There are entirely rational reasons to be a good and moral person. I contend it is better to base your morality on rationality than on religion, simply because rationality means being thoughtful and attentive to the current situation, while religion implies following someone else's thinking without question. Blindly relgious folk could do with a good dose of rationality, methinks.
I would agree, and frankly go a bit further. Religion can lead directly to immoral behaviour. I can think of two cases off the top of my head where Bibilical figures commit what I would consider gravely immoral acts, as "men of god" - Abraham's near-slaughter of his son at god's behest, and the time the prophet Elijah murdered 42 children (by god-invoked bear attack, no less) for making fun of him. These acts are not condemned at all in the text, they are actually meant to be instructive. It's a bit sick.
You should read Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling before condemning Abraham.
I doubt anyone can convince me it's okay to butcher your kid.
He doesn't try to, and I'm not trying to. But maybe someone can convince you that even a faulty religion can lead to positive results.
Understood. However, I'm really not interested in looking up apologists for religion. If you have an argument, go ahead and make one; but I won't be researching this just on your say-so, sorry. No offense intended.
In spite of what I said, I did just read the wikipedia entry on "fear and trembling". Didn't see anything terribly interesting there. If you hear god's voice telling you to kill, I'm putting my money on schizophrenia.
That's fine. It's very easy to write off religion from a rational point of view and it's very easy to write off science from a religious perspective. And it's none of my business if you staunchly refuse to admit that there might be reason in faith and there might be faith in reason.
You are putting words in my mouth, but it is true that I disdain faith. Faith and reason are not, in my mind, comparable things, at all. Finding one in the other is a nonsensical idea to me.
Great. The next time you scoff at a young earth creationist or someone against stem cell research, realize that you are the exact same thing but on the opposite side.
Not at all. I don't have faith in Feynman, as much as you may wish it so. Faith means I believe it with no justification (or because god says so). I have trust in Feynman, which is based on the fact that I have read a couple of his books and seen some of his lectures, and I know of his reputation. On the evidence of those things, I trust that he is not a charlatan. I may be wrong, but my belief is not one of faith.
Right, and people don't have faith in God. They've read his book, seen a few of the things he's done, and his reputation precedes him.
God hasn't written a book. No one has seen anything he's done. He does have a rep, though. So does Santa.
And if you can demonstrate something that god has done, I'll bet you could collect a million dollars from the Randi Foundation.
Because they are, for the most part, untestable.Why can’t I submit a religious or spiritual claim?
untestable claims are pretty much useless in terms of determining their truth. That's fine if you are claiming something as a subjective opinion or truth i.e. " I don't feel well." or " Lady Gaga sucks"...However, if you're making an assertion about something being a fact, if we can't test the truth of your claim, then, sorry, we feel no need to believe you.
Blindly rational folks could do with a bit of religion, as well. Besides, this book doesn't mind if there are reasons to be good and moral. It's not about whether religion is worth it or not. It's about the legal standing of non-religious beliefs. And what is your rationale that it's better to trust yourself over others? If you know you've met someone smarter than yourself, isn't the most rational thing to do to accept what they say as correct?
Right. But where do you get the idea that it's better to have proof than accept an argument from authority? If you know someone is more intelligent than you and less likely to make mistakes, I don't know if there's a rational reason to not take their arguments at face value.
They only need to be wrong this one time to mess me up. Why do you think that accepting the word of someone that you think is smarter than you is a form of evidence? It's not. Evidence is evidence. Richard Feinman could tell me that the moon's a balloon just to play with my head. Geniuses are quirky that way.
Feynman told you that matter can and does exist in all of its possible positions simultaneously, and you believed it. I don't mean to offend you, but I highly doubt that you have studied physics to the point where you could prove his findings to yourself mathematically, and I also doubt that you have the equipment and wherewithal to reproduce the experiment. So you have no evidence that Feynman is correct besides a lot of other, more knowledgeable people in the same field telling you that he's correct. Beginning to sound less and less like reason!
Feynman does not argue from authority. People may trust him as an authority, and I certainly do, but the point is that his peers do not.
Hmm. Sounds an awful lot like
following someone else's thinking without question
to me. But, hey, if you say that it's reason then I guess you just need a new definition of religion.
I didn't say it was reason. I said Feynman does not argue from authority.
What? Maybe I'm not phrasing this well enough. Here's what I'm asking:
There is someone whom you know, empirically, or through whatever means you find convincing, is smarter than you.
That someone is also less likely to make mistakes than you.
Why would you trust yourself over that person rationally?
Because I know my own motivations, and I do not know theirs.Why would you trust yourself over that person rationally?
