All Comments (31)

Malleck writes:
“Idolater, the blind, stubborn, hate-filled ignoramus and stupid, parrot-like Islam phobic misanthrope is YOU, not Jihadists."
Technically Jihadist is an Idolater. Doesn’t Jihadist kiss and rotate around a stone in Arabia, AND BELIEVE THAT WOULD WIPE OUT ALL HIS SINS? Then he is idol worshipper i,e. Idolator.

Stop imagining there's a heaven my friends; and stop imagining there's a god. You have been taught to imagine these things by your family and community, and by religious leaders whose occupational survival depend on you believing such superstitious claptrap.

It might have all made sense hundreds of years ago, when we didn't know any better, but this is 2008, and the very idea of a supernatural world is laughable to any un-indoctrinated grown up.

The six-billionth child is now about eight years old, and what he/she believes about the world depends very much on where he/she was born.

He/she will likely be;
A Shia Muslim if born in Iran.
A Mormon if born in Utah.
A Catholic if born in Ireland.
A Hindu if born in Calcutta.
A Sunni Muslim if born in Pakistan.
A Southern Baptist if born the deep south.
And so on and so on and so on and so on.

Tolstoy once wrote that patriotism is an evil because it sets men against each other.

I think religion is an evil for the same reason, but also because it is irrational nonsense, without any basis in reality.

Jihadist, and Mr Malleck.

Salman Rushdie wrote this letter a few years ago to the Six-Billionth child born into our modern world. I personally find it quite brilliant.

Dear little Six - Billionth Living Person: As one of the newest members of a notoriously inquisitive species, it probably won't be too long before you start asking the two $64,000 questions with which the other 5,999,999,999 of us have been wrestling for some time.
How did we get here? And, now that we are here, how shall we live?
Oddly - as if six billion of us weren't enough to be going on with - it will almost certainly be suggested to you that the answer to the question of origins requires you to believe in the existence of a further, invisible, innefable Being "somewhere up there", an omnipotent creature whom we poor limited creatures are unable even to perceive, much less to understand.
That is, you will be strongly encouraged to imagine a heaven, with at least one god in residence.
This sky god, it's said, made the universe by churning its matter in a giant pot. Or, he danced. Or, he vomited creation out of himself. Or, he simply called it into being, and lo, it Was. In some of the more interesting creation stories, the singly mighty sky god is subdivided into many lesser forces - junior dieties, avatars, gigantic metamorphic "ancestors" whose adventures create the landscape, or the whimsical, wanton, meddling, cruel pantheons of the great polytheisms, whose wild doings will convince you that the real engine of creation was lust; for infinite power, for too easily broken human bodies, for clouds of glory. But it's only fair to add that there are also stories which offer the message that the primary creative impulse was, and is, love.
Many of these stories will strike you extremely beautiful, and therefore seductive. Unfortunately, however, you will not be required to make a purely literary response to them. Only the stories of dead religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you. So you will be told that belief in "your" stories, and adherence to the rituals of worship that have grown up around them, must become a vital part of your life in the crowded world. They will be called the heart of your culture, even of your individual identity.

It is possible that they may at some point come to feel inescapable, not in the way that the truth is inescapable, but in the way that a jail is. They may at some point cease to feel like the texts in which human beings have tried to solve a great mystery, and feel, instead, like the pretexts for other properly anointed human beings to order you around. And it's true that human history is full of the public oppression wrought by the charioteers of the gods.
In the opinion of religious people, however, the private comfort that religion brings more than compensates for the evil done in its name.

As human knowledge has grown, it has also become plain that every religious story ever told about how we got here is quite simply wrong. This, finally, is what all religions have in common. They didn't get it right. There was no celestial churning, no maker's dance, no vomiting of galaxies, no snake or kangaroo ancestors, no Valhalla, no Olympus, no six-day conjuring trick followed by a day of rest. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But here's something genuinly odd. The wrongness of the sacred tales hasn't lessened the zeal of the devout in the least. If anything, the sheer out-of-step zaniness of religion leads the religious to insist ever more stridently on the importance of blind faith.

As a result of this faith, by the way, lt has proved impossible, in many parts of the world, to prevent the human race's numbers from swelling alarmingly. Blame the overcrowded planet at least partly on the misguidedness of the races spiritual guides. In your own lifetime, you may witness the arrival of the nine billionth world citizen.

