Revolution of the Mind

Big is a relative word

2007-02-25T04:35:00.000+11:00

Sigung Chu and his mini me

2007-02-18T14:57:00.000+11:00

Barak Obama is not a genuine alternative, or 'Any colour as long as its rich'

2007-02-02T19:25:00.000+11:00

Barak Obama is not a genuine alternative. A useful metaphor is the radiation spectrum – all robust and feisty debate and choice is confined to a narrow range.

The American system has been intentionally designed and redesigned from the very beginning to represent concentrated wealth. Look into Barak Obama background and you’ll find that it’s from the elite section of the community that owns everything. Whether you or I have a problem with that, I happen to (I don’t think it’s justified), but even if you don’t have a problem with it, you can’t expect him to act that different from anyone else that is ALLOWED to hold that office because they are from and represent concentrated wealth. Middle class people are allowed to serve, not lead. And below middle class….what, oh sorry, I stopped paying attention. I must have lost interest in where I was going with that.

Peering Into the Abyss of the Future - with visual and auditory aids :)

2007-01-13T01:48:00.000+11:00

Below is a 45 minute speech by MIT professor Noam Chomsky on the past and future of nuclear weapons and their role in global domination:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0259216&mode=thread&tid=5

1. The US is spending billions each year to own space. Nothing like see their own documents:

We you read official document it makes it more real, not just someone's conjecture. The largest high tech industrial counry in the world are in a systematic and coordinated manner spending billions to make this happen.

2. This is forcing all countries to develop their own destructive capability:

3. Each and every one of us is being challenged. Is your response to this challenge adequete?

All of us need to take a few small steps.

Think for yourself. Question everything. Have an independent mind.

Then participate in your democracy.

You and everything you care about: family, friends, bank account, status, pleasure, ambitions -
GONE

False Prophets & Intellectual Dissedents

2007-01-12T11:44:00.001+11:00

Questioner:

"Politicians are rarely great minds or intellectuals, they are 'scoundrels' as Samuel Johnson said. So my question to Mr Chomsky is, what effect do intellectuals or great minds have in the politics of today, and has he ever been able to influence any major decision of the political leaders in the past few decades?"

Noam Chomsky:

First of all, we should have no illusions. History is written by intellectuals, almost by definition. So if you look at history intellectuals look pretty good. On the other hand, if you look at the actual history, the role of intellectuals has typically been awful. I mention the Bible as an example, but it's a good example that pattern replicates. There were people in the biblical period who we would call dissident intellectuals, they're called Prophets. It's a bad translation of an obscure Hebrew word. But if you look at what the Prophets were saying, it's what we would call dissident intellectuals. Geopolitical critique, a call for justice and freedom and so on. Yes, that's dissident intellectuals. How were they treated? Well? No, they were denounced as haters of Israel. They were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, reviled. Now, there were intellectuals at that time who were very highly respected, namely the flatterers at the court. Hundreds of years later they were called false prophets. That's the way it works. It's the flatterers at the court who are typically the mainstream of the intellectuals. It runs all the way through history, very few exceptions. So, you don't look to intellectuals to influence policy. Dissident intellectuals often have many things to say, but they're usually pretty badly treated, varying in different societies.

What makes things better is popular movements. That is what effects policy, that's how we've gained the freedoms that we have and we have a lot of freedom, but it didn't come from above and it didn't come from intellectuals. It came from organised popular movements, which demanded more freedom, like the non-violent resistance in Iraq, which forced the US and Britain to permit elections. That's how we got the right to vote here. That's how we got women's rights, that's how we got freedom of speech and so on. Constant struggle, that's why there are such efforts to break up popular movements and to atomise people and separate them from one another and to create enormous gulfs between public opinion and public policy. It's a constant battle and, yes, that's the way to make things better as in the past, plenty of concrete ways to do it. We're much more able to than in the past because of the freedoms that have been won. We have a legacy of freedom, which has been won. We can use it, improve it, carry it forward or we can abandon it. But you're not going to look to intellectuals to save you.

Source (includes audio).

Right Wing Media Bias

2007-01-11T12:23:00.000+11:00

This is a very interesting report on the media bias in the UK media on the war in Iraq. The media, owned by concentrated power, rarely questions the framework for the war.

That is, what right do be have to be there in the first place? Not just "I don't like the execution of the war" vs. "We need to escalate the war"

The Report can be found here.

From the report:

Coverage overwhelmingly reflected the official line on the moral case for war: over 80% of TV and press stories mirrored the government position and less than 12% challenged it.

Controversial issues such as civilian casualties and anti-war protest accounted for considerably less than 10% of news stories across both TV and newspapers.

Distributed Energy Eeneration - Solar + Tidal

2007-01-08T05:12:00.000+11:00

This is an easy, quick read and makes much sense - Freeman.

Howard Morrison looks at the efficiencies of power transmission and discovers the losses are significant. This lost is eliminated when power is generated on site, a process known as distributed energy generation.

Robyn Williams: Howard Morrison gets cross about waste. He's built a house for the future where he lives in central NSW. Like Ron Oxburgh, ex-chairman of Shell, he believes the present times are an opportunity.

Howard Morrison: In the world of global warming and peak oil, Australia can be the lucky country yet again, but first we have to turn a century of thinking of energy on its head. With 80% of our electricity coming from coal-fired power stations, we either isolate CO2 emissions from the atmosphere by geo-sequestration or stop combustion based electricity generation. Storing the current amount of CO2 emitted from the world's 8,100 largest producers would require tens of thousands of underground storage sites. If combustion-based generation continued globally for the next half century, hundreds of thousands of sites would be needed to store a projected 5,000 billion tonnes of CO2. The engineering and construction work required to achieve this would dwarf any project ever attempted on Earth. If a storage site failed and CO2 rose through the rock, through the surface, every living thing in the vicinity could be killed.

If there is to be any hope of reining in increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, combustion-based electricity generation will need to be in sharp decline. Lat month, the president of Japan's Sharp Electronics corporation stunned the world by saying that by 2030, fossil fuel electricity generation would be totally finished. Nuclear electricity generation is currently the only low-CO2 way of generating enough power to fill the gap and to keep the world economy going. Even so, per kilowatt of electricity, nuclear produces one-third of the CO2 of coal-fired electricity generation when mining, building and decommissioning of nuclear power plants are considered. New nuclear power stations, along with the current 440 worldwide, will exhaust the known reserves of high-grade uranium within three to four decades. After that, processing low-grade ore into fuel will become prohibitively expensive.

But now to the next lucky country's story, and here it is. Two facts we need to be perfectly clear about. First, demand for power is based on the grid supplying virtually all electricity. Demand is the upstream figure of how much electricity must be produced. The downstream figure is the amount of electricity it actually takes to run our electrical devices. These two figures are very different, and this leads to the little talked about second fact; the electricity grid is woefully inefficient. Take the typical Australian scenario; for every four tonnes of coal burnt in the power station furnace, only one tonne of that coal's electrical energy producing potential reaches the power point. Losses mainly in the form of heat make the grid 25% efficient at best. Inefficient lighting, motors and appliances reduce the overall efficiency of electricity to about 15%. Last century's answer to an industrialising world won't cut it in the 21st century.

So why transmit power through hundreds of kilometres of wire from power stations to users anyway? Every Australian coastal city can develop grids sized to their own high voltage applications, such as electric trains, high volume water pumps, large computer servers et cetera, using wave energy as the key renewable. Wave energy is the rough equivalent of an underwater wind farm but with a forever dependable breeze. On today's technology, a one-hectare wave farm can produce one megawatt of electricity. All other electrical devices can function perfectly well on low voltage or extra low voltage electricity, and this can be generated on site. On site electricity generation is called distributed energy generation, and in Australia it can be done anywhere with solar. Australia is the Saudi Arabia of solar, with more sunshine than any other developed country on the planet. Worldwide, solar is growing at 40% a year.

Advances in building materials and electronics have fostered much of this growth. Thermally efficient building materials can now reduce demand for heating and cooling to zero in well-designed buildings. Overall, building materials have improved more in the last 10 years than in the last 1,000. Building integrated photovoltaics is revolutionising how we design and build. Roofing materials in the form of roof sheeting and roof tiles now become rooftop power stations, while at the same time aesthetically enhancing the overall appeal of the building. Every rooftop power station can be linked to others to create mini grids to power neighbourhoods, industrial sites, shopping centres or localised facilities anywhere. But wait, there's more! Half of the roof area of a thermally efficient home with a roof power station will not only power your home but power that urban electrical vehicle you'll be driving around next decade. Solar's weak link has always been storing energy for when the sun isn't shining. That's being solved with new energy storage devices such as ultra capacitors. When incorporated in BIPV rooftop power systems, these devices can provide many decades of maintenance-free energy storage.

We are in the biggest paradigm shift in human history. From hunter-gatherer to agriculture took thousands of years. Agriculture to the industrial age, hundreds. Global warming is compressing the next shift into decades. Australia's energy future is building capacity through distributed energy grids, hundreds of thousands of grids across the country fed by solar and wave energy. Renewable distributed energy generation can do the same work as the existing grid but with only a quarter of the electricity. The key to being the lucky country yet again lies with us as individuals. There needs to be a very strong incentive to rebuild the system, to make distributed energy generation the primary source of power.

Robyn Williams: Howard Morrison, who's proving his principles on the design of his own house on the central coast of NSW.

Guests:

Howard Morrison Fassifern NSW

Presenter Robyn Williams

Producer David Fisher

Click here for to go to the original source of this article

Steven Pinker

2006-12-31T07:29:00.001+11:00


Steven Pinker is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at http://www.mit.edu/%7epinker/ Harvard University. For more info go to www.meaningoflife.tv.

Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky on Deception

2006-12-31T07:27:00.001+11:00


Robert Trivers and Noam Chomsky discuss deception.

Read this and make a decision

2006-12-31T04:25:00.000+11:00

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has release a comprehensive study of the livestock industry.

