Dan Brown, author of the Dan Vinci Code (a book I read during a week’s vacation in Devon since it was the only literature available in the rental home), seems to be a pretty smart guy, even though I wasn’t keen on that book. His intelligence is palpable in the video below, which shows about half of his Penguin Lecture from last winter in India, and a Q&A (beginning at 17:10) with Rajdeep Sardesai. You needn’t watch it all: perhaps the five minutes beginning at 3:50 and about five minutes of the Q&A. There’s a report on this talk on PuffHo and at The Hindu.
Sadly, Brown espouses, in much of the talk, an accommodationism between science and religion. Clearly a believer, he points out the contradictions he noticed when young between scripture and science, and asked himself the question—as he asks the audience here—”How do we become modern science-minded people without losing our faith?” That, of course, presupposes the conclusion that he must hold onto his faith no matter what he finds. It becomes more difficult to grasp that given his statement (my emphasis) that “For one’s own survival, it is critical that we live without malice that we educate ourselves and that we ask difficult questions and above all we engage in dialogue especially with those whose ideas are not own own.”
Brown also notes in passing that we inherit our religions culturally: “We worship the Gods of our parents—it truly is that simple.” That’s a short statement of the observation motivating John Loftus’s “Outsider Test for Faith“, which I’ve discussed before. If everyone gets their faith from their parents, how come, if there really is a God, all those faiths conflict?
Brown has the answer.
The the conflict-between-faith observation, he says is a delusion, for “religions aren’t all that different; those differences arise only when we start using language” They are, in effect, not real differences in beliefs, but only differences in “vocabulary and semantics”. In essence, he claims, “All of our world religions have at their core the same basic human truths. Kindness is better than cruelty, creation is better than desctruction, and love is better than hate.” In the Q&A he adds that scripture is only a metaphor, and should never be taken literally.
The questions raised by this “solution” are obvious, and I needn’t dwell on them. The differences in religions are not a matter of semantics; they are real differences in what scripture claims and in what religionists have come to believe (unless Brown thinks that Islam’s call to kill apostates, or Catholics’ demonization of gays, are only metaphorical) And who is Brown to determine what religions have at their core, as opposed to what’s in the peel that can be discarded? And isn’t it odd that the same “core” values of religion are also the core values of humanism, values promulgated even by secular philosophers of ancient Greece, and by atheist/humanists ever since then. Why do you even need religion for that?
The answer is that you don’t. We can have all those moral teachings without the veneer of superstition, for it’s that veneer of empirical claims that is divisive. What’s at the core of every religion is in fact a worm: a worm of delusion gnawing away at rationality. Brown, like Karen Armstrong and other smart people who can’t let go of their delusions, arrogates to himself the true meaning of religion, and the ability to winnow the moral truths from the supernatural chaff. Pity that most of the world’s believers don’t agree with him.
Finally, how does Brown reconcile science and religion? In two ways. First he write off religious claims about nature as mere metaphor, not realizing that this raises the problems of what, exactly, is true in scripture. Are God and Jesus and Muhammad also metaphors? Further, he simply raises a version of Steve Gould’s NOMA hypothesis:
“Science and religion are partners. They are two different languages telling the same story . . . While science dwells on the answers, religion savors the questions.”
Notice that he says “savors” instead of “answers”. Science answers questions; religion “addresses” them. Pity that religion has never answered any question, at least about what’s real.
It’s also a pity that Brown’s interrogator Sardesai throws him only softball questions, but I guess that’s to be expected at a literary event like this. But Lord, just let me sit down with this man for an hour and ask him hard questions, like why he’s so sure there’s a God to begin with, and how he can tell when something in scripture is merely a metaphor.
But the greatest pity of all is that Hitchens is no longer alive to debate Dan Brown.
Sometimes I think I could make a good living by just parroting the warm, comfortable bromides of people like Brown. It still amazes me, though, even after all these years, that smart people can say such dumb things. I’d paraphrase Steven Weinberg by saying, “With or without religion, smart people will say smart things and dumb people will say dumb things. But for a smart person to say a dumb thing—that takes religion.”
