sacha wrote:okay, Steersman, I'm feeling generous at the moment:
But not overly sentimental, I hope. :-)
Although you and Phil are still looking a little defensive when it comes to “The Hitch†– which was sort of my point and which is somewhat of a problem, at least from a general perspective. As mentioned, I expect he had some very good points and arguments – notably, in passing, the article BarnOwl linked to, his undergoing waterboarding to give some credibility to his arguments about torture as government policy – but I expect he had some that were at least very problematic. And in that latter class I would put his opinions, at least some of them, on religion in general and in particular those implied by his book, “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everythingâ€.
But, as that relates to my earlier quote of franc – “Lay off Hitch†– in the context of that defensiveness and to something else on which I had been planning on responding to in any case,
James Onen had referenced and elaborated on an earlier comment by
Everyman which
franc had, in turn, made some interesting if somewhat inconsistent observations and arguments:
franc wrote:EveryMan wrote:Religion itself is not harmful, people are. And some people are going to continue to be evil regardless of whether or not their are religions around for them to use to excuse their actions. As L. Ron Hubbard proved, if the existing ones aren't evil enough you can always start your own.
John Gray's (not the mars/venus idiot) whole hypothesis is that god is irrelevant - it is the actions of believers that harm.
However, while I’ll agree with franc there about the “actions of believers†even if it is somewhat inconsistent with Hitchens’ position – unless one wants to argue that a religion is comprised of the actions of its believers, I’m not sure that his assertion is correct that Gray’s “whole hypothesis is that god is irrelevant†or that the hypothesis itself is valid or supportable.
And in that latter case – the question of whether “god is irrelevantâ€, while it is no doubt true that a non-existent entity has to be considered irrelevant and of no effect, that is a little more difficult to justify if we’re talking about abstractions which can have far reaching effects – for example, considering the season, Santa Claus. What people believe to be true or act as if it were true, even in cases where it is plainly not the case, are still determinants of the “actions of those believers†and have to be considered and understood if one is to make any changes in those actions.
Which is sort of the reason why I think that Gray’s hypothesis is anything but that “god is irrelevantâ€, at least on the basis of this
synopsis of his book
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia which, in passing, takes some shots at various “New Atheistsâ€, Hitchens in particular. But while it appears that Gray himself is more sympathetic to religion in general than I think is justified, I also think he is quite correct to argue that religion at least encompasses perspectives and perceptions that have been and are of surpassing value that are worth preserving and promoting. And which will be rather difficult to eradicate as many of them are integral to secular humanism.
But I sort of like to think of the problem as a case of “accentuating the positive, eliminating the negativeâ€. Or, maybe more appropriately, of separating the wheat from the chaff, the latter of which can certainly be rather poisonous. And that is sort of why I think that Hitchens, among others, has missed the boat on that score: he got it half right, but was and is badly wrong on the other half.
However, that still leaves open the question of what constitutes the wheat and what the chaff and how they might be separated, if at all – which reminds me of the
facehugger scene in
Alien. But one thing that I think that is particularly relevant and of potential value is, for want of a better word, transcendence.
Now while that word carries some unfortunate and problematic if not justified connotations of “wooâ€, there are other connotations and interpretations and implications to the word that have some solid biology and physics behind them – notably the swarming of
locusts and the phenomenon of
emergence, a notable example of which is the emergence of consciousness – our minds – out of the behaviour of the hundred billion neurons and thousand trillion synaptic connections in our brains.
Seems to me that only through a close analysis of religion itself and an understanding of where and why it
has worked can we hope to ameliorate if not obviate cases where it hasn’t. And in which regard, tarring all of religion with the brush of “poison†tends to be rather problematic to say the least, particularly if that “dogma†is subscribed to without much thought or reflection involved.