(If too many people are being born as a result, in part, of religious strictures against birth control, then too many people are also dying because religious culture, by refusing to face the facts of human sexuality, also refuses to fight against sexually transmitted diseases.)

There are those who say that the great wars of the new century will once again be wars of religion, jihads and crusades, as they were in the Middle Ages. I don't believe them, or not in the way they mean it. Take a look at the Muslim world, or rather the Islamist world, to use the word coined to describe Islam's present day "political arm". The divisions between its great powers (Afghanistan against Iran against Iraq against Saudi Arabia against Syria against Egypt) are what strike you most forcefully. There's very little resembling a common purpose. Even after the non-Islamic NATO fought a war for the Muslim Kosovan Albanians, the Muslim world was slow in coming forward with much needed humanitarian aid.

The real wars of religion are the wars religions unleash against ordinary citizens within their "sphere of influence." They are wars of the godly against the largely defenceless - American fundamentalists against pro-choice doctors, Iranian mullahs against their country's Jewish minority, Hindu fundamentalists in Bombay against that city's increasingly fearful Muslims.

The victors in that war must not be the closed-minded, marching into battle with, as ever, God on their side. To choose unbelief is to choose mind over dogma, to trust in our humanity instead of all these dangerous divinities. So, how did we get here? Don't look for the answer in story books. Imperfect human knowledge may be a bumpy, pot-holed street, but it's the only road to wisdom worth taking. Virgil, who believed that the apiarist Aristaeus could spontaneously generate new bees from the rotting carcess of a cow, was closer to a truth about origins than all the revered old books.

The ancient wisdoms are modern non-senses.

Live in your own time, use what we know and, as you grow up, perhaps the human race will finally grow up with you and put aside childish things. As the song says, "It's easy if you try."

As for mortality, the second great question - how to live? What is right action, and what wrong?- it comes down to your willingness to think for yourself. Only you can decide if you want to be handed down the law by priests, and accept that good and evil are somehow external to ourselves.

To my mind, religion - even at its most sophisticated - essentially infantalizes our ethical selves by setting infallible moral Arbiters and irredeemably immoral Tempters above us; the eternal parents, good and bad, light and dark, of the supernatural realm.

How, then, are we to make ethical choices without a divine rulebook or judge? Is unbelief just the first step on the long slide into the brain death of cultural relativism, according to which many unbearable things - female circumcision, to name just one - can be excused on culturally specific grounds, and the universality of human rights, too can be ignored?
(This last piece of moral unmaking finds supporters in some of the world's most authoritarian regimes, and also, unnervingly, on the editorial page of the Daily Telegraph,UK.)

Well, no, it isn't, but the reasons for saying so aren't clear-cut. Only hard-line ideology is clear-cut. Freedom, which is the word I use for the secular-ethical position, is inevitably fuzzier. Yes, freedom is that space in which contradiction can reign, it is a never-ending debate. It is not in itself the answer to the question of morals, but the conversation about that question. And it is much more than mere relativism, because it is not merely a never-ending talk show, but a place in which choices are made, values defined and defended.

Intellectual freedom, in European history, has mostly meant freedom from the restraints of the Church and not the state.

This is the battle Voltaire was fighting, and it's also what all six billion of us could do for ourselves, the revolution in which each of us could play our small, six-billionth part; once and for all we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and behavior. Once and for all we could put the stories back into the books, put the books back on the shelves, and see the world undogmatized and plain.

Imagine there's no heaven, my dear Six-Billionth, and at once the sky's the limit.

Extracted from Letters to the Six-Billionth World Citizen, published in English by Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam.

i suspect you would stack up fairly well with most of the self apointed movers and shakers. to often in life it is the people who have a little money so they can buy all thier sparkle and flash to mesmerize and amaze the mere mortals. in my experience the truely gifted and wise and the ones actually coming up with the good and even great ideas arent on center stage... they are to bussy creating and amazing themselves and others to be the showmaan in real life. what you saw was most like a circus... with some very fine performers perfforming on thier stage. these people are neccessary to call attention to what the real people are doing but please.... dont think you are inferior in anyway to them. i myself have benndisappointed by a many a person who was put up as a genius and they could even keep up with me and i certaionly dont claim to be a geneus .. i just create things and write things that i attribute to Gods grace because i dont know where they come from when they come. just about every highy intelligent highly creative person has told me they feel the same way. i find yur points of reason well thought out and solid thats more than most of the sparkle and flash people. it is possible i have misread your words or taken thing out of context but the main thing i came away with is you apperntly felt you were in over your head but i someone who has read your word suspect yu had things to teach them and i hope you did. i suscribe to the idea that everbody is a teacher and everyone is a student i have often been amazed at the brilliance and wisdom of evn a child at times. the truth is true all the time and by whoever says it. if it is not true all the time someone has misnamed what they were talking about. you seem to deal in truth. but then again i'm just a dyslexic artist so please check my words for truth if any is contained in my words