If this is true then either atheists are religious — or atheists don’t believe kindness is better than cruelty, creation is better than destruction, and love is better than hate. Or, of course, there’s something more at the core of religion which is distinct from humanist values.
Most people who take Brown’s tack will offer the first one as a kind of bargain for refraining from debate. There are the variations. 1.) Atheists believe in God without realizing it. 2.) What “God” means is so wide-ranging that there’s no reason we can’t just say it’s another word for “love” or “nature.” 3.)Religion and humanism have the same values so we should just stop there.
Any atheist who fails to accept any one of those peace offerings — or all of those compensation prizes, offered one after another — thereby falls onto the deadly second prong of the angry, cruel, destructive, hateful person who doesn’t want harmony and peace.
It’s a variation of what Greta Christina has called The Argument from Shut Up, offered as an open-minded call for unity.
No, science savors the questions. Religion dwells on getting the right answers.
Ultimately, the most destructive thing that can happen to religion is not going to be something from evolution or neurology. It’s going to be a wearing-away of the bland and smug idea that we all want to “keep our faith” because it’s such a charming, humbling, wide-eyed attitude of appreciation, love, and gratitude.
Yes, a very good description. This is why liberal believers don’t rate a pass on criticism for their more liberal interpretations of their religions. They are still marginalizing others that don’t believe as they do, and they are still excusing, elevating, faith over evidence.
Smarmy sleight of hand is what it looks like to me. Like a politician smiling, kissing babies while stealing their candy.
Yes. You’ve got to read this quote on “faith” from Andrew Sullivan. It’s just awesomeness tied up with a bow.
That kind of thing just angers me so damn much.
So many people struggle just to make ends meet by honestly applying real knowledge and skill.
Then there’s fuckers like Heschel.
If this is true then either atheists are religious — or atheists don’t believe kindness is better than cruelty, creation is better than destruction, and love is better than hate.
While I’m not sure enough to say for sure, I think it’s most likely they’re angling for the former: atheists are OK at heart, but they’re too stubborn, independent, smug, intelligence-craving, etc. to ever admit that they’re no better and no different from the rest of us when it comes to humanity, or the human spirit, or the soul, whatever. Bless their pretentious hearts; they really are good people.
In the end, it’s just another form of feel-good romanticism, which trades on the idea that rationality is all very good and useful and Spock-like, and we love Spock for being what he is, he’s a part of the crew, but the human soul is irrational, or non-rational, or can’t be analysed and dissected, or is the most real of all things, or intelligence is nothing if you don’t have heart, spirit, life, etc.
And this, I think, is the deeper clash going on here: whether the human soul is exceptional and spiritual and life itself and the core of everything important, or a couple of kilos of electric meat tucked up in the skull. In other words, romanticism and rationality. It’s such a huge and long-standing clash that it might be a good candidate for THE root of the problem, unless there’s one that burrows deeper still and unites more phenomena without being too general.
I wonder if one of the major attractions of faith – in spite of its faulty reasonings – is precisely that it’s so irrational or non-rational. In some twisted, warped way, it’s supposed to prove that one is “human” and not a robot, or an animal, or whatever inhuman thing you can impute to those with the temerity of wanting good reasons to believe something.
This is a fantastic piece. We’re in for a treat with ‘The Albatross’.
My thoughts exactly. I guess nothing should surprise me anymore, but my reading of the two “DaVinci Code” books had rationalists as the heroes and religious extremists as the bad guys. I wonder why he didn’t make his protagonists “ground of being” types? Presumably his NOMA stance says it all: pure rationalism, in his view, throws the baby out with the bath water. He’s certainly not alone – I don’t like NOMAism, but it needn’t entail the “common good core” spiel which undermines it completely, and his credibility along with it. Libertarians espouse lots of ideas in common with progressives, but the areas where they diverge are so dear to me as to make Libertarianism anathema. It must be nice to go around with a Pollyannaish view of religion; I can’t do it, myself.
> “religions aren’t all that different; those differences arise only when we start using language”
This is largely true, but perhaps not in the way he thinks of it. All religions stem from the human desire to understand and control the world around them AND escape death. The rest is just language.