The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent -- 18% -- than transport.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth's entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33% of the global arable land, [which is] used to produce feed for livestock

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth's increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20% percent of all terrestrial animal biomass.

Meat and diary animals, our pets and humans make up 98% of land vertebrates.

Full report and summary here.

My suggestion - eat low on the food chain.

Best Summary of Sustainable Energy Ever!

2006-12-31T01:50:00.000+11:00

Listen to this presentation by Nate Lewis if you want to learn something about sustainable energy. Best single discussion I have heard on the subject.

Listen to a streaming audio version of this presentation.
Download the Powerpoint Presentation.
Download the transcript of an earlier version of this talk.
Watch the Caltech Streaming Theater presentation on 56k, Broadband, or Cable/DSL connection.
(requires Real Audio Player, a free download HERE)

Below is a summary of the discussion taken from http://www.its.caltech.edu/~mmrc/nslenergy/.

The Lewis Group
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA

Scientific Challenges in Sustainable Energy Technology

This presentation will describe and evaluate the challenges, both technical, political, and economic, involved with widespread adoption of renewable energy technologies.

First, we estimate the available fossil fuel resources and reserves based on data from the World Energy Assessment and World Energy Council. In conjunction with the current and projected global primary power production rates, we then estimate the remaining years of supply of oil, gas, and coal for use in primary power production. We then compare the price per unit of energy of these sources to those of renewable energy technologies (wind, solar thermal, solar electric, biomass, hydroelectric, and geothermal) to evaluate the degree to which supply/demand forces stimulate a transition to renewable energy technologies in the next 20-50 years.
Secondly, we evaluate the greenhouse gas buildup limitations on carbon-based power consumption as an unpriced externality to fossil-fuel consumption, considering global population growth, increased global gross domestic product, and increased energy efficiency per unit of globally averaged GDP, as produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). A greenhouse gas constraint on total carbon emissions, in conjunction with global population growth, is projected to drive the demand for carbon-free power well beyond that produced by conventional supply/demand pricing tradeoffs, at potentially daunting levels relative to current renewable energy demand levels.
Thirdly, we evaluate the level and timescale of R&D investment that is needed to produce the required quantity of carbon-free power by the 2050 timeframe, to support the expected global energy demand for carbon-free power.
Fourth, we evaluate the energy potential of various renewable energy resources to ascertain which resources are adequately available globally to support the projected global carbon-free energy demand requirements.
Fifth, we evaluate the challenges to the chemical sciences to enable the cost-effective production of carbon-free power on the needed scale by the 2050 timeframe.
Finally, we discuss the effects of a change in primary power technology on the energy supply infrastructure and discuss the impact of such a change on the modes of energy consumption by the energy consumer and additional demands on the chemical sciences to support such a transition in energy supply.

The Mass Media: Point vs. Counterpoint

2006-12-14T12:43:00.000+11:00

Dennis at onegoodmove.org is my new hero.

All news contains an argument. I am sick of the mainstream media's ideal of objectivity. They aren't objective. They're presentation contains an argument, even if it is implicit. Honest argument is explicit.

Coverage of warfare is the worst. Warfare is not fought 'for freedom' or some such hogwash. War is power-politics. So where is the analysis in terms of power politics?

Instead of analysis & argument
we get point vs. counterpoint.

wiki on Media bias:
One technique used to avoid bias is the "point/counterpoint" or "round table," an adversarial format in which representatives of opposing views comment on an issue. This approach theoretically allows diverse views to appear in the media. However, the person organizing the report still has the responsibility to choose people who really represent the breadth of opinion, to ask them non-prejudicial questions, and to edit or arbitrate their comments fairly. When done carelessly, a point/counterpoint can be as unfair as a simple biased report, by suggesting that the "losing" side lost on its merits.

The Skeptics Society has accused reporters of misusing the point/counterpoint format by giving more time to superstitions than to their scientific rebuttals.

Using this format can also lead to accusations that the reporter has created a misleading appearance that viewpoints have equal validity (sometimes called "false balance"). This may happen when a taboo exists around one of the viewpoints, or when one of the representatives habitually makes claims that are easily shown to be inaccurate.

and wiki on False balance:

False balance can sometimes originate from similar motives as sensationalism, where producers and editors may feel that a story portrayed as a contentious debate will be more commercially successful to pursue than a more accurate account of the issue. However, unlike most other media biases, false balance may actually stem from an attempt to avoid bias; producers and editors may confuse treating competing views fairly -- i.e., in proportion to their actual merits and significance -- with treating them equally, giving them equal time to present their views even when those views may be known beforehand to be based on false information.

Click here
for a shocking study (Click here for the fallout) done by FAIR on PBS's NewsHour Study. I also liked the selection of viewers comments. I will quote just one example here:

I would like to ask a few questions about the fact that PBS favors Republicans four to one. Sounds like a headline. Was the 2 to 1 Repubs over everyone else reported on that PBS flagship news show? Any idea why not? And why isn't this fact reported anywhere in American mainstream media (you have to go to the Internet and the blogs for that)? If the headline were instead, 'PBS Favors Dems 4 to 1', the Republican echo machine, er, 'Media', would make sure everyone heard about it 24-7. Wouldn't they?Cambridge, MA

I am one of those people who used to make an effort to get home on time for the "NewsHour." In the last few years, I have gradually detached myself from the program, and now I know why. As a minority, I have been less and less interested in the choice of guests and the "balanced" views expressed on the show. I expect something different from the NewsHour. I wish it had more objective non-partisan analysis, and less of the "fair and balanced" nonsense we can watch at other stations.
Maria Barbosa, Frederick, MD

I am really sick and tired of seeing pro-administration, pro-corporate people on the "NewsHour." Where are the women, the peace activists, the feminists, the Greens, the Democrats, the brown people? The other night I had the misfortune to listen to two white guys basically agreeing with each other and both conservative. Who do you want to watch your program?
Judith Salzman, Tucson, AZ

Last letter from a Professor of media studies, Michael Griffin:

Analyses of guest lists on television news programs may be an imperfect method for gauging patterns of news coverage, but it is one of the most reliable and replicable methods for generating comparative data. And while it may not be the best way to catch the fine distinctions and nuances of reporting practices, it is a good tool for monitoring gross patterns of coverage over time, especially when the data show a consistent and clear pattern, with 4 to 1 or 5 to 1 source discrepancies appearing in study after study.

I have looked at the findings of the recent FAIR study of NewsHour guests in 2005-2006. These findings are no surprise, as they parallel the results of numerous other studies of journalism coverage over the last two decades. But they do confirm a serious continuing problem: the tendency of mainstream American journalists to serve as "stenographers to power." It is obvious from the FAIR data, as it has been obvious in numerous previous studies, that the single biggest problem is journalists' heavy over-reliance on official sources. Relying so heavily on sources from government and inside-the-beltway Washington think tanks, as well as favoring corporate business and finance sources over smaller business, regional, local or community voices, inevitably and inescapably skews the reporting we get, both in terms of the information and data that is made available and the news frames within which interviews and discussions on the program take place.

I urge producers, editors and reporters at the NewsHour to seriously rethink their routine daily practices regarding sources and the range of views found on the program. As a long-time NewsHour viewer, a PBS member, and a scholar and close observer of journalism, I find that the FAIR data on guests conforms very closely with my own perceptions of the embedded (albeit presumably unintentional) bias that has characterized NewsHour reporting over the years: the tendency to focus on relatively narrow, establishment-centered frames of reference in the coverage of nearly every issue.

Without the same commercial pressures faced by advertising-sponsored news operations, PBS has the freedom, and the public obligation, to reflect as wide a range of American voices as possible. There is really no excuse for the NewsHour to be serving as a platform for already influential public and business leaders to further disseminate their views.

Michael Griffin, Northfield, MN
Professor of Media Studies, Carleton College

A good cartoon here:

http://www.thismodernworld.org/arc/1993/93media-bias.gif

Deepak doesn't get Buddhism

2006-12-14T09:23:00.000+11:00

Deepak doesn't get Buddhism.

Quoting Deepak:
"Yet there is a deeper question lurking here. I may feel that I want a banana, but where did this "I" come from" Maybe it's a delusion as some philosophers and brain scientists assert, since no once has ever found the region of the brain where the personal self resides. Even so, we don't have to take a leap into arch materialism. Buddhists believe that the individual ego is an illusion, and this fact points them toward a universal intelligence (not a personal God) that is consistent with recent neurological findings."

Deepak, the illusion of an individual ego does not necessarily point toward a universal intelligence. It could just as easily point to somewhere else. If someone was schooled in the practice of Pure Land Buddhism, it might point this way:

The Thinker: Who is reciting the Buddha's name?

Thought: I am.

The Thinker: Who is 'I'?

Thought: Wrong question. The right question is What is 'I'?

The Thinker: 'I' is a product of thought. I am the product of thought.

The Thought: I don't make thoughts, but AM thought.

Thought: The thinker is thought.

Thought: Thought is generated by the brain.

Deepak, the 'universal intelligence' is cunning thought spinning a new illusion.

Quick Explanation of Natural Selection (for Deepak Chopra)

2006-12-14T08:40:00.001+11:00

Click here for Deepak Chopra's attack on The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.

Have you ever heard that evolution is a theory of chance? That's a (big) misunderstanding that many people, including Deepak, make. Or have your heard that there must be a God who made everything because you can't have all this order on earth by chance. Well that's true, it can't be here all by chance. How about how an eye is too complex to have evolved? The theory of evolution by natural selection is an elegant and powerful explanation of how we are all here - with eyes - non randomly and with no magic.

"Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators." Richard Dawkins

Let me unpack that a little for you.

For evolution to occur three factors are required.
1. variation.
2. selection.
3. hereditary.

1. Variation.
Variation is generated randomly by mutation. This is where people get (perhaps understandably) confused. People think evolution is just about the mutation. Mutation can only explain simple changes. Something zigs instead of zags. But that's not the whole story.