Oh there "Reality Challenged" and Obfuscating Jihadist,

Even a Dummy would understand the following list of flaws in Islam :

1. Believe in "pretty/ugly wingie" thingies and teach their children that such fictional things really exist.

2. Believe that the long-dead Arab did actually talk to the "pretty Gabriel" in the hot "Gabe" cave and therein received the warmongering and anti-female words now listed in the koran.

3. That Sunnis believe they are superior to Shiites in all aspects of life. Shiites think the same way about Sunnis.

4. That Islam is perfect and the koran inherently condones no sin even though the 24/7, 800 year-old blood feud between Sunnis and Shiites gives significant credence that greed, hate, suicides, assassinations, maiming, and murder are condoned by the koran. Having multiple wives also gives significant credence to the sins of rape, adultery, lust and polygamy. The condoned treatment of these wives gives credence that the koran allows the sins of hatred, anger and greed.

And the recent Pew study is evidence that Professors Crossan, Borg, Fredirksen, and the other contemporary NT exegetes are getting the word out on the historic Jesus and Christianity. And unlike critics of Islam, these professors are not threatened with injury or assassination.

You do not answer the questions but rather get real mean on a personal level. Why millions and millions of Muslims want to kill people like Rushdie, Hirsi, Spencer...?

FYI- yesterday's NY Times has a front page article about young Muslims in Iraq "hating" the clerics and Islam due to all the violence around them. Please read. Also quotes young Muslims saying that whenever someone is beheaded they hear "Allah u Akbar".

I think that is what the passengers on 9/11 heard.

Mohamed Malleck, you write rubbish most of which is boring and meaningless, you should not waste you time writing; leave that to people who know what they write about. You should spend your time doing something constructive - Go to Pakistan and calm the culture that has lately begun to kill each other in the name of Islam. They pit one brand of Islam against the other and use human made in Islam bombs.

The people you despise Hirisi, Rusdhdie etc. are all trying to tell Muslims the flaws of Islam you “believers” don't want to face. Why is it that every Muslim when faced with criticism of Islam and its "prophet" will resort to name calling? Is it simply because they cannot answer?

All that rubbish you wrote earlier is nullified by this...

Mohamed Malleck writes to Idolator: "ROT IN YOUR HELL!! "

Why? You know genius, one only rots in the Hell he believes in. That is your hell not his it's for you and yours only.

"SHAME SHAME ON YOU WASHiNGTON POST"

OMG- Jacob begins to make sense-

Read this:

MEDIA TO BLAME FOR ISLAMIC MISCONCEPTIONS

The managing editor of one of the country’s biggest newspapers thinks news organizations ought to hire more Muslim reporters.

Philip Bennett, the Washington Post’s managing editor, said reporters often struggle with understanding Islam during a speech Monday at UCI about the difficulties of covering the religion.

Bennett’s speech focused on the media’s need to cover issues concerning Islam in an in-depth, long-term manner.

To illustrate this point he drew mainly from quotes of notable colleagues and statistical polls, rarely giving his own opinion directly.

“Six of 10 Americans, according to a 2007 ABC Poll, don’t understand the basic tenets of Islam,” Bennett said.

He attributed this to the lack of Muslims working in American newsrooms.

“At the Post I want more Muslim readers and I want more Muslim journalists,” he said.

Words poorly translated from Arabic to English are a big source of confusion caused by the lack of Muslim voices in the American media, according to Bennett.

Zeyad Maasarani, 22, a Muslim reporter for California’s most circulated Muslim publication, Southern California in Focus, agrees with Bennett that terms like “jihad,” “madrasa” and “hijab” are a big source of the public’s misunderstanding of Islam.