Science also stems from the human desire to understand and control the world around them and does a much better job than does religion.
Science disposes of the fantasy that one can escape death.
I think a lot of religion is about controlling people. I think the best evidence for this is that they are so obsessed with mandating sexual behaviour.
Agreed. Initially, it may have been about controlling people so they didn’t upset how religion was used to “control” the environment. But control of the people quickly became an end in itself. I still think we can safely say that this supports the meta-message that all religions are essentially the same, just varying in degree.
Note that science can also be used to control people. And in some cases, that may be the very reason why certain science is done. But this is miniscule compared to religion and no “true science” would be conducted to control people, right?
I totally agree and, IMO, it will prove to be impossible for us to redefine cultural attitudes about gender until we abandon our shame or honor based codes of morality.
Honor and shame morality of the Abrahamic faiths is simply a dehumanizing abomination. Men and women are made to regard sexuality with fear and shame, yet, through religion, men are given the mechanism for projecting that shame back on to women. Women are made to bear the brunt of their own shame and are made to internalize the shame that men project onto them. So religious men get the benefit of piety, without having to actually be pious, while women are made to bear the shame for both the genders, hence, boys will be boys but the whore must be cast out.
Even if you don’t read that much into it, it’s still just plain-old not fair.
I can’t think of two worldviews whose differences arise before we start using language. Are there differences between Calvinism and Unitarianism, for example, that “arise” before we use language?
Different logos, I guess.
And, yeah, this religion says “blessed are the peacemakers,” that one says “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear” … actually, those are from the same religion. Anyway. Language!
The Dan Sollievo code.
Ha!
I owe my atheism in part to Dan Brown. In his book, The Lost Symbol, he introduced me to the Institute of Noetic Sciences and painted a picture of that organization as doing leading edge and miraculous science. I had been a sucker for woo, but after visiting http://www.noetic.org and reading up on their “science” I began to notice the naked emperor. The clincher was when I started using their Flash based games that you controlled with your mind. Being an IT professional with a strong understanding of computer systems, I was incredulous that they expected people to focus on images on the screen and actually control those images! There’s no feedback from the fucking monitor so how is my brain going to control something that’s actually happening in the box at my feet by concentrating on pixels being displayed on an output device without some form of input peripheral that can translate what I’m thinking? The answer is that they created these games and the objects moved at random, and given the human tendency towards confirmation bias, if occasionally the object moved then credulous buffoons would believe they were actually using their minds to affect the computer. This pissed me off because in order to program such a game, the Institute of Noetic Sciences had to know this and intentionally create these games to fool people. I realized then that they were frauds and all the thin columns of woo based belief came tumbling down and I’ve been a skeptic ever since. I’ve also refused to read anymore books by Brown. Especially since the ending of the Lost Symbol was so lousy. It seemed clever at the time, but in hindsight is disingenuous and feeds the conservative delusion of the US being a Christian nation.
Once, NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Haggerty got off her leash and decided to do some science reporting. So she went to the Institute of Noetic Sciences and filed this fawning, credulous story, which actually aired on All Things Considered.
I think it was in Dawkins’ The God Delusion where he described an old study where ducks (or geese, I do not remember) actually developed a kind of religion around their food dispenser. The machine was programmed to dispense food randomly. Over time, different birds developed rituals of bowing, or circling, or preening before the food dispenser. It was pretty clear that the birds saw the occasional food dispensing as a confirmation of their ritual, and the many negative results were simply not weighed.
That would be Skinner’s pigeons, I believe. There are probably videos available online if you google ’em.
Better still is the psychological literature on the human tendency to confuse correlation with causation, as that directly describes how perfectly ordinary and sensible people can form bizarre beliefs from what a strictly objective observer would call scanty evidence.
To be fair, the game programmers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences are probably idiots.
No, not in the normal sense. I mean they don’t worry about feedback or interface or any of the usual concerns of legitimate computer programming because the entire point of psychokenesis is that it isn’t reducible to non-mental components. Imagine that “intention” is its own force, one which lies outside of physical law. They believe this.