2. Selection.
example of how the environment can non-randomly select for and against a property. ImagineSelection is non-random. The environment does the selection. A very simple non-biological you have a bag of flour that has several cups of sand randomly distributed in it. How do you separate the sand and the flour into two separate piles? One way would be to use a sieve. A sieve lets through matter (flour for example) that is small enough to fit through the holes in the mesh. It prevents matter that is in chunks larger than the holes passing through the holes. After sifting, you have separated the flour from the sand and have two highly ordered, non random piles.

3. Hereditary.

I won't go into why Dawkins uses the word Replicator, though I think it is an excellent term. Do some research and I'm sure you will agree. I recommend Susan Blackmore's 'The Meme Machine' for an excellent introduction the General Replicator Theory.

The Hereditary principle is just as important as the principle of variation and selection. You really can't understand any of the three principles without seeing how they work together. The Hereditary principle explains how non-randomly selected single mutations can ACCUMULATE over time. This concept of accumulation is really key. Billions of years of accumulating the randomly produced but non-randomly selected good changes in the recipe that develops an organism from a zygote leads to marvels such as you and me (and the rest of our cousins in the biosphere).

I hope this has been helpful :)

Images from
http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rdmp1c/teaching/L1/Evolution/l2/eye.html

Murder, Death, Kill: Buddhism

2006-12-01T19:59:00.000+11:00

A short article by Sam Harris called Killing the Buddha

Sam points out that if the insight and practices of Buddhism are worth a damn, they aren't 'buddhist' anymore than algebra is 'Islamic' or physics is 'Christian'.

The west is not as religious as we think it is... Part 3 - UK

2006-11-30T08:00:00.000+11:00

Reposted from http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/newsarticleview.asp?article=2288

17 million British Humanists (24/11/06)

(Numbers in brackets below refer to endnotes)

In the 2001 census 7 out of 10 people ticked the ‘Christian’ box but, with church attendance now below 7% (1) and under 1 in 3 marriages taking place in church (2), this figure was clearly more about cultural identity than religious belief (3).

Today an Ipsos MORI poll has shown that 36% of people – equivalent to around 17 million adults – are in fact humanists in their basic outlook.

They:

- feel scientific & other evidence provides the best way to understand the universe (rather than feeling that religious beliefs are needed for a ‘complete understanding’)

- believe that ‘right and wrong’ can be explained by human nature alone, and does not necessarily require religious teachings, and

- base their judgments of right and wrong on ‘the effects on people and the consequences for society and the world’.

Humanism is a non-religious ethical outlook on life and these answers summarise its key beliefs (click here for more details on Humanism today)

These are the key figures from the poll (the detailed results and further analysis are given here , along with analysis of the Ipsos MORI poll on how many people believe religious groups and leaders have too much influence on Government ):

- Overall, faced with the choice, 62% said ‘scientific & other evidence provides the best way to understand the universe’ against 22% who felt ‘religious beliefs are needed for a complete understanding of the universe’.

- Similarly, 62% chose ‘Human nature by itself gives us an understanding of what is right and wrong’, against 27% who said ‘People need religious teachings in order to understand what is right and wrong’.

- In the last question, faced with three choices, 65% said that what is right and wrong ‘depends on the effects on people and the consequences for society and the world’. The rest split almost equally between two profoundly un-Humanist views: 15% said right and wrong were ‘basically just a matter of personal preference’ and 13% said what was right and wrong was ‘unchanging and should never be challenged’.

Thirty-six percent chose all three of the Humanist answers, and another 30% chose two out of three. Only 13% chose none of them.

41% believe this is our only life

Another question found that 41% endorsed the strong statement: ‘This life is the only life we have and death is the end of our personal existence’. Fractionally more - 45% - preferred the broad view that ‘when we die we go on and still exist in another way’. Of those choosing all three of the ‘Humanist’ answers, 54% said this was our only life, against 38% who believed in some sort of continued existence. And of those seeing this as our only life, 79% chose two or all three of the ‘Humanist’ answers to the other questions. (Interestingly, 22% of those who endorsed the need for religion in answers to other questions also said this was our only life.)

Commentary (for more click here )

Hanne Stinson, chief executive of the British Humanist Association said, ‘Britain is basically a humanist country, and this poll shows it. We have always been aware that many people who do not identify themselves as humanists, and this includes quite a few people who do not know what Humanism is, live their lives by what one might describe as humanist principles. People who join the Association often tell us that they have been humanists all their lives, or for the last 20 years or so, but didn’t know it. But it is very encouraging to find that 36% of the British population are not simply non-religious, but actually humanist in their outlook and their morality, and that very many others don’t feel they need religion to understand the universe, or to guide their moral decisions. These people may not belong to the Humanist Association, may not have even heard of Humanism, but they share our attitudes and we speak for them in our campaigns.’

For further commentary on the results of the poll from Ms Stinson and from BHA Vice Presidents Claire Rayner, Baroness Whitaker and Richard Norman, along with analysis of the Ipsos MORI poll on how many people believe religious groups and leaders have too much influence on Government , click here

ENDNOTES

(1) Religious Trends 5: 2005/06, table 2.21

(2) 68% of marriages in 2004 were civil ceremonies - National Statistics

(3) For example it was asked in a context of ethnicity and the question was ‘What is your religion?’, rather than ‘Do you have a religion and if so what is it?’

NOTES TO EDITORS

The British Humanist Association(BHA) represents and supports the non-religious. It is the largest organisation in the UK campaigning for an end to religious privilege and to discrimination based on religion or belief, and for a secular state.

For further comment, contact:

Hanne Stinson by email or on 07764 947249

Andrew Copson by email or on 07855 380633

John Leaman (Ipsos MORI) by email or on 020 7347 3000

The following supporters of the British Humanist Association are also available for comment:

Susan Blackmore by email

A C Grayling by email

The west is not as religious as we think it is... Part 2 US

2006-11-30T07:45:00.000+11:00

The last elections in the US the least religious voters made the biggest difference to the outcome, as this group gave the Democrats an even greater share of their vote -- 67%, up from 55% in 2002. The Democrats lead over the Republicans from voters who never attend a church rose from 14% in 2002 to a thumping 37% in 2006.

The west is not as religious as we think it is... Part 1 - Australia

2006-11-30T07:28:00.000+11:00

Read below for the Summary of the report or click the link for the pdf:
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/ccls/spir/sppub/Summary_Report.pdf

MEDIA RELEASE
NATIONAL STUDY OF THE “SPIRITUALITY” OF GENERATION Y COMPLETED

The Spirit of Generation Y project (2003-2006), is a national study of spirituality among Australian young people in their teens and twenties, conducted by researchers from Australian Catholic University, Monash University and the Christian Research Association. The research consisted of a survey of a nationally representative sample of Generation Y (born 1976-1990), with comparison groups from ‘Generation X’ (born 1961-75) and the ‘Baby-Boomer’ generation (born 1946-60), supplemented by extended, face-to-face interviews.

The project explored Generation Y’s range of worldviews and values, their sense of meaning and purpose in life, the ways in which they find peace and happiness, their involvement in traditional religions and alternative spiritualities, how they relate to the society around them, and the influences which shape their outlook and lifestyle.

Key Findings
Belief 48% of Generation Y (Gen Y) believe in a God, 20% do not, and 32% are unsure. Two-thirds of those who do not believe in God, or are uncertain, do believe in a ‘higher being or life-force’.

Spirituality There are three main strands in the ‘spirituality’ of Generation Y: Christian: (44% of Gen Y) Eclectic: (17%) Humanist: (31%)

Christian Only 19% of Gen Y are actively involved in a church to the extent of attending religious services once a month or more; (conservative Protestant denominations—16% of Gen Y—have by far the highest rates of attendance); but many more believe in God and Jesus, and pray regularly. Religion is seen as a private matter, and there is a strong tide of movement among Gen Y Christians away from previous involvement or identification with a church, and even from religious belief.

Eclectic 17 % of Gen Y have an eclectic spirituality, believing in two or more New Age, esoteric or Eastern beliefs (including belief in reincarnation, psychics and fortune tellers, ghosts, astrology) and perhaps engaging in one or more alternative spiritual practices (yoga, Tarot, tai-chi). Some of these people attend religious services but most do not. Such beliefs and practices are more common among young women than young men.

Humanist 31 % of Gen Y can be classified as Humanists, rejecting the idea of God, although a few believe in a ‘higher being’. Of these secular-minded young people, almost half believe that there is very little truth in religion, and less than a quarter believe in life after death. They also largely reject alternative spiritualities.

Social concern Gen Y are not notably more self centred and lacking in altruism than older generations. For example, 27% are involved in some kind of volunteer work per month. Those who are actively involved in service to the community and have positive civic values are far more likely to come from the ranks of those who have spiritual and religious beliefs and actively practise them.

Influences The significant social forces shaping contemporary religion and spirituality – secularisation, the relativism of postmodernity, consumer capitalism, individualism – influence more than Generation Y alone, although young people, by virtue of their age and life stage, are more subject to their effects.

Conclusions:

Generation Y are what their parents and Australian culture have made them. They have taken strongly to two ‘late modern’ principles: that an individual’s views and preferences, provided they harm no-one else, should not be questioned or constrained, and that spiritual/religious beliefs and practices are purely personal lifestyle choices—in no way necessary. Despite moving away in large numbers from traditional religious sources of meaning, they seem to have a strong sense of purpose in their lives. There is no evidence from this project of a widespread plague of meaninglessness or social alienation among Generation Y, nor of a critical lack of social support.

Although broader support structures such as church and local community have grown weaker over the last century, families appear to have compensated by increasing the intimacy of family life, and young people also rely more heavily on friendship networks. By these means, Generation Y appear to be successful, for now, in holding at bay the threats to personal security inherent in the much more isolated status of the individual within society.