“Jihad means holy war, which is the definition that most Americans know, but it also means struggle, and valiant attempt,” Maasarani said.

One such word that has been contentiously debated in newsrooms is “Islamist,” which generally refers to a political movement governed by Islamic law. Bennett said at the Washington Post editors still have not decided whether to add it to their style book.

Some argue the word is a useful distinction for movements like Hamas and Hezbollah, but others at the Post argue that it is too vague and should be omitted in favor of a more specific description.

Bennett spent most of his time recalling an anecdote about a misunderstood Muslim group in Walkersville, Md., who were trying to purchase a large amount of land for a retreat.

The Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect considered heretical through much of the Muslim world, did TV interviews, town hall meetings and even door-to-door interviews to try to convince the people of Walkersville that they meant well, according to Bennett, but the county zoning board ultimately denied permission to buy the land.

He cites cursorily researched articles in the local and national newspapers that neglected to figure out who the Ahmadiyya really were as a primary reason that their proposal was met with massive protests.

Bennett said that in the period following 9/11 there was a lot of uninformed writing about Islam, and that “the best journalism fought against the tide of public perception.”

Bennet’s lecture is part of a larger series of events on religion and politics sponsored by the UCI Center for the Study of Democracy.

http://www.dailypilot.com/articles/2008/03/04/religion/dpt-bennett03042008.txt

IDOLATOR,

The blind, stubborn, hate-filled ignoramus and stupid, parrot-like Islamophobic misanthope is YOU, not Jihadist.

Have you visited the website of Ziauddin Sardar on The Guardian of UK? Or Qantara.de?

Why, I bet that you have not even clicked on TED.com, so precious to you is your hatred for others that you would fear to see your phobias siftened by reasoned argument.

ROT IN YOUR HELL!!

Victoria,

Thanks so very much. God bless!

Jihadist;

The point is if Muslims do not think these people are Islamic scholars then why not just ignore them and move on. But no, they have to threaten them and kill them. During a poll in UK, 85 percent of British Muslims were willing to kill Rushdie. Likewise, I bet millions would do the same to Hirsi and others including Tasleema Nasreen (a Muslim refugee in India)

Btw, when is your next jihadist mission? You should go to Pak where there have been more than 7 jihadist peace missions in last 7 days.

as always mr malleck- you get my neurons firing- here's a talk by the aforementioned vilayanur ramachandran on his fascinating and simple resolution of the phantom limb paralysis problem (at least once).
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/

TED,

I am, first and foremost, an Economist. When I was a university student in the early 1970's, the eminent Economists were Paul Samuelson, Kenneth Arrow and a bloke, more notorious than notable, called Milton Friedman. Just like Arthur Laffer during the Ronald Reagan period, the trumpet of this notorious bloke was blown in the highest cacophonic decibels by the political and social conservative crowd of the time to such a ridiculous extent that, for most non-Economists, our discipline, which, in its time of glory under the impetus of one of the sharpest minds in the history of thought, John Stuart Mill, was known as "Moral Science", became synonymous with this insipid fellow. The main thesis of the fellow, as that of all conservatives at all times, was that what prevails on the ground is the natural order of things. Translated, it means "Might is right". He went on to formulate theses about the Natural Rate of Unemployment, the Natural Rate of Interest, the Natural Immutable Rule by which the Money Supply should grow, year-in and year-out. It was the equivalent of the physicist's Theory of Everything.

One British Economist named Frank Hahn, who was far more rigorous, building the whole body of Econimc Theory from first principles, including out-of-equilibrium micro-economics, and working in tune with the more incisive investigations of Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, rightly dismissed Milton Friedman's theses as the elucubrations of an intellectually lazy but celebrity-show savvy would-be Economist.

Around that same time in the 1960's/early 1970's, one of the most intelligent nobel prize-winners in Economics of the last decade, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the seminal journal article on out-of-equilibrium macroeconomics built up from disequilibrium microeconomics. Stiglitz, Samuelson, Arrow, Frank Hahn are part of a generation of highly-respected Economists who have contributed immensely to the welfare of humankind. Milton Friedman and Arthur Laffer have been the equivalent of political reactionaries like the Shah of Iran, Marcos of Philippines, Pinochet of Chile, Jonas Savimbi of Angola, and Uribe of Columbia, who defend against all reason the idea that "might is right".