They probably fall for the effect themselves. The more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to find significant patterns which don’t necessarily exist — if this is what they’ve began with. They doubted and “tested” their doubts. Confirmation bias made them feel science-y.
I love your account of how you concluded their computer programs were phony.
“I’ve also refused to read anymore books by Brown. Especially since the ending of the Lost Symbol was so lousy.”
You’re probably not missing much. RationalWiki, after giving a few paragraphs to each of Brown’s books up to Lost Symbol, summarises his next one, ‘Inferno’, in just five words: “Is just plain fucking awful”.
You’re right on about the Lost Symbol. Not sure why I forced myself to suffer through it. I guess I was hoping that eventually the clever, history-conscious, seemingly-agnostic professor would unveil the Noetic woo for the pseudo-science that it is.
I remember trying to read a Dan Brown novel once. I don’t even remember which one it was, but after a very brief time I got bored and reached for one of my Battletech novels, which are on roughly the same intellectual level but don’t have any pretensions of being grounded in reality.
This is just a variation on the ‘little people’ concept, and just as offensive as the standard version. He’s basically claiming that millions if not billions of people throughout history died over ‘vocabulary and semantics’ in religious wars, because they (unlike the esteemed Dan Brown) were too stupid to see their religious beliefs were really the same.
I beg to differ. While I think they fought over beliefs that will ultimately prove to be false, I am at least respectful/humble enough to accept that they knew what they believed better than Dan Brown did, and to accept that when they felt there were theological differences worth fighting over, that feeling was rooted in actual theological differences.
It can be rephrased: “Religions are, in effect, not real differences in underlying beliefs, but only differences in details. All of our world religions have at their core the same basic supernatural assumptions.”
This is both very important (“what makes ‘religion’ different from a non-religious life philosophy?”) and highly insignificant. The classic deepity.
You could say the same thing about political systems. All forms of government are concerned with promoting social harmony. It’s just the silly little details which make the small distinctions between social democracies, kingships, republics, communes, and totalitarian theocratic dictatorships marked by extreme violence and control. At their heart, they’re all asking and answering the same question: how ought we to live? We should live well.
Whoop-de-doodly-doo.
I found the two Brown books I’ve read, including The Da Vinci Code, to be masters of the art of suspence pacing but otherwise execrably badly researched and styled. There is no question in my mind that the religious conspiracy themes played a large part in the popularity of Code by keying into cultural memes. To me the popularity speaks volumes about western society.
My reading of The DaVinci Code was severely marred by my spiritual friends’ prior assurance that as an atheist I would surely love the book because it provides an iconoclastic view of Christianity and makes the traditional Church the Bad Guys. They seemed to think it was a legitimate theory I’d appreciate. There’s science and history and above all skepticism. It’s a very humanist book!
They do not understand humanism. I realized this with a deep attending sense of sudden exhaustion over how much they failed to realize this.
Mr. Brown’s tendency to take liberties with his portrayal of things has gotten its own trope.
There are websites devoted to exposing the errors in Dan Brown’s books (that’s ignoring the religiously-motivated ones), probably spurred on by the emphasis Dan Brown placed on the amount of research he allegedly carries out.
I like RationalWiki’s summary of Da Vinci Code which begins “Jesus and Mary Magdalene got it on, went to France, founded the Merovingian bloodline, the bloodline being considered the true Holy Grail. This conflicts with accepted Christian doctrine, and the equally realistic Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade.”
Brown was also, notoriously, sued for plagiarism by Baigent and Lee, authors of the pseudo-history ‘Holy Blood and Holy Grail’. They failed miserably. To quote RationalWiki again, “The moral of the story here is to avoid presenting confabulation as fact if you want to sue people who write novels based on your junk.”
Umm, http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dan_Brown
I suppose it’s to Dan Brown’s credit that he at least accepts that his version is fiction.
I recall reading the Da Vinci Code back when it was first out and very popular. It only reminded me why I do not read much fiction. This one keeps dragging you down this imaginary path that becomes harder to swallow with every page. And this one becomes very hard because it is a fiction about a fiction. Thanks but no thanks.
