| StoreTags: new, atheism, god, religion, science
Author: nagrom on January 04 2007 Viewed 10756 times. 12 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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Interview with Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith".
Basically a very rational argument for questioning, not religious freedom, but the acceptance of religion in society.
Also, if you scroll down a bit, there's an article about the origins of public school, which I implore everybody to read before sending your kids off to be hammered into cubes.
Anybody who was intrigued by the public school blurb, you may be interested in this book on the subject by John Gatto: link (it's free online) | |
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01/05/07
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bsr
in my world???
01/05/07
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bsr
no human can ever experience anything objectively. so what i see with my eyes isn't objective reality.
01/05/07
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nagrom
Is that to say if you measure something to be a meter long, you can never know it's a meter long because humans can't experience things objectively?
01/05/07
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nagrom
Frankly, I disagree with you. I think there's a such thing as objective reality and that although we may be wearing rose tinted glasses, we can still look at it.
01/05/07
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nagrom
"in my world???"
In your theory of how the world is.
01/05/07
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bsr
our experience is completely subjective. the only objective thing we can say is that we're pretty sure we're here.
01/05/07
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soft
im pretty sure i just ate a pot noodle.
01/05/07
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cbit
bsr said: "no human can ever experience anything objectively. so what i see with my eyes isn't objective reality."
perhaps not.. but you can (through a combination of your eyes, your other senses, and knowledge from previous experience) detect a real, objective world. We do this all the time, we have to. The contact we all share with this real world enables us to say things like 'i believe that when i drop this pencil it will fall to the ground'. Losing contact with the real world = madness.
01/05/07
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bsr
we see the human world. coloured by everything we've evolved into. take away what makes us human and you're left with a strange alien mass of flux and potential. the rules still hold, pencils still drop.
01/05/07
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cbit
p: science is not a religion
dawkins said: "Given the dangers of faith — and considering the accomplishments of reason and observation in the activity called science — I find it ironic that, whenever I lecture publicly, there always seems to be someone who comes forward and says, "Of course, your science is just a religion like ours. Fundamentally, science just comes down to faith, doesn't it?"
Well, science is not religion and it doesn't just come down to faith. Although it has many of religion's virtues, it has none of its vices. Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists."
edited: Jan 05 2007
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nagrom
"we see the human world. coloured by everything we've evolved into. take away what makes us human and you're left with a strange alien mass of flux and potential. the rules still hold, pencils still drop."
But even if we see certain aspects of it in a certain way, it still exists as it is and when we look at it, its properties don't change.
Also, because multiple people can look and see the same thing, it means that if objectivity were impossible, we'd have to be in some sort of human cosmic agreement about the way things are when we look at them (Seth or What the Bleep Do We Know Anyway -esque stuff)
01/05/07
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nagrom
BTW, I wanted to mention that I remain personally agnostic, despite agreeing with Dawkins and Harris.
I think religion should be questioned and stay questioned, not eliminated.
Although I think the world might be better off with less religion.
01/05/07
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cbit
agreed. it doesn't matter if what we're seeing is coloured by our humanness.. (roughly speaking) as long as it's consistent over time and consistent with what our neighbours see, that's enough to establish it as reality. i don't see a problem here.
01/05/07
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celibacyclub
what we see with our eyes is interperated by our consciousness, like that trick with the lines and the red dot, if you cover one eye, your brain 'fills in' lines where the dot should be.
i believe that aspects of consciousness give rise to religion. those aspects can not just be removed by talking to people. our minds as a species would have to grow a bit i think.
as for science being truth, its only truth to humans. we are not capable of stepping outside ourselves enough to know wether our humanness gets in the way of what we feel are absolute truths. at the same time we could all agree that we will always be humans, so taking a non human perspective into account could be ignored for the sake of working in this human perceived world we are stuck in.
01/05/07
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cbit
nagrom said: "BTW, I wanted to mention that I remain personally agnostic, despite agreeing with Dawkins and Harris."
I'm 'toothfairy' agnostic according to dawkins book (ie. believe that the existence of god is undisprovable, but that the probability of his existence is practically nil).
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