As George Soros, in his book "The Bubble of American Supremacy" aptly summarises the conservative position, applicable to all relations, but described in terms of international realtions: 'International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The US (you can substitute "whoever wields absolute power') is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a positin to impose its views, interests and values of the world .. because of its demostrated superiority".

I am telling all this because the view of Reality that you suport, TED, by quoting AC Grayling's "The Form of Things" resembles the various "Theories o Everyting" or Milton Freidman's "Natural Laws" that revelas more intellectual laziness than painful investigations and testing against reality.

The US is experiencing, these days, the folly of the insane idea that drove the neocons only a few years ago: "Reality? What reality? We are an empire now; we make our own reality".

No, reality can be constructed from sense data, from a knowledge of how raw sense data impinge on consciousness, from how a 'firsy draft' of reality emerges from the sharing of this 'personal consciousness' with others and eventually grows into a 'meme' or 'cultural value' which acquires a life of its own and evolves just like a biological entity evolves over millenia and acquires characteristics that miximize its chances of survival and reproduction.

Thus there is ongoing research on competing evolutionary 'god-concepts' and how these may interact to be come accepted by intelligent beings in a symbiotic competition for survival.

One last crucial element that it is absolutely necessary not to overlook : it is not all exclusively competition; there is also kinship- driven cooperation running parallel to competition. Evolutionary biologists have a lot to contribute in this reasearch agenda, but do so many experts in various other disciplines.

To sum up what I said TED: Your quote from Grayling is a sweeping, intellectually lazy, Theory of Everything. What is being pieced together by those multi-disciplinary investigators who post the results of their investigation on edge.org and metanexus.net, a summary of which I am trying to put together in th piece I have posted, is a more rigorous construct which, admittedly, still a work in progress.

Stupid reigns on this thread-

Vincent Van Gogh painted "The Starry Night".

Don McLean wrote the song "Starry Starry Night"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dipFMJckZOM

Theo Van Gogh was murdered in 2004 by an Islamist. He was shot eight times- then his throat was cut- nearly decapitating him. Two knives were left implanted in his chest- one attaching a five-page note to his body. The note threatened Western society, Jews, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Hirsi Ali wrote the script-Submission. Theo Van Gogh produced and directed the film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXGZBs65qMs

It was Theo van Gogh ( the Dutch film maker), not Vincent van Gogh (the painter) who was killed by an Islamic extremist.

To the disgusting, homophobic, moronic "Anonymous" whose post appears first: you are truly vile. And just as bad, you are insipid.

Concerned The Christian Now Liberated:)

Hello pussycat.

If only Concy Christy Libby would address the flaws in his approach on the Crossanization of America!

Your work in progress should be the Crossanization of American Christians ain't it? Not much success, eh, even in On Faith threads?

Write a book entitled:

"CROSSANIZED CHRISTIANITY FOR DUMMIES!!!"

With yellow covers and don't forget to put in lots of pictures. It may help.

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Idolator:)

Islamic scholars? Rushdie, Ayaan Ali Hirsi, Robert Spencer? Vincent Van Gogh?

We don't even read Bernard Lewis. You know, that old fellow who predicted the end of the world sometime in 2005. Robert Spenser also predicted the end of the world then too. And Hirsi the political scientist an Islamic scholar? And Salman Rushdie busy taking on and discarding many wives an Islamic scholar? And er, Vincent Van Goth the artist who cut off his ear and painted "Starry, Starry Night"?

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As Buddhists in Asia like to say, Gautama Buddha suggest, not impose.

Gautama Buddha teaches us to have compassion and to be compassionate.

And who was that who implied that Buddhists have automatic compassion build into them by just being Buddhist?:)

In the Buddhist heartlands of Asia, for one, there is at least half a million prostitutes in Buddhist Thailand. Never mistake indifference with a gentle mien, charming manner and smiling face for compassion. After all, Gautama Buddha only suggest, not impose.

Malleck,

Your work in progress should be on the flaws of Islam (and other religions). That would be a guaranteed best seller!!!

A suggested title:

"UNTIL THE KORAN IS DEFLAWED, NO ONE IS SAFE!!!"