And as re “values promulgated even by secular philosophers of .ancient. Greece, and by atheist/humanists ever since then. Why do you even need religion for that? The answer is that you don’t,” perhaps there will be, as well, in .contemporary. Greece after over the past millennia all of its magically mythical goddesses and gods thereat some lovely measure of what is … … real: just yesterday, a Sunday, its current folks elected to its highest office a self – described atheist, Mr Alexis Tsipres of http://www.tinyurl.com/n6t6fvo !
Bravo, Grecians !
Blue
As Dubya learned, it’s Greeks, not Grecians.
Even under a strongly accomodationist view it would not really be true that “science and religion are telling the same story”. Maybe (for the accomodationist) inter-related stories like Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” but certainly not at all the same story.
Nor do the differences between religions arise from language. They in part arise from literalization of mythic narratives. (K Armstrong is just a step ahead of Dan Brown here.)
You might talk about core !*aspirations*! and/or !*ethics*! of many religions being partly similar (but not identical!!), but that would be different from similarity of !*teachings*! Some similarities of religion are outward ones due to a kind of convergent evolution, much as the body-shape of sharks and dolphins are very much alike, but they are inwardly quite different (an air-breather and a water-breather).
I think it’s fine to talk about similarities between religions and a shared common core, but some religions are a lot easier to put in dialogue with each other and some religions are easier to dialogue with science than others. It’s a lot easier to find commonality between Buddhism and modern liberal Christianity than between Scientology and Shintoism. It’s a lot easier to reconcile modern science with being a Quaker than being an Evangelical Southern Baptist, etc.
“But for a smart person to say a dumb thing—that takes religion.””
How about rather than “religion”, we substitute the word “ideology”?
I think “ideology” is a good choice. For me the term that sprang to mind was “faith”.
I like your paraphrase of Steven Weinberg — except that I’m very smart and yet I’ve said a fair number of very dumb things, and unfortunately I can’t blame religion for most of them. 🙂
Not sure I would call the DaVinci Code literature. Is there another term for a collection of words printed on paper?
I think his writing level is commonly referred to as pulp.
assadalboustani makes a good point at #3 along the lines of my own thinking.
It’s an interesting thing to notice, time and again, about the way humans think: I know about science, I even know some science, enough to know that ancients were just making bad guesses to explain the physical world – but which explanations they needed, for their own sanity and sense of security, yet; despite my knowledge of science and my knowledge of the motivations of the ancients, I hold that their guesses about the foundations of morality and functioning of the human “heart” to be TRUE! And furthermore their bad and wicked guesses don’t count, because people are not bad and wicked.
Seems to me the accommodation stems from some mix of attachment to tradition and the personal sense there is something going on inside “me” that is not a mechanistic, biological process. A more cynical person than I might suggest that a Dan Brown is aware of his audience, and might have an incentive to accommodate their beliefs (on the assumption the number offended by accommodationism will be small, or at least less offended than believers are by rationalism). I’m not cynical, though, and I think he’s speaking from the heart. But I suspect if his views were more “controversial,” he might hold his tongue.
Personally, I love fiction and I think his books are pretty good, as far as the poolside-reading genre goes. Sometimes I think there is more truth in good fiction than there is in non-fiction, to the extent the focus is more on rendering plausible characters and situations in an entertaining way, as opposed to making a particular case or grinding an axe. I’m glad I saw this: funny to see someone spinning a theoty so poorly reasoned that it would likely never make it into in the “fiction” books the speaker writes.
Poolside reading is a good description. There’s nothing wrong with that sort of book. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a good nonfiction book either. But people make a mistake when they think the former is the latter.
By former and latter, do you mean mistaking a light summer read for non-fiction? If so, yes, I remember wondering if readers take Dan Brown’s depiction of the Illuminati as true (not that their domination of the U.S. Supreme Court should make anyone wary).
Yep, that’s what I meant. Sorry to be stuffy about it. In a series of two examples, former means ‘first’ and latter means ‘last.’
Nothing stuffy about your comment at all.