Much has been written and theorised about the changing spiritual landscape in late modern societies:
the rise of alternative spiritualities, the increasing popularity of the New Age, the attraction of Eastern religions, the development of eclectic ‘mix and match’ spiritualities and the emergence of nature religions and Neo-Paganism. This study did not find that Gen Y are a generation of spiritual seekers; less than one-fifth of Gen Y have a ‘mix and match’ spirituality, while few are seriously exploring alternatives like Buddhism or Wicca.

Many young people in Australia are what we have called Humanists—following an avowedly secular path in life, rejecting belief in God and declaring that there is little truth in any religion, affirming instead human experience, human reason and scientific explanations. Some are angry at or disenchanted with organised religion, but most simply do not care or are not interested. This is not unique to Generation Y; their parents are the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation, 23 percent of whom are Humanists, while a further 24 percent are nominal Christians – people who might maintain a residual belief in God and identify with a denomination, but little more than that. Non-religious young people simply reflect the broader secular context and the spirituality of their own parents.

Summary of the project’s final report (The book version is due out in July, 2007)
A summary report of the project’s findings is available on the website:
http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/ccls/spir/sppub/sppub.htm
Research team:
Dr. Michael Mason Australian Catholic University
Email: Michael.Mason@acu.edu.au
Assoc Prof Ruth Webber Australian Catholic University
Email: Ruth.Webber@acu.edu.au
Dr. Andrew Singleton, Monash University
Email: Andrew.Singleton@arts.monash.edu.au
Dr. Philip Hughes, Christian Research Association
Email: P.Hughes@cra.org.au

2 Problems: the Sacred in the Secular & Seperate Majesteria

2006-11-30T07:18:00.000+11:00

Just finished watching the first quicktime of the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. The collective conversation that occurred there is very important, one of the most important on the planet. I am struck by the advantage in terms of accessibility and speed of transmission of knowledge over the internet, and I feel an attitude (so well by Daniel Dennett recently) of thank Goodness for the internet, and the society that produced it. In a similar way I would like to express gratitude for the work all the people who attended Beyond Belief 2006 are doing. It does not go unappreciated and it provides encouragement to my own actions and efforts.

The purpose of this blog is to attempt to establish communication with you (the reader) on two concerns of mine. I tend to be blunt in written communication, or at least that is the feedback I get from others. I think it is basically because I'm a serious person that uses nonverbal communication to counterbalance (‘soften’) the verbal content and style I naturally use. Of course email lacks this nonverbal component. So I'm trying something a little different in this email and start with a brief disclosure.

Okay, the relevant details about me: I'm 29yo male living in Sydney Australia, studying a double degree in arts (cognitive science) and psychology at the University of NSW. My academic interests include philosophy of science, an evolutionary and computational perspective on the mind and brain, body language and facial expressions. I have been heavily involved in martial arts, studying and teaching Wing Chun kung fu for 6 years until returning to university to pursue an career academic research. Through martial arts I became interested in eastern philosophy, i.e. some Taoism, a little Buddhism, then through Bruce Lee the writings of Jiddu Krishnamurti which I have investigated for several years now with seriousness and vigour.

I share all this in the hope that it provide a context for understanding my following inquiry, perhaps in something like the way information is defined in information theory. I’ll assume you have been exposed to western and eastern philosophy I’m sure you are at least familiar with most of what I’ll refer to, (such as eastern philosophical systems and the works of philosophers of science). I’m hoping that for the sake of brevity I can merely refer to what concerns me, and hopefully we will have enough shared knowledge for communication to occur, with clarification and expansion needing only to be ask for to be provided.

I believe I share a similar attitude toward the teachings of Krishnamurti that many do toward the body of knowledge that is called Buddhism. That is, that what ever its purpose and subject matter, it is completely based on a materialist conception of the universe, that the mind is amazing but not made of a special substance or immortal etc. If your like me, you probably belief that Buddhism (not the degraded form of being an ‘ism’) has something important to contribute to this secular world that currently is missing from western culture and the western tradition of science and rationality. No doubt that you are interested like myself in using science (one example: using fMRI with meditating monks) to learn from traditional bodies of knowledge in much the same what that scientific medicine absorbs the useful and reject the useless from ‘alternative medicine’. Implied in all this is the basic claim that reality is what is sacred, not thoughts, and that each one of us can transform our consciousness in an extraordinary way that is not demeaned by the fact that the whole process is entirely materialistic. This is the first reason I have attempt communication with you: I believe the notion of fundamentally transforming human consciousness is missing from our global culture (including the scientific community), perhaps in part due to the psychologically crippling effects of dogma.

The second concern I wish to discuss with you is the problem of a dominating philosophy of science that I believe is crippling the scientific community. Having just watched the first quicktime Beyond Belief 2006 clip and having just read ‘How We Believe’, I noticed that the mind of Michael Shermer has been influenced by this philosophy. Gould’s separate ‘Magisteria’, and Shermer’s ‘Separate Worlds’ Model are directly the result of this thinking. This philosophy has evolved out of the thinking of the Logical Empericists and the Popperians. This inadequate philosophy has been bothering me for years whenever I came across it, but only recently after reading an article by Larry Laudan did I realise the nature of the beast, so to speak. This combined with the memetic plagues such as social constructivism have I believed crippled the scientific mind, not in its ability to conduct the work of science, but in its ability to combat the irrational forces in this world. The stagnation in the philosophy of most scientists is obvious when you consider that decades how many scientists adopt either an outdated, simplistic Popperian philosophy or a purely pragmatic view of the truth (this William James like attitude to the truth is prevalent in psychology, .This is the second point of inquiry I wish to attempt to communicate with you, my reader.

I hope that these issues concern you and that further communication will be seen as beneficial and desirable.

Superheroes of Science

2006-11-30T06:46:00.000+11:00

beyondbelief2006.org

15 hours of video from the conference in San Diego, CA.

This is an rich vein of gold on the science and religion problem. Well worth every minute, which I'm sure you'll agree once you see the first clip at:

Click here to watch the segments:
http://beyondbelief2006.org/Watch/ or if your don't quick that much time then there are four shorter clips on the homepage: http://beyondbelief2006.org/

See below for the list of scientific speakers involved - 34 scientific superstars!

	John Allman, an authority on primate cognition and brain evolution, is Hixon Professor of Psychobiology at the California Institute of Technology. He has received the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation. His book Evolving Brains traces the evolutionary path to the modern brain. Moral intuitions and the neural mechanisms of economic and social decision-making are among his current studies.
	Scott Atran, Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France, has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature. He currently is an organizer of a NATO working group on suicide terrorism. His publications include In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin and forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
	Francisco Ayala, described as the "Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology" by The New York Times, has made singular contributions not only to evolutionary and population genetics, but also to education, philosophy, ethics, religion, and national science policy. The Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Irvine, he is the author of the book, Darwin and Intelligent Design.
	Mahzarin Banaji, currently Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, studies human thinking and feeling in social context, particularly how unconscious assessments reflect hidden attitudes about social group membership such as race, gender and class. Her research has implications for theories of individual responsibility and social justice.
	Patricia Churchland, who chairs the University of California, San Diego Philosophy Department, focuses also on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.
	Paul Churchland is professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego. With his wife and philosophical partner, Patricia, he has been an advocate of "eliminative materialism", which claims that scientific theories about the brain do not square well with our traditional commonsense beliefs about the mind. Among his books are Matter and Consciousness, A Neurocomputational Perspective, and The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul.
	Paul Davies, who recently joined Arizona State Univer- sity, as a Distinguished Lecturer, is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, author and broadcaster. He continues his association with the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University. He has written over 20 books, including the just published The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life? His other books include Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational WorldThe God Experiment: Can Science Prove the Existence of God?. and
	Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has popularized the gene-centered view of evolution and theory of memetics. His many books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and the New York Times best seller The God Delusion.
	Ann Druyan, the CEO and co-founder of Cosmos Studios, which specializes in the production of science based entertainment for all media, has authored several books, including A Famous Broken Heart, and Comet, which was on the New York Times best seller list for two months. Additionally, she co-authored another New York Times best seller, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors with her late husband, Carl Sagan.
	Paul Ekman, whose research documented that emotions with their 10,000 facial expressions are universal - a product of human evolution - was a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco in the Psychiatry Department for 32 years before retiring in 2004. He has authored over 10 books, including Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life.
	Owen Flanagan, specializes in philosophy of mind and moral psychology as James B Duke Professor and Professor of Neurobiology at Duke. He also holds appointments in Psychology and Neurobiology and is a Faculty Fellow in Cognitive Neuroscience. His latest book, The Problem of the Soul: Two Visions of Mind and How to Reconcile Them, explains that we need not give up our ideas of moral responsibility and personal freedom in order to have an empirically sound view of the human mind.
	Stuart Hameroff is an anesthesiologist and the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona. He is known for his promotion of the scientific study of the mechanisms of consciousness. He was the lead organizer of the first Tucson Consciousness Meeting, which is widely regarded as a landmark event. His collaboration with mathematical physicist Roger Penrose led to the development of the 'Orch-OR' theory of consciousness.
	Charles Harper is Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. Originally trained in engineering at Princeton and philosophy and theology at the University of Oxford, he has published research articles in scientific journals such as Nature, Science, and the Astrophysics Journal, and been the co-editor of several books, including Science & Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity and Fitness of the Cosmos for Life.
	Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of ReasonLetter to a Christian Nation. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience. which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and
	William Hurlbut, a physician and consulting professor in the Program in Human Biology at Stanford University, focuses on the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. A member of the U.S. President's Council on Bioethics, he supports the use of "Altered Nuclear Transfer," as a possible way for scientists to obtain pluripotent human embryonic stem cells for research.
	Melvin J. Konner is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology, Neuroscience, and Behavioral Biology at Emory University, and author of The Tangled Wing, has been described as "the nearest thing we have to a poet laureate of behavioral biology". His book Unsettled tells the story of the Jews from ancient history to the modern age.
	Sir Harold Kroto, Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television, in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of a new form of carbon, the C60 Buckminsterfullerene. He has received the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award, given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom.
	Lawrence Krauss, Director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University where he also serves as the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy, has authored The Fifth Essence: The Search for Dark Matter in the Universe, The Physics of Star Trek, Beyond Star Trek, and Hiding in the Mirror. He received the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award in 2002.
	Elizabeth Loftus, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, and the Department of Criminology, Law, and Society, at the University of California, Irvine. Her publications include, Eyewitness Testimony, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the Eyewitness and the Expert Who Puts Memory on Trial and The Myth of Repressed Memory: False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse.
	Steven Nadler is Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and Max and Frieda Weinstein-Bascom Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of books on Spinoza, including Spinoza: A Life. His research focuses on seventeenth-century philosophy and the antecedents to aspects of modern thought in medieval Latin and Jewish philosophy - including the problem of evil.
	Susan Neiman, currently a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, is Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. Author of Evil in Modern Thought: An alternative History of Philosophy, she is now writing Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, a defense of the moral language of the Enlightenment as foundation for a liberal world view robust enough to meet contemporary challenges.
	Carolyn Porco is currently the leader of the Cassini Science Imaging Team and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission. She is a Senior Research Scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and an Adjunct Professor at both the University of Colorado and the University of Arizona. An asteroid has been named in her honor.
	VS Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.
	Joan Roughgarden is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Stanford and teaches geophysics as well as a mathematical ecology. In her book, Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, she challenges Darwin's theories and promotes a diversity-affirming model of biology and evolution. Her most recent work, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, reflects on the relationship between science and religion.
	Loyal Rue, a two-time Templeton Award winner, is currently a professor of Religion and Philosophy at Luther College. His research focuses primarily on the Naturalistic Theory of Religion and his most recent book, Religion Is Not About God: How Spiritual Traditions Nurture Our Biological Nature, discusses the complex relationship between the concept of God and religion.
	Terrence Sejnowski is an HHMI investigator, the Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute. He is the author of several books including The Computational Brain and Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are.
	Michael Shermer, a former college professor, is the founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine. A monthly columnist for Scientific American, he is the author of The Science of Good and Evil. His most recent book, Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, a discussion of the boundary between religion and science.
	Daniel Siegel, is the executive director of the Center for Human Development as well as an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and a practicing psychiatrist. He is an award-winning educator whose goal is to provide a scientifically grounded view of human experience to facilitate psychological well-being and emotional resilience. He is the author of The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience.
	Richard Sloan is the author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. He is a professor of behavior medicine at Columbia University Medical Center where he conducts research on the relationship between psychological factors and health, including prayer and medicine.
	Neil deGrasse Tyson , the new host of the PBS-TV program "NOVA scienceNOW", is director of the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center For Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal.
	J. Craig Venter, renowned as the leader of the Celera research program to decipher the human genome, is founder of both the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation and the J. Craig Venter Institute. In 2005 he co-founded Synthetic Genomics, a company that seeks to produce ethanol and hydrogen as alternative fuels through the use of microorganisms.
	Steven Weinberg, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin where he founded its Theory Group and holds the Josey Regental Chair of Science, was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with colleagues Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow for combining electromagnetism and the weak force into electroweak force. He has written several popular books including the prize-winning The First Three Minutes, The Discovery of Subatomic Particles, and Dreams of a Final Theory.
	James Woodward, the J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology, focuses on research regarding the philosophical and normative aspects of causation and explanation. His recent book, Making Things Happen, won the 2005 Latokos Award from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
	Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series "The Human Quest". He is co-founder and Director of The Science

