religion, non-existent as many are rejected by observation. The real gaps have gone, mostly or fully (cosmology, particle physics, physicalism). Magic beings that doesn’t manifest at all fair no better when the gaps are missing.
I interpret it as a typical passive-aggressive position of bending over to have the matter shown right up the osculated rump of religion.
Ah. But my god is beyond the reach of your science. And it is the height of arrogance to think otherwise.
Curtis White made a hilarious error in that piece, and wound up spectacularly demolishing his own case.
He claims that Hitchens “simply ignores” relgious scholarship, and fails to consult those of a contrary opinion to his own.
Then he quotes a religious scholar Hamblin, who in turn says this this about Hitchens:
In discussing the exodus, Hitchens dogmatically asserts: “There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert . . .”
Stupidly, White didn’t bother checking the source of that quotation. In fact that wasn’t Hitchens’ conclusion at all. Hitch was recounting the conclusion of two Israeli archeologists who had set out specifically to “find the title deeds” of Israel.
Hitchens actually wrote:
“But then much more extensive and objective work was undertaken, presented most notably by Israel Finkelstein of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, and his colleague Neil Asher Silberman. These men regard the “Hebrew Bible” or Pentateuch as beautiful, and the story of modern Israel as an all-around inspiration, in which respects I humbly beg to differ. But their conclusion is final, and the more creditable for asserting evidence over self-interest. There was no flight from Egypt, no wandering in the desert…”
So in fact White wound up quoting Hitchens doing exactly what White accused him of failing to have done!
Also, White repeatedly accused Hitchens of lying, but failed to name a single one.
When my 6yr old son was hit by a car he only had a few bruises,i know I thanked god.I probably didn’t mean it but it’s the thing you do when something turns out ok and you expect the worse.
That’s understandable. It’s how our brains work. People tend to get really superstitious when they are under stress as well. I almost think there HAS to be an OCD link in there somewhere.
I have noticed a curious divide between believers and non-believers. The non-believers think that knee-jerk impulses, childish assumptions, major stress, untested intuitions, and traumatic situations make conclusions less reliable: we work at our best when we are cool, calm, mature, and prepared to be reasonable.
Religious believers often seem to think it’s the other way around.
They call it “heart knowledge.”
I think Diana is right. When you or yours have narrowly avoided catastrophe, it is difficult to not let your sense of relief from getting the better of your rational faculties. Maybe you don’t want to “jinx yourself”. Of course, that kind of feeling can cut both ways:
It’s probably only natural when narrowly saved from disaster to want to thank something, and an anthropomorphic personification such as ‘god’ is probably the first that comes to mind. It’s a matter of habit, really, rather than an indication of belief.
(Similarly, last week I drove over the Furka Pass in Switzerland, a narrow road with only a row of futile stone posts to mark the edge. I am not fond of heights. It would be incorrect to infer any religious belief from the nonstop stream of religious (and irreligious) invocations that emanated all the way down 🙂
I read Karen Armstrong’s ‘A Case for God’ years ago, largely on the basis of a 4 star review on Amazon by John W Loftus (that John W Loftus). I thought it actually wasn’t too bad.
Although, it’s so long ago, I can’t remember her arguments. It certainly didn’t shake my atheist worldview.
“Religion is not about belief, but surrendering yourself to religious emotions” — what babble is this?
What are “religious emotions”? What are these emotions based in? If religious belief is a non-factor, why do people “surrender” emotionally to a particular dogma?
Go ask some people in an Anglican church if they are “surrendering emotionally” to Allah, and see what they say, Karen.
If it’s not about belief, then why bother with the dogma at all? Just more blather, that tries to immunize faith from criticism, by reducing what it means to be “religious” down to some nebulous, endlessly shifting non-entity.
Excellent; along with Dave’s comment at #9 above, this really nails it. Hasn’t Ms. Armstrong noticed that different religions have different beliefs–and if they didn’t, they would not be different religions–and different emotional responses to various religious items? Or is she just confusing “what is” with “what I want it to be”?
After reading this
http://www.altx.com/int2/curtis.white.html
you’ll realize that CW is an addled postmodernist who is angry that science is getting all the attention.
“..the mapping of the human brain will soon be completed…”
Unless I missed something–which would not be a first–this is bunk considering that the billions of neurons in the brain, each carrying our unique DNA and with hundreds of connections, are also uniquely connected and uniquely ‘informed’ by our experience, modelling the brain even individually is an unlikely, possibly intractable problem.
If true, the idea of mapping it is a fantasy.
The problem with all the religious and atheists/science debate centers around their collective misunderstanding of terminology. God and religion are not now nor ever have been the same thing. Whether or not a god (or Great Creator) exists in any form has nothing to do with religion. Religion is a human invention primarily as a political tool used since earliest times to allow a leader to manipulate the gullible. And a very useful tool it is. But it is very easy to rally an army if it presented as ‘god’s will’ and not an avarice leader who wishes to keep control of his population and fill his coffers. Just because someone says that god spoke to him and demanded action of a population or congregation does not mean that any god was consulted or aloud to sanction or condemn these actions.
Religion is a human invention primarily as a political tool used since earliest times to allow a leader to manipulate the gullible.
Well said! “To the people, all religions were equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the magistrates equally useful.”
Nice and concise. I like that.
It’s not original to me (wish it were!); someone famous said it with respect to Roman culture in the time of Caesar. I’ve forgotten the source, but I’m sure it can be googled. OK, just did. Gibbon; see:
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_gibbon_1_2_1.htm
Everybody who says that science is not great and make a book and sell it THROUGH THE INTERNET should just STFU.
Jerry, are you writing a book on atheism/belief, etc.?
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“Religion is not about belief, but surrendering yourself to religious emotions,”
Well, she got that right.
And there is also the fact:
When passion governs she never governs wisely
Surrendering logic and reason to emotions can make you do all kinds of things. Not always bad, but it often is. For example, blowing yourself and others up in a suicide bombing or burning schoolchildren to death as islamic radicals did this week in the 21st century!!