I know what former and latter mean – I just wanted to confirm I was reading your intent!
Andy Thomson at the 2009 American Atheists convention said it well during his presentation:
Morality is doing what is right, regardless what we are told.
Religious dogma is doing what we are told, no matter what is right.
Mike
I can’t say my reading about religions was deep, but it was broad. It seemed to me that there really is a basic, core division among religions. In mostly western religions, the basic problem is the individual’s behavior and relationship with what’s important. In mostly eastern religions, individuality is the problem to be overcome. Those attitudes really can’t be reconciled.
There is some overlap I think in the great emphasis in both towards humbling oneself and learning to be less concerned with worldly matters.
“learning to be less concerned with worldly matters”
Except that most of them encourage you to become more concerned with worldly matters, such as how to wear your hair, what to eat, and whom you have sex with.
My understanding is that many religions insist that the repetition of mindless rules and rituals can make you detach from your awareness of and concern for the secular world. If you’re doing it all for God/Spirit/Divine there’s a kind of narrow focus comes into play. You separate.
Possibly. It sounds like an effective kind of brain-washing. “Not my will, but thine.”
I read the Da Vinci Code. It was fast paced and suspenseful and he pulled an interesting diversity of religious variations into it. I stayed up way to late finishing it. Then I thought about it and said, “Ick!” and haven’t read any more of his books. I’d say Brown did well something not really worth doing at all.
What’s at the core of every religion is in fact a worm: a worm of delusion gnawing away at rationality.
That’s a wonderful statement about what is wrong with accommodationism.
A couple of years ago, I saw Brown speak at the Chautauqua Institute.
I was appalled, he showed himself to be mathematically illiterate by citing the existence of imaginary numbers as an example of how science was opening up to radical new ideas.
having read Angels and Demons, I can say that he is equally adept at science and technology. I am especially fond of the batteries whose discharge can be predicted to the second (this plot device was preserved in the movie version).
Yeah, you had to treat the bomb as a bit of trek-like technobabble and just roll with it. For plot purposes, its just a big bomb that will go off on timer and a reason to give him a sidekick. Try and analyze the bomb description any more deeply than that, and you will quickly lose any suspension of disbelief you may have enjoyed.
“..but religion savors the questions”.
Gaack, I need a strong purgative to rid my system of that pablum. Gimme some Hitchens or Dawkins stat.
Ahhh, that’s better.
“All of our world religions have at their core the same basic human truths. Kindness is better than cruelty, creation is better than destruction, and love is better than hate.”
If so, how are we to explain this:
“If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)
What I find particularly wrong-headed about that claim of Brown’s is not just that it glosses over genuine atrocities committed under the banner of religious motives; it takes a highly complex, multifaceted, detailed mishmash of moralities, traditional practices, beliefs, tenets, and cultural trappings, and tries to pass them off as a collective effort at birthday-card-style hippy love bromides.
It’s a breathtakingly dull and uninformed claim, requiring not so much a whitewashing of history as a stick figure fingerprint paint daub passed off as complex and realistic art.
It’s particularly ridiculous because it also steamrollers over human psychology. With rare exceptions, no one objects to kindness, creation, and love… for those who “deserve” it. One of the first problems is that religions, like many badly designed morality systems, divide the world up into heroes and villains, or the worthy and the unworthy, often on arbitrary or irrelevant grounds, and apply or justify cruelty, destruction, and hate accordingly. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but you’d never guess even that much from this sickly sweet nonsense Brown and his ilk peddle under the guise of accommodationist “insight”, which looks more and more like self-serving propaganda.
It’s simplified, ignorant of human psychology, in denial of the findings of both history and religious study, and more a badge to wave to show he’s saying the right things than a meaningful sentence to be taken seriously. Only the most severe sufferers of cognitive bias will be fooled by it. Apparently, there are a good number of said sufferers.
Reminds me of Reza Aslan, who had a short piece in the NY Times Magazine around Christmastime, that different religions are just using different languages to describe the same “ineffable experience of faith.”
sub
Wholly metaphorically speaking: Hitchens would remove Browns internal organs and display them in front of Brown while still breathing.