Jiddu Krishnamurti audio downloads

2006-11-30T01:27:00.000+11:00

Have you ever heard of Jiddu Krishnamurti? You might like what he has to say if:

you are perhaps sympathetic to the basic message of Buddhism or Taoism (or more specifically, like the eastern philosophical traditions its 'obvious' to you that an 'ego' or 'me' has a fundamental source of misery and disorder in the world
you dislike the nationalism, and organised religion (including how Buddhism and Taoism is reduced to an organised religion by the vast majority of believers
you respect science, reason, and rigorous thought
you are a serious person who is not absorbed by the trivial and the meaningless.

Krishnamurti talked to a vast number of people before his death, and wrote many books.

Click here for to access all the Krishnamurti audio files I have collected.
Of course it is all free and instantly accessible, with each audio file downloadable with a single click.

The Wisdom of Crowds

2006-11-29T14:40:00.000+11:00

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds

Religion is not creative, its mechanical!

2006-11-27T04:25:00.000+11:00

Has anyone ever noticed that when someone says something like "I walk my dog religiously" they mean it is a mechanical habit?

God is imaginary. We all think the God's of Ancient Eygpt are fictions, and the same for the God's of Ancient Greece. The same is true of the God created by humans in the Middle East 2000 years ago.

To a believer, atheism may seem an empty and meaningless paradigm to leave in. But it need not be. If you investigate into it, the sacred can be found it the actual not the fictional. To claim words, symbols, images, books, thought, etc is sacred is obscene and a source of much disorder, misery and sorrow in this world.

Why Are Atheists So Angry? Also, the inability of Believers to tell fact from fiction

2006-11-27T04:13:00.000+11:00

Posted from http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/debate-with-dennis-prager/

This is a great read where the atheist Sam Harris really demolishes the Judeo-Christian believer Dennis Prager. My comments are at the end.

Why Are Atheists So Angry? A Debate with Dennis Prager

This Debate was conducted by email for the website Jewcy.com

Author of the thundering anti-theist polemics The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris may just be the Thomas Paine of an emerging movement to wrench religion out of American life. Prager is a nationally syndicated talk radio host who trumpets the virtues of the Judeo-Christian tradition… (www.jewcy.com)

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Yahweh Belongs on the Scrapheap of Mythology

I’d like to begin this exchange by making the observation that “atheist” is a term that should not even exist. We do not, after all, have a name for a person who does not believe in Zeus or Thor. In fact, we are all “atheists” with respect to Zeus and Thor and the thousands of other dead gods that now lie upon the scrapheap of mythology.

A politician who seriously invokes Poseidon in a campaign speech will have thereby announced the end of his political career. Why is this so? Did someone around the time of Constantine discover that the pagan gods do not actually exist, while the biblical God does? Of course not. There are thousands of gods that were once worshipped with absolute conviction by men and women like ourselves, and yet we all now agree that they are rightly dead. An “atheist” is simply someone who thinks that the God of Abraham should be buried with the rest of these imaginary friends. I am quite sure that we need only use words like “reason,” “common sense,” “evidence,” and “intellectual honesty” to do the job.

So many gods have passed into oblivion, and yet the sky-god of Abraham demands fresh sacrifices. Wars are still waged, crimes committed, and science undone out of deference to an invisible being who is believed to have created the entire cosmos, fine-tuned the constants of nature, blanketed the earth with 20,000 distinct species of grasshopper, and yet still remains so provincial a creature as to concern himself with what consenting adults do for pleasure in the privacy of their bedrooms. Incompatible beliefs about this God long ago shattered our world into separate moral communities—Christians, Muslims, Jews, etc.—and these divisions remain a continuous source of human violence.

And yet, while the religious divisions in our world are self-evident, many people still imagine that religious conflict is always caused by a lack of education, by poverty, or by politics. Yet the September 11th hijackers were college-educated, middle-class, and had no discernible experience of political oppression. They did, however, spend a remarkable amount of time at their local mosques talking about the depravity of infidels and about the pleasures that await martyrs in Paradise.

How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don’t know what it is like to really believe in God.

The United States now stands alone in the developed world as a country that conducts its national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism. Eighty-three percent of the U.S. population believes that Jesus literally rose from the dead; 53% believe that the universe is 6,000 years old. This is embarrassing. Add to this comedy of false certainties the fact that 44% of Americans are confident that Jesus will return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years and you will glimpse the terrible liability of this sort of thinking.

Nearly half of the American population is eagerly anticipating the end of the world. This dewy-eyed nihilism provides absolutely no incentive to build a sustainable civilization. Many of these people are lunatics, but they are not the lunatic fringe. Some of them can actually get Karl Rove on the phone whenever they want.

While Muslim extremists now fly planes into our buildings, saw the heads off journalists and aid-workers, and riot by the tens of thousands over cartoons, several recent polls reveal that atheists are now the most reviled minority in the United States. A majority of Americans say they would refuse to vote for an atheist even if he were a “well-qualified candidate” from their own political party. Atheism, therefore, is a perfect impediment to holding elected office in this country (while being a woman, black, Muslim, Jewish, or gay is not). Most Americans also say that of all the unsavory alternatives on offer, they would be least likely to allow their child to marry an atheist. These declarations of prejudice might be enough to make some atheists angry. But they are not what makes me angry.

As an atheist, I am angry that we live in a society in which the plain truth cannot be spoken without offending 90% of the population. The plain truth is this: There is no good reason to believe in a personal God; there is no good reason to believe that the Bible, the Koran, or any other book was dictated by an omniscient being; we do not, in any important sense, get our morality from religion; the Bible and the Koran are not, even remotely, the best sources of guidance we have for living in the 21st century; and the belief in God and in the divine provenance of scripture is getting a lot of people killed unnecessarily.

Against these plain truths religious people have erected a grotesque edifice of myths, obfuscations, half-truths, and wishful thinking. Perhaps you, Dennis, would now like to bring some of that edifice into view.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: The Faith of Disbelief

There is one thing you and I agree on, Sam. You write that you are “quite sure that we need only use words like ‘reason,’ ‘common sense,’ ‘evidence,’ and ‘intellectual honesty’ to do the job.”

I agree because I am certain that use of those wonderful vehicles to truth make the case for God, not for atheism.

Yet you and other atheists—as opposed to agnostics, who simply claim doubts about God—appropriate words like “reason” and “common sense” to maintain a position that is hardly the fruit of reason and common sense.