Consider the hypothesis (which anyway is overwhelmingly likely to be true) that the universe exists as a result of the play of natural laws alone. Late in the billions of years that the universe has existed,in one little corner of it, consciousness flickers into existence and over some millions of years grows into self awareness,and for some thousands of years more produces art, painting, philosophy, science, literature and music. It produces moments of great happiness and also great suffering; great kindness and love, and great cruelty. And then - because of a virus, or a collision with another planet, or because the aware beings are so stupid that they blow ourselves up - consciousness comes to an end and the universe reverts to being a neutral play of blind natural forces.

ACGrayling. The Form Of Things. pp115

Yep! thanks a lot, T. Owens and Victoria.

But do add edge.org and metanexus.net to your favourites as well.

Well, Mr. Patel,

This is the first time I hear of TED.

But, since we are writing about works-in-progress, here is the incomplete first draft of the ideas I have been mulling about on that famous Muslim utternace "Insha'Allah", which I insanely grandiosely title "How God Wills". I hope to be completing my insane essay soon and then I hope to post it in its entirety as response to one of your own commentaries.

Please read it and reassure me that I am not totally insane.

A HYPOTHESIS -- HOW GOD WILLS

The idea of an Omniscient, Omnipotent and All-merciful God is in contradiction with the concept of free will for God’s creation, because if He knows everything, is capable of everything and is infinitely benevolent, He cannot allow an act of free will by His creation that might diverge from Absolute Good- no evil and no suffering ought to exist if an Omniscient , Omnipotent and All-merciful God existed. Correct?

Wrong! Demonstrably wrong in the strongest scientific terms. Wrong for at least two reasons : these two reasons reflect special facets of the underlying reasoning, and throws into relief the latest, most incisive, cutting-edge scientific investigations of the ultimate truths that mankind has been pursuing since time immemorial. The special facets behind the erroneous argument are : (i) the fact that its logic is bivalued whereas many-valued logic is the appropriate analytical tool to investigate transcendent truth; and (ii) the a-temporal nature of the argument blanks out the most important consideration in modern science – evolution, including the understanding of the idea of consciousness, the resolution of the mind-body problem (the old question religious question whether there is such a thing as a ‘soul’, etc), the role of emotion as well as rationality in the forming of the human ‘soul’ and his formulation of ‘moral principles’ as an individual survival strategy. There is yet a third dimension that wreaks havoc with the ‘atheist’ argument that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between the idea of an Omniscient, Omnipotent and All-merciful God and “free will” as applied to societies and pluralities. That third dimension is encapsulated in the question : how can individual choices of values be rationally aggregated into a coherent collective choice that has at least minimum desirable values. It has been rigorously demonstrated in a famous scientific work known as Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that such as aggregation is as impossible as the contradiction between the existence of God and free will is real. But then, that Theorem also assumes that collective choice is to be exercised without any sort of restrictions whatsoever, and that everyone’s set of values has equal weight. When the three assumptions – of bivalued logic, of atemporal reasoning and of unrestricted choice with equal weights -- are relaxed, and the idea of God is enlarged to a deity that is not necessarily anthropomorphic or anthropic, the whole beauty of spirituality as embodied in religions (not just Islam, but Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism and other faiths) becomes fabulous, the way it becomes to the Sufi!

Those who ridicule Islam (or Christianity or Judaism or other faiths based on the idea of existence of a God) on the basis of shallow reading of the religious texts or even of the historical record only make fools of themselves.

In the very first chapter of his excellent work “How Brains Make Up Their Minds”, the neuroscientist, Walter J. Freeman, writes “ What is at issue is the nature of self-determination (i.e. Free will!). The problem boils down to the question of how and in what sense brains, with their cells, their neurons, can create actions and thoughts, which we experience as our minds (i.e. ‘souls’) and our selves (i.e. consciousness) and whether or how our experiences can change or influence our brains and neurons. What does it mean to say that one causes the other?” The book goes on to explain how ‘one causes the other”.

Freeman starts laying out his argument by explaining what is meant by ‘meaning’. Every individual starts with his consciousness (Remember that, like David Hilbert setting out to construct the whole body of Mathematics from first principles, Descartes started with ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’) and creates meaning as his brain articulates intentional behaviour and then changes itself in accordance with the sensory consequences of these behaviours. [The whole formulation is traceable to the Muslim Philosopher Ibn Sina, from whom Thomas Aquinas learnt it and named it ‘assimilation’, a term retained until Piaget bequeathed it to modern psychologists, psychