Sam Harris & Andrew Sullivan

Harris and Dawkins are "rationalists" who don't get the fact of non-rational knowledge. As in this comment of Teilhard de Chardin:

"... I took the lamp, and leaving the zone of everyday occupations and relationships where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates. But as I moved further and further away from the conventional certainties by which social life is superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself. At each step of the descent a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. And when I had to stop my exploration because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and out of it came -- arising from I know not where -- the current which I dare to call my life."

which leads to the state of mind described by Shunryu Suzuki:

"Because you think you have body or mind, you have very lonely feelings. But when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, then you become very strong and your existence becomes very meaningful." [Zen Mind Beginner's Mind]

In my little book -- The Secular Spirit -- I distiguish between sectarian faith and universal faith:

. . .there are two kinds of knowledge we find in religion. One of them is trans-rational and gives the awareness of the ultimate ground of human existence. The other is pre-rational and consists of the set of terrified projections imprinted by a harsh childhood that introspection encounters on its way to awareness of ultimate ground.

So, the core problem of religion is all the projections it has collected throughout history, things we no longer need.

"The decline of religion in advanced industrial society is a natural and evolutionary process. It happens whether we comment on it or not. It stems from increased material security and information. With these resources, the self becomes stronger, and so it needs less myth and less sedative to deal with the pain stored in the unconscious.

As the self becomes more mature, it needs less sedation and turns to purer and more direct techniques of contemplation. Thus, paternalism and ritual decline and meditation and equality increase. Religious systems that cling to hierarchy and hypnotic ritual lose constituency, and so a social milieu arises that rejects religious authority. We call this milieu secularism." [The Secular Spirit]

Harris and Dawkins don't get this, at all. They are naive and amateurish epistemologists. Therefore, all their discussions are beside the point. Human beings will keep on wanting to engage the ultimate ground of their existence.

My book is available on amazon dot com, barnes and noble dot com, xlibris dot com, or read it for free at www.thesecularspirit.com.

...to the last really lame piece by Sullivan is now up at Beliefnet. It's long, but good - and tears the nonsense that Sullivan spouted last to shreds. Take a look when you get a chance.

Jim Downey

"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

"What strikes me about the Sullivan extracts above is their total incoherency. I mean, the guy isn't saying anything at all - just spewing content-free warm and fuzzy pieties. But then, most god talk is like that, but the pervasive religious brainwashing of our society, which requires us to give automatic undeserved respect to god talk and not examine it critically, saves people from being called on their meaningless waffle."

I completely agree with this statement and drew the same conclusion upon finishing Sullivan’s responses. What is he saying? He simply avoided every single one of Harris’s questions regarding the complete and utter ridiculousness of so many religious beliefs. Harris is having at him like a human-sized piñata – and all Sullivan can respond with in essence is, god is truth and love.

Here’s a link to a great website that playfully and not so playfully skewers many strongly held religious beliefs - http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com/

Here’s a brief excerpt (some context, this is in response to those who claim God cured them of cancer, heart disease or whatnot. The basic premise, if god cures these diseases and maladies, why has he never, ever, in all of recorded history, helped a person regenerate a lost limb.):

“No matter how many people pray. No matter how sincere those people are. No matter how much they believe. No matter how devout and deserving the recipient. Nothing will happen. The legs will not regenerate. Prayer does not restore the severed limbs of amputees. You can electronically search through all the medical journals ever written -- there is no documented case of an amputated leg being restored spontaneously. And we know that God ignores the prayers of amputees through our own observations of the world around us. If God were answering the prayers of amputees to regenerate their lost limbs, we would be seeing amputated legs growing back every day.”

What strikes me about the Sullivan extracts above is their total incoherency. I mean, the guy isn't saying anything at all - just spewing content-free warm and fuzzy pieties. But then, most god talk is like that, but the pervasive religious brainwashing of our society, which requires us to give automatic undeserved respect to god talk and not examine it critically, saves people from being called on their meaningless waffle.

- No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Harris's response to Sullivan is now up, here. I find it curious that he only addresses the central tautology mentioned above in the very end, and then to say that he isn't quite sure what Sullivan means with the word "God". The rest of the missive is interesting, but altogether too polite - granting Sullivan the refuge that moderate religiosity is better than extremism, then carefully dismantling the framework that allows it being much better.

Jim Downey

"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller

Here's what bugs me in Sullivan's response (The "it" he's talking about here is "fundamentalism" ):

It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life.

First off, ask any honest religious person and they'll tell you that doubt is anethema to faith. But let's take Sullivan's definition of faith and religious belief on their own terms, accepting that "mystery" is central to them.

The idea that there are "mysteries" in the universe -- things that we don't know yet and may (I don't believe this, but whatever) be incapable of knowing -- is uncontroversial among educated people. If something is a "mystery", however, that tells us that its actual meaning, content, definition is indeterminate. Logically speaking, something that has an indeterminate value cannot be described as "true" any more than it can be described as "false".

So, Andrew, here's the problem with your "faith": You can file God under "mystery" or you can file him/her/it under "truth", but you can't do both. Unless, of course, you want to go on sounding incoherent...

-Toast

It always strikes me how utterly backwards Sullivan can think at times, but this is not one of those times. This is the typical defense of faith he's known for. It's very common for Sullivan to refer to "Christianists," people who believe in belief in the Christian god, but by some twisting of the definition of Christian (on his part), makes them not true Christians. Sullivan's defense of intellectual dishonesty in the face of religion is a prime example of a "No true Scotsman" fallacy.