Is it really reason and common sense that lead atheists to their certitude that everything, all existence, came about by sheer chance? That there is therefore no God, no creator, no designer? Unlikely. Atheist certainty and religious certainty are both faith claims that transcend reason and common sense. But at least religious believers have the intellectual honesty to admit theirs is a faith claim.

Nevertheless, I am not as certain about God as you are about no-God. When I look at the unjust world God created, I have questions, sometimes even doubts. But not atheists like you, Sam. No, they look at love and consciousness, at the grandeur of the universe, at the birth of a child, and they hear Bach’s music and conclude that all of this and everything else just came about by itself.

It is an understatement to say that I do not find that position intellectually compelling. And when held with certitude, it borders arrogance.

On the other side, we believers look at the evidence and believe that there is a God. In that sense, the atheist has considerably less intellectual honesty than the sophisticated believer. The atheist says he knows, despite the fact that what he “knows” is unprovable. The believer believes because he knows that what he believes is ultimately unprovable.

Now, of course, I am referring to the “sophisticated believer,” not to every human on Earth who claims to believe in God. There are many people with simplistic views of God, and many millions who have vile notions of God. If I and all other believers in God are to be lumped with Muslims who believe that slaughtering innocents gets you sex in heaven, then you must be lumped with Josef Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung and all the other atheists who butchered more innocents than all the religious crackpots in history.

Do you not know about people such as Francis Collins? On June 11, 2006, the Times of London reported that “The scientist who led the team that cracked the human genome…now believes in the existence of God … Francis Collins, the director of the U.S. National Human Genome Research Institute, claims there is a rational basis for a creator and that scientific discoveries bring man ‘closer to God.’”

Is Francis Collins irrational, lacking in common sense, unaware of evidence, and intellectually dishonest? Would you like to debate Francis Collins about God based on the scientific evidence and common sense? I doubt it.

Neither you nor I, untrained in the sciences, would even understand much of the evidence these and many other scientists offer for belief in God.

So, enough of the college dorm clichés about “no evidence” for God. You have not decided to be an atheist because of “no evidence.” As a non-scientist, you are unlikely to even know the evidence that believing scientists offer.

The Times piece quoted Collins:

When you have for the first time in front of you this 3.1 billion–letter instruction book that conveys all kinds of information and all kinds of mystery about humankind, you can’t survey that going through page after page without a sense of awe. I can’t help but look at those pages and have a vague sense that this is giving me a glimpse of God’s mind.

Have you checked those 3.1 billion–letter instructions? I suspect you would understand them as poorly as I would.

In a future response I will address the other points in your opening statement. But I will respond to one now—your argument that Prager’s or Collins’s God is in the same intellectual league as belief in Zeus. Did anyone studying the human genome ever argue for Zeus? What are you talking about?

I’ll answer that question. You are talking as if you are addressing fellow atheists who cheer all these lines that belittle faith in God. They think ridicule compensates for their ignorance of intellectually sophisticated God-belief. But unfortunately for you, in this dialogue you are not addressing fellow believers in atheism or people who mock religion. You are addressing a mixed audience and debating a man who knows his arguments. I heard them in high school.

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: The Burden of Proof Falls on the Faithful

I should clear up a couple misconceptions you have about me. While I am very happy that you have admitted your own ignorance of the relevant science, there is no need to attribute this ignorance to me.

While my day job as an infidel has slowed my progress of late, I am in the process of finishing my Ph.D. in neuroscience. This requires that I actually understand recent developments in biology. Let me assure you that I am firmly grounded in the life sciences and am well aware of the kinds of contortions that people like Francis Collins make in the service of their religious myths. Your claim that I would be afraid to debate Collins is especially amusing, given that I offered to debate him several months ago, and he is still considering it. I’ll be sure to invite you to this event if it ever gets scheduled.

You are, however, quite correct to observe that many scientists do believe in God. I indicated as much in my first post (“a person can have sufficient intellectual ... resources to build a nuclear bomb ...”). But in the developed world this is an American phenomenon. And even in this benighted country of ours, faith in God virtually disappears among the most established scientists.

A recent poll of the National Academy of Sciences (our most elite scientific organization) revealed that only 7% of its members believe in God (compared to 40% of ordinary scientists and 90% of the population at large). Still, I would be the first to admit there is a debate to be waged and won in the scientific community on this point. The fact that 40% of American scientists believe in God does not indicate that there are good reasons to believe in God; it indicates that 60% of scientists aren’t doing their jobs. The faith of people like Collins is invariably propped up by terrible arguments of the sort you have begun to put forward. Let’s look at a few of them.

First, the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man. This defense of religion is one that Bertrand Russell demolished a century ago with his famous “teapot argument.” As I can’t improve on it, and you clearly have forgotten it amid the many challenges to piety you successfully parried “in high school,” here it is again:

Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense.

If a valid retort to Russell has ever seen the light of day, I’m not aware of it.

The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion—when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.

Atheism does not assert that “it is all made by chance.” No one knows why the universe came into being. Most scientists readily admit their ignorance on this point. Religious believers do not. One of the extraordinary ironies of religious discourse can be seen in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while condemning scientists and other nonbelievers for their intellectual arrogance. You have done a fine job of this above. And yet, there is no worldview more reprehensible in its arrogance than that of a religious believer: The Creator of the Universe takes an active interest in me, approves of me, loves me, and will reward me after death; my current beliefs, drawn from scripture, will remain the best statement of the truth until the end of the world; everyone who disagrees with me will spend eternity in hell…

An average believer has achieved a level of arrogance that is simply unimaginable in scientific discourse—and there have been some extraordinarily arrogant scientists.

You suggest that the existence of the universe demonstrates the existence of God. Why? Because everything that exists must have a cause. It is amazing how many people find this argument compelling.

Who is to say that the only thing that could give rise to the universe is a personal God? Even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be designed by a designer, this would not suggest that this designer is the God of Abraham, or that He approves of Judaism or Christianity. If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. Or it could be the work of an evil God, or two such gods playing tug-of-war with a larger cosmos.

If God created the universe, what created God? To say that God is uncreated simply begs the question. Why can’t I say that the cosmos is uncreated?

I eagerly await your display of “intellectually sophisticated God-belief,” Dennis. But you’re going to have to do better than that.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Straw Men, Teapots, and Moral Confusion

Dear Sam:

I may have erred in assuming that you, like myself and nearly all other mortals, could not match Dr. Francis Collins—the head of the human genome project— in his knowledge of human genetics. So if, as a graduate student in neuroscience, you have already approached Collins’s level of expertise, I salute you and exclude you from the vast majority of atheists or theists who could not debate him about the science that leads him to belief in God.

My point remains valid, as you graciously concede. Scientific knowledge hardly invalidates belief that there is a God. On the contrary, there are more believers in God in the natural sciences than in the social sciences. This suggests that it is the virtual absence of God in education, not knowledge of science, that likely accounts for the atheism of academics.

I note that you did not respond to my dismissal of your comparison of Zeus-belief with God-belief. You were wise to avoid it. That argument is intellectually silly, and unworthy of serious atheist.

You write that “the atheist you have conjured—so chock-full of false certainty—is an utter straw man.” “Straw man?” Sam, there is not one honest reader of your first letter who could assume anything but certitude on your part. Your dismissal of belief in God as intellectually identical to belief in Zeus proves my point, because both you and I are utterly certain that Zeus is not God.

And if you really aren’t certain that there is no God, level with us about your doubts as I did about mine.

The teapot argument is entirely inapplicable to me. I never wrote that atheism fails because it cannot disprove God. Are you responding to what I wrote, or just assuming that I fall into your caricature of believers?

I am, however, grateful for your bringing Bertrand Russell into the discussion. Russell is a fine example of one major reason I reject atheism. In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.

Bertrand Russell, the great atheist, was, to put it gently, a very morally confused man. Among his many confused ideas was to wage pre-emptive war (including, if necessary, using nuclear bombs) on the Soviet Union after World War II, and then, after the Soviet Union gained nuclear weapons, advocated that America and the West disarm.

Secularism usually produces moral and intellectual foolishness in people and institutions. My prime evidence is the contemporary American university, which is a place of intellectual and moral confusion so deep that one must look very hard to find religious Christian or Jewish equivalents.

That is why I wrote a column years ago titled “How I found God at Columbia University.” Professors where I did my graduate work, at the Columbia University School of International Affairs, were wrong on virtually every important issue.

To give but one example of the foolishness that pervades your godless, religionless, secular world, the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, was forced from office by the Harvard faculty largely because he had the audacity to say that brain differences between men and women might help account for their different predilections for the sciences and math. As the Psalms put it thousands of years ago, “Wisdom begins with awe of God.” The lack of wisdom at the secular temple, the university—where America is the world’s villain, where women and men are regarded as essentially the same, and where Marxism was taken seriously for generations—verifies the Psalmist’s view.

So thanks for raising Bertrand Russell. Though his china teapot argument is irrelevant to anything I have written or believe, his morally confused outlook on the world helped me to understand how indispensable God is to morality and wisdom, about which (especially in light of your characterization of this country as “benighted”) I’ll write more in my next letter.

Take care,

Dennis

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: An Irrelevant Argument and Its Imaginary Facts

This debate is fast drawing to a close, Dennis, and you have neither addressed my arguments nor presented any substantive arguments of your own.

I certainly did not claim that I possessed Collins’s level of expertise. I am, however, sufficiently conversant with the relevant science to know that Collins does not hold his beliefs about God for compelling, scientific reasons. You appear rather over-awed by the man’s academic credentials. Let me assure you that even very accomplished scientists can be terrible philosophers.

Collins, as you probably know, has just published a book-length defense of religious faith entitled The Language of God. It is a masterpiece of simple-mindedness. For instance, Collins describes the moment that he, a top-tier scientist, became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains…the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

A recent profile of Collins in Time adds a priceless detail: The waterfall was frozen in three streams, and this put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity! Earlier you wrote that I would not “even understand” the evidence that a genius like Francis Collins would put forward in defense of his faith. I confess you may be right about this.