Brown and Aslan and Armstrong need to have a pow-wow and tell themselves how they think it really is.
If, after watching even an iota of Brown, you need some sunshine watch this whole lecture, absolutely brilliant:
What is life: lecture Jeremy England
Thanks for the link.
The rosy picture or rosy veiw of religion seduces it’s followers, all laid out with narratives and meaning in a book. Litle effort is needed and all that back up, churches, music, priest, nuns, pomp and ceremony, silk shoes, centuries of delivering and building (including wealth) by coersion (threat of hell or conversely, eternal peace) all declared in god loving puffery to the minds of a populas that just want answers. And of course, not to mention the evolutionary psychology of belief and practices.
Science on the other hand is not so easy, it is fragmented, theories abound, effort is required to sift through it all, a good rudimental education would help and it does not come in a one size fits all book.
Those who are the leaders in their fields of science and discovery don’t pomp and ceremony, (to the media)they gather in discrete groups, write papers and many books. They don’t promise redemtion or happy reunions with dead relatives.
So, an inquiring mind is a prerequisite, skepticism is healthy and the rest follows in those small incremental steps to understanding yourself and the universe, science is constantly moving and adding and subtracting to it’s knowledge base, unfortunatly to many this is scary and unpredictable.
Dan Brown thinks by accommodating both veiws it may help, an admirable sentiment but a tug of war that is of no value to critical thinking and just furthers ignorance. Religions are static and based on a well orchestrated lie, science is dynamic based on empirical and peer reviewed facts.
Helping people come to grips with this concept should be a proximate goal for all atheists and Dan Brown should cease this pandering to religion.
Brown:
“All of our world religions have at their core the same basic human truths.”
Hmm.
“All of our world religions have at their core the same basic fallacies.”
FIFH(im)
“All of our world religions have at their core clearly divergent human truths.”
Sophisticated Theology™ is fun like those poetry refrigerator magnets: you just mix the words up and move them around and it still makes sense!
Well, “theological sense”, anyway.
🙂
Dan Brown may be real smart but he knows jack shit about the history of Christianity.
I have probably told my Dan Brown story here before, but here goes… Never read any of his books and have no interest in doing so. About 20+ years ago I attended a wonderful week-long Math Teachers’ conference (several years in a row) at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, NH. Dan Brown’s dad was a Math teacher there. I think that Dan was home from college or something (waaaay pre- Da Vinci) and was helping his dad collate hand-outs or something. One of my fellow teachers was really into dancing and a bunch of us were practicing some salsa moves in the Academy (I think that was the name of the main hall) basement before a seminar. Dan Brown asked if anyone knew how to waltz. Having spent my last 2 years of high school in Vienna I said Yes, I do. So….I waltzed with the future famous Dan Brown in a NH basement. Little did I know that he would end up being THE Dan Brown (whom I have zero interest in).
You must admit that I could not have made this up…nobody would believe me;-)
If we had discussed religion at the time, I’m sure I would have attempted to “fix his clock.”
You missed a chance there. He is reputedly now richer than God. 😉
LOL- even if he were richer than Croesus, I’d have no interest in DB.
Right, it’s all about kindness, like threatening lawsuits and jailtime over crackers.
I have found when talking to moderate christians that they don’t actually have any beliefs apart from the fact that there is a god. When they are questioned about what they exactly believe they parrot off things that they have been told but get extremely flustered when the paradoxes of their beliefs are pointed out. They usually then fall back on the “you just don’t understand it is about belief”garbage and walk away.
“But for a smart person to say a dumb thing—that takes religion.”
Does it? Of course, it’s all about how we define a smart person… but if we can consider a person smart, when he defends or says religious things, I think we can be more general: superstition, religious or not, will have this impact on people; “smart” person will say dumb because of superstition.
If we can say that smart people aren’t superstitious, well, we could’ve just said that smart people aren’t religous, or don’t say religious claims.
I used to say dumb things like that without embarrassment in my youth, but these days when I hear grown men and women mouth these same dumb things I feel totally embarrassed for them.