I haven't listened the interview yet, but I always find this an interesting topic. Luckily, I don't have bad experiences with religious zealots. Personally, I think that the live and let live mentality is best applied here (as Leiter suggests if I read the summary correctly). Religion does give some people strength to do more with their lives and there is no reason to take that away from them. One cannot prove the existence of God, nor prove the he does not exist. And because of that, we can't go around and say that religion is wrong. There is only one problem with letting religion going unchecked. One of the reasons religion is so successful is because the idea inherently wants to multiply. Let me explain: Ideas multiply and survive because the ones who have the idea shares the idea. An Idea which actually encourages the spreading of the Idea has a higher probability of survival in the jungle which is our collective mind. But think about the Idea itself for a moment. The idea doesn't have to be a good idea. So, bad ideas with a good survival potential is more likely to survive then a good idea with a bad survival potential. I will not judge whether religion is good or bad, just keep in mind that the idea can be good, bad or anything in between. I said that there was a problem with letting religion going unchecked. The problem is that the Idea religion is an Idea with a high survival potential. This means that even if we were to forbid religion, it would most likely still survive. On the other hand, if we leave it unchecked, we will see people trying to convince others that their religion is true. This will result in things like Jehovah's witlessness, who are disliked by everybody and just completely insane cults like the Peoples Temple, which resulted in the Jonestown mass suicide, and the Church of Scientology. On the less extrime side we also have the fact that the Vatican did not want people to use condoms until just a short while ago, even tough that could have save lot of pain and lives in Africa. I hope we can take away the position of power of religious institutions. People can still believe what they want, but we should not want religious institutions in power. A more content related reply might come later :-P
Not 'most likely'; it simply would. This has been proven many, many times. Good post otherwise, just not particularly related to what the author is talking about.This means that even if we were to forbid religion, it would most likely still survive.
I'd like to get into this bit by bit. In the initial paragraph, the author brings up the fact that religious conscience claims can be used as exemptions from the law, whereas non-religious conscience claims cannot (for example avoiding the draft). Is there an essential difference between these two claims which makes one more valid than the other? The author says no. I would tend to agree, BUT I am happy to argue the other side. A claim of religious conscience, is made from the conviction that one's eternal life is dependent upon this decision. A claim of non-religious conscience is made from the conviction that you must behave ethically in order to feel right in your own skin. Eternity vs. The Present.
A claim of religious conscience, is made from the conviction that one's eternal life is dependent upon this decision.
This may be true in theory, but I really doubt that this is the rationale behind decisions on an individual level. I have Muslim friends who occasionally, for conveniences sake, forgo fasting sometimes. Theoretically, this is a black mark against their eternal souls, but it doesn't seem to bother them very much. I'd say that there are often other factors behind a claim for exemption from laws, and very often the religiously motivated argument is just secondary to the actual reasons.
Interesting point. What you are essentially saying is that because a claim of religious conscience impacts the eternal life, it automatically gains more power in the present then a claim of non-religious conscience. This while both claims have the same moral/ethical standing, so should impact the eternal life in the same way. By the way, not all non-religious claims of conscience are made from the conviction that one needs to behave ethically to be feel right in your own skin. One can also be convinced that one needs to behave ethically at all costs, because it is for the greater good.
Further into the interview the author gives 3 distinguishing qualifiers that determine what religion is as opposed to anything else. They are
1. Categorical demands on adherents which are both absolute and non-negotiable
2. Some beliefs that are isolated against ordinary standards of reason and evidence (such as transubstantiation)
3. All religions are discharged by forms of existential consolation. They teach us how to deal with death, loss, pain and suffering. So, in the example he uses, the Sikh boy vs. the Farmer's son, the Sikh boy's claim to be able to carry a Kirpan is not just a demand made by his religion which rules his eternal life, it is also a cultural demand that proves his manhood. For the farmer's son, it is simply a family tradition. There is more weight on the side of the religion, thus more pressure on the individual to conform and more stress and harm caused by disallowing the knife.
No! Fish, in the article I've linked elsewhere in the discussion does a much better job than I could in defeating these pro-religion exemption arguments: The familiar proverb that captures this requirement is, “Ours is a government of laws and not of men.” The liberal project is threatened whenever that formula is reversed, whenever the state’s generality is at risk of being eroded by the particular beliefs of men. Substance, then, is the chief danger to the liberal state, and the chief form of that danger is religion, both because of the categorical demands it places on its adherents and because it refuses the formal constraints that keep substance cabined in the sphere of the private. So that while the liberal state is pledged to refrain from burdening the claims of conscience, were it to surrender itself to them, it would, says Leiter, “cease being a state.” Just such a surrender would be involved in the “carving out of special protections” whenever someone wholly in the grasp of conviction — religious or any other — demanded them. So in short, whenever we offer a conscious exemption to established law based solely on religious or cultural tradition, liberalism itself is the big loser.Liberalism begins by dislodging the authority that in other political systems provides stability and meaning — a God or a theology or a monarch or a dictator. Liberalism replaces those rejected authorities with the idea of individual rights and it becomes the liberal project to build a political system and a system of value on that foundation. Somewhat paradoxically, the privileging of individual rights means that the substantive commitments of no individual can be allowed to inform the body of law, which must be generally applicable; applicable, that is, to every citizen no matter what his or her beliefs and biases may happen to be.
"Why should religion be afforded special legal and moral standing"? -Great question. Has anyone here read this yet? It's an unusual thing that people, like the women in the Starbucks in Nasheville, think that religion is "under attack" in the US. I think that briandmyers made some good points in another discussion here (that I can't find) about how it is the atheists that have been the most persecuted over the years. If I ever mention that I don't believe in god or that I am unsure of my beliefs I am often looked at with either pity, anger or fear. The woman in the coffee shop belongs to one of the largest clubs on earth. She has nothing to fear. Again, mpoe, great work with the New Books Network the site looks great and the content is consistently strong.