I hope it is immediately obvious to you, and to every one of our readers, that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus is the son of God, then it can mean anything at all.

Let’s say I saw that same waterfall, and its three streams made me think of Romulus, Remus, and the She-wolf—the mythical founders of Rome. I just knew, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup. This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins. (Because Italy did win the World Cup.)

The reason science (especially in America) doesn’t better inoculate its practitioners against the belief that Jesus was the son of God (or that Joseph Smith received God’s final revelation on golden plates from the angel Maroni) is because it is taboo to seriously challenge a person’s religious faith in our society. I wonder what you make of the fact that some significant number of Hindu scientists believe in a plurality of gods. Does this suggest to you that polytheism has been borne out by dispassionate scientific research?

You also appear to have drawn the wrong conclusion from the statistics. There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God, and does so in a more or less linear fashion (about 10% of the general population are atheists/agnostics, 40% of doctors, 60% of research scientists, and 93% of National Academy members).

An article in Nature recently reported that no scientists doubt the existence of God more than biologists, followed closely by physicists and astronomers. I’m not aware of the data you cite on social scientists, but if it is as you report, and they are more atheistic still, it would not surprise me. After all, these people spend a lot of time thinking about things like self-deception, wishful thinking, cognitive biases, and the other enemies of intellectual honesty that keep religion in such good standing in our society.

Tell me why it is more reasonable to believe in Yahweh than in Zeus. I have little doubt that if Francis Collins grew up in a culture in which nine out of ten people venerated the gods of Mount Olympus, that frozen waterfall would have carried a decidedly pagan message (perhaps he would have thought “trident” before “trinity” and hit upon Poseidon as his favorite deity).

Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.

I raised the teapot argument because you accused me (and all atheists) of being certain that God does not exist, inviting our readers to appreciate just how absurd and intellectually dishonest such certainty is. Russell’s argument reveals why an atheist need never pretend to such certainty (as I don’t). The burden is upon those who believe in Yahweh, Zeus, or celestial teapots to provide evidence in support of their doctrines. Russell’s argument does indeed apply to you. And it will apply to your children’s children if we don’t get our heads straight as a civilization.

You wrote: “In the West, people and societies who reject the God of Judeo-Christian religions are more likely to become morally confused and foolish than believing Jews and Christians are.”

As you are well aware, the United States is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence. It is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen-pregnancy, STD infection, and infant mortality. Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above miseries, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms. Clearly, strong religious commitment does little to guarantee moral behavior or societal health.

But there is a far more important point for you and our readers to understand. Even if your claim about the link between faith and morality were true, it would offer no support whatsoever for your religious beliefs. Even if atheism led straight to moral chaos, this would not suggest that the doctrine of Judaism is true. Islam might be true in that case. Or all religions might function like placebos. As descriptions of the universe, they could be utterly false but extraordinarily useful. Contrary to your opinion, however, the evidence suggests that they are both false and dangerous.

I suspect, Dennis, that you and I agree about many questions of morality. I trust we both feel that slavery was an abomination, despite the fact that no matter how you squint your eyes the Bible tells us that it is okay to keep slaves. (Who decides what is good in the Good Book? Answer: We do. Our moral intuitions are still primary. It makes absolutely no sense, therefore, to think that we get our basic sense of right and wrong out of scripture). We surely agree that political correctness has undermined the intellectual and moral integrity of much of our discourse, both within our universities and elsewhere.

But the linkage you have drawn between immorality and atheism is spurious. And, needless to say, the taboo that got Lawrence Summers fired is the same taboo that would keep an atheist professor from criticizing the lunatic religious convictions of his students. What we need, across the board, is intellectual honesty—not more dogmatism.

It seems that your attachment to religion results, at least in part, from your abhorrence of moral relativism. I fully share your concern here and spend a considerable portion of my professional energies trying to free secularism from the dangerous nonsense with which it is often entangled. I strongly suspect that you and I have similar views of the risks posed to civilization by the spread of Islam. We probably draw some of the same lessons from the failures of multiculturalism in Western Europe: All the backwardness and barbarism that goes by the name of European Islam (the forced marriages, honor killings, anti-Semitism, hostility to free speech, and so forth) has to be reamed out of those immigrant populations or the whole continent is headed over the falls.

But it is clear from our debate that you and I differ on the location of the problem. In your view, the problem must be that Europe has lost the moral backbone that only religion can provide (and Islam just happens to be the wrong religion.) In my view, our world has been shattered, quite unnecessarily, by religion itself. As I said, even if you were right, and the only people who could summon the moral courage to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world were the religious lunatics of the West, this would suggest nothing at all about the existence of the biblical God. It would only show that a belief in Him might be politically necessary, in a given time and place, to motivate people to fight (as our inimitable President says) “the evildoers.”

I am reasonably sure you are wrong about this. But again, this is quite irrelevant to the question before us.

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Unhappy Correlations

Dear Sam:

Dr. Collins did not offer three waterfalls as an argument for belief in the Trinity, not even in your isolated citation from his book or in the single sentence in Time. All he said was that three waterfalls reminded of him of the Christian Trinity and that after observing such awesome beauty he became a believing Christian.

If a man says that a beautiful flower reminds him of his beautiful wife, he is not saying that the beauty of the flower proves his wife is also beautiful. Natural wonders often inspire a person to reflect on the divine. You see natural beauty and, for that matter, everything else in the universe, and see no Creator, just coincidence. I find that reaction at least as odd as you find seeing in nature evidence for a Creator.

The Collins comments simply indicate that he and other eminent scientists see science as arguing for a Creator God. If Collins had said that the existence of three waterfalls proves that there is a Trinity, I would then share your dismissive attitude. But these comments didn’t even imply something so preposterous.

You write that, “There is little question that exposure to a scientific education reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God,” a point I fully acknowledged in my last correspondence. But exposure to other areas of higher education, specifically the “social sciences,” further reduces the likelihood that a person will believe in God.

We therefore have two choices about how to interpret these data. One is that the more one knows, the less likely one is to believe in God. That is your interpretation. I have another interpretation—that contemporary higher education increases factual knowledge but decreases wisdom. With some exceptions, I believe that the more time one spends at a university the more foolish he or she becomes.

Only among the highly educated are there still those who believe that men and women are basically the same. Going back a generation or two, support for Josef Stalin, perhaps the greatest mass murderer in history, was almost entirely confined in the West to intellectuals. German Ph.D.s were also among Hitler’s greatest supporters. The moral record of secular intellectuals—Lenin’s “useful idiots”— is the worst of any single group in free societies in the last hundred years.

I am therefore not quite bowled over by data connecting higher secular education with atheism.

You write that, “Your job is to either produce a rational argument for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition (one that reveals why one billion Hindus are utterly in error about the nature of the cosmos), or to admit that you cannot do this. I am willing to bet the farm that you cannot.”

Don’t bet your farm quite yet. I have in fact made the case for the unique legitimacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition in 25 essays I wrote in 2005. Suffice it to that Judeo-Christian values alone gave humanity the notion of the sacredness of human life; linear history and therefore the idea of moral and scientific progress; universal standards of good and evil; the abolition of slavery; the scientific method; the development of democracy; equality of the sexes; the greatest experiment in non-ethnicity-based society (America); the greatest music ever composed; and the greatest art ever drawn.

As for India, I have traveled there a number of times and lectured there; I have a deep reverence for its people and culture. But India did not give us those contributions. Nor did China and certainly not any of the societies contemporaneous with the ancient Jews who gave us the Torah from which these values emanate.

Presumably you assume that all these world-changing values and unique achievements would have evolved on their own with no Hebrew Bible, no divine revelation, and no Christians to bring the Bible to the world. You are, after all, a believer that everything awesome came from nothing.

That is how you view the world: All things came from no thing; intelligence came from nonintelligence; order came from chaos. I cannot understand why anyone finds these beliefs rationally compelling. I can only conclude that it takes either a university education—the secular immersion that begins in grade school—or an antipathy to religion.

If you want to make the case for secularism producing better people in America, how about “betting the farm” on this: I bet you whatever sum we each can afford that the vast majority of murderers and rapists in this country were not religiously active during the time they committed their violent crimes. I would make a second bet that you won’t take that bet.

Here’s another real-life correlation for you to ponder. For the most part, secular Europe couldn’t tell the moral difference between America and the Soviet Union and can’t tell the difference between Israel and its enemies. Religious America knew the Soviet Union was an “evil empire” and believes that there is a moral chasm separating Israel from its enemies. And secular Europe, like secular America, doesn’t even reproduce itself. Secularism either makes people too selfish to have more than one child and/or shatters any belief in sustaining one’s society and culture.

Finally, I salute you for acknowledging the Islamic threat and for abhorring the moral relativism that pervades the West. Unlike most atheists, you do acknowledge that the moral courage to fight today’s greatest evil is primarily to be found among religious Jews and Christians. I credit that courage to the moral clarity inherent to Jewish and Christian beliefs and to these Jews’ and Christians’ belief in God. I have yet to figure out to what you ascribe the courage among the religious and the lack of moral backbone in secular Europe and America.

You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.

From: Sam Harris
To: Dennis Prager
Subject: Three Ways to Miss the Point

Well, we seem to have arrived at the end of our debate without a true meeting of minds. I doubt either of us expected to change the other’s views on religion. Before signing off, I would like to point out that you have relied on a variety of maneuvers that do not (even in combination) lend any support to your position:

1. You have observed that some very smart people, like Francis Collins, believe in God.

As it stands, citing such good company doesn’t amount to an argument—especially when the reasons these illustrious people have for believing in God are risible. Unfortunately, it is your treatment of Collins that is “misleading.” The excerpt I provided represents his own account of the precise moment he had his doubts about Christianity removed. You are rightly embarrassed by this, given your reliance on him as one of the great lights of “sophisticated” faith.

I will leave it to our readers to consult Collins’s book and decide for themselves whether the man arrived at his belief in the risen Christ through the science of molecular biology or by some other route. You, however, would do well to observe that there is an enormous difference between (1) acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study, and (2) acquiring it through emotionality and wishful thinking, then looking to see if can survive contact with science. Collins has clearly done the latter.

The fact that evangelical Christianity can still survive contact with science (because of the gaps in science) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an evangelical Christian. And despite your gyrations on the subject, the fact that scientists are, across the board, less religious than nonscientists suggests that science doesn’t tend to support religious belief.

2. You have, rather frequently, ignored the plain meaning of words.

I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.).

3. You have continually sought to make the case that belief in God is useful.

While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists. (It is debatable, of course, because the Judeo-Christian tradition, to which you ascribe so much of humanity’s progress, has also spawned much of the world’s misery—and even produced Stalin, the worst of the worst).

The fact that certain religious beliefs might be useful in no way suggests their legitimacy. I can guarantee, for instance, that the following religion, invented by me in the last ten seconds, would be extraordinarily useful. It is called “Scientismo.” Here is its creed: Be kind to others; do not lie, steal, or murder; and oblige your children to master mathematics and science to the best of their abilities or 17 demons will torture you with hot tongs for eternity after death. If I could spread this faith to billions, I have little doubt that we would live in a better world than we do at present. Would this suggest that the 17 demons of Scientismo exist? Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.

With regard to your wager about the religiosity of murderers and rapists—it depends, of course, on what you mean by “religiously active.” If you are suggesting that these violent offenders rarely believe in your biblical God, I will happily take this bet. The rate of belief among murders and rapists in the U.S. must surely exceed the rate of nonbelief. I would even be willing to handicap it: We can leave aside the thousands of ordained child-rapists in the Catholic Church (or weren’t they “religiously active” by your lights?).

I should also point out that you sealed your last missive with a fallacy. You wrote:

“You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.”

No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a “powerful argument,” or even an argument at all; please keep your x’s straight. If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.

A further irony, of course, is that the civilizational threat that worries us both—Islamic fascism—is purely the product of religious faith, held for precisely the reasons (or pseudo-reasons) you defend. If Muslims didn’t think of themselves as “Muslims”, Jews as “Jews”, and Christians and “Christians”, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Let me assure you that “sophisticated” Muslims resort to the same rationalizations that Francis Collins does to prop up their belief in mighty Allah. Indeed, your “awesome beauty of nature” is one of the chief rationales for faith found in the Koran. How many more people will have to die because of this Iron Age response to the beauty of nature?

If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.

All the best,

Sam

From: Dennis Prager
To: Sam Harris
Subject: Your Task is Far Greater than Mine

I will leave it to our readers to identify who relied on “maneuvers.”

To help them judge I will cite your words and not rely on paraphrasing your views as you have mine.

You write: “You have observed that very smart people, like Francis Collins, occasionally believe in God.”

I didn’t write that. I wrote that some eminent scientists believe in God and that some of them have come to believe in God through science. The issue was scientists and belief, not “very smart people” and belief. In fact, with no implication intended regarding you, I have almost never encountered “very smart people” who do not believe in God. The vast majority of atheists I have met had fine brain matter, but if “smart” includes wisdom, intellectual depth, profundity of thought, and moral insight, I have encountered such people almost exclusively among believers in the Judeo-Christian God. (For the record, I have also met fools who believe in this God.)

You write: “I trust that attentive readers will notice where you have misconstrued me (or rendered a tortured interpretation of Collins, polling data, etc.) and then pressed a false charge.”

I continue to defend my understanding of Collins—in fact, on my radio show I asked him about the waterfalls and he sustained my, not your, understanding. (The entire interview with him is available through my website.)

You never took my bet that the vast majority of violent criminals were not religiously active when they committed their crimes. Instead you redefined “religiously active” to mean belief in the biblical God. Everyone who uses the term knows it doesn’t refer to belief; it refers to being active within a religion, such as with regular church or synagogue attendance, Bible study, etc. You know as well as I do that such people are not proportionately represented among America’s violent criminals. So you redefined “religiously active” to avoid the wager.

You write: “While the usefulness of religion might be worth debating in another context, it is completely irrelevant to the question of whether God exists.” I agree. My argument is that unlike Judeo-Christian America, secular societies—generally meaning those of Western Europe—lose their will to survive (by not reproducing), and stand for nothing (they were largely morally worthless in the Cold War against Communism and are worthless or worse in helping to keep Israel alive against Muslims who vow to exterminate the Jewish state.) When people realize this, they may conclude that something that is necessary for society to survive—belief in the God of Israel—may in fact exist.

You write that the Judeo-Christian tradition “even produced Stalin.” I have to admit this is a first in a lifetime of debating atheists. I can only imagine that you are referring to the fact that Stalin attended a Christian seminary as a youth. So what? Stalin was a passionate atheist who murdered untold numbers of Christian clergy, destroyed virtually every church in Russia, and forced Soviet students to study “scientific atheism.” If those violent pro-atheism policies were produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, then words have no meaning.

You write: “Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.”

That is certainly true. However, if what may be a “useful delusion” is responsible for Judeo-Christian civilization’s abolishing slavery, discovering science and the scientific method, affirming rationality, believing in progress (the Torah was unique in repudiating the cyclic view of life), elevating women’s rights, affirming universal human rights, establishing the sanctity of human life, and so much more, then I would be loathe to dismiss it as merely a “useful delusion.”

You write: “If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.” This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not “even remotely suggest that God exists.” Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?

You conclude: “If nothing else, our debate clearly reveals how difficult it is to change another person’s mind on this subject. Perhaps some of our readers had their views shifted one way or the other. Whatever the result, I’m very happy we took the time to correspond.”

I, too, am happy we took the time to correspond. But I never entered this debate with any hope that I would change your mind on this subject. The motto of my radio show is, “I prefer clarity to agreement,” and that is why I agreed to this. I wanted readers to attain clarity about the differences between atheism and Judeo-based theism.

And with that goal in mind, I will end with my re-wording of a superb summary of the argument for belief in God that was made by Rabbi Milton Steinberg (1903–1950), a rationalist (and non-Orthodox) rabbi: “The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for the existence of everything else.”

And that is why your task, Sam, is infinitely greater than mine.

All the best,

Dennis

About Sam Harris: Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME , U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, Der Spiegel, The Globe and Mail, New Scientist, Wired, SEED Magazine, and many other journals. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris makes regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that religion now poses to modern societies. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. He blogs for the Washington Post / Newsweek website: On Faith.

About Dennis Prager: Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show live Monday through Friday mornings from Los Angeles. Widely sought after by television shows for his opinions, he’s appeared on “Larry King Live,” “Hardball,” “Hannity & Colmes,” “CBS Evening News,” “The Today Show” and many others. Dennis also writes a syndicated column (Creators Syndicate) that is published in newspapers across the country and on the Internet. His writings have also appeared in major national and international publications including, Commentary, The Weekly Standard and The Wall Street Journal. He has authored four books, including The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism, which remains a paperback bestseller over 20 years after its release. Mr. Prager was a Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International Affairs, where he did graduate work at the Middle East and Russian Institutes. He has taught Russian and Jewish history at Brooklyn College; and was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Delegation to the Vienna Review Conference on the Helsinki Accords. He holds an honorary doctorate of laws from Pepperdine University.

appeal to consequences of a belief has this fallacious form:
The belief in P leads to Q.
Q is desirable.
Therefore, P is true
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences>

If an argument has this form it is techincally NOT an argument at all. This is what Sam is pointing out (see below):

Sam:
No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a "powerful argument," or even an argument at all; please keep your x's straight. If humanity can't survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn't, even remotely, suggest that God exists.

Dennis Prager's Reponse to Sam:
You write: "If humanity can't survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn't, even remotely, suggest that God exists." This statement is as novel as the one suggesting that Stalin was produced by Judeo-Christian values. It is hard for me to imagine that any fair-minded reader would reach the same conclusion. If we both acknowledge that without belief in God humanity would self-destruct, it is quite a stretch to say that this fact does not "even remotely suggest that God exists." Can you name one thing that does not exist but is essential to human survival?

This is most troubling to me. Even after Sam points out that Dennis is conflating the reference with the referant, Dennis still confuses to. He may be aware of his mistake and be avoiding owning up to it, but it is just as likely that he is cognitively less capable of identifying thought from non-thought based reality. Some realities depend on thought such as money. Money becomes more than paper and metal because we individually as well as collectively give it meaning and value. Then there are things such as the fact that the earth is revolving around the sun and not the other way around that is independent of both individual and collective thought. I think belief about God is like money - socially constructed. But God is a truth claim about the universe like the earth revolving around the sun. You can't socially construct God into existence like you can belief in God. Did you notice how Dennis' arguments are based on the usefulness of belief in God? This is the type of argument that would be valid for arguing for the usefulness of believing in the value of money.

As a strict materialist/patternist I believe that we need to not only use rationality from within the religious mindset (e.g. "Say I grant you the truth claim of T, you still have problems X,Y,Z), but from the position that completely disregards the fictions and focuses on realities. Part of reality is the psychological/neurological basis of belief. For example in psychology it is well known that people suffering from anxiety disorders such as obsessive compulsive disorder a contributing factor is an reduced ability to distinguish thought from reality. It is also known that religiosity has a large genetic component, that its not just social indoctrination. The brains of the religious are a little broken in their ability to distiguish between reference and referant, and science needs to discover exactly how. I believe the sciences that deal with Mind, Brain, and Society will be much more threatening to religious belief than cosmology, geology and biology as they learn move about the religious mind.

Related to this is my view that that all those that fight powerful falsehoods should not attack them as being non-sense, but as being imaginary. This may seem a trivial point, but I believe it is not. If further clarification on this point is required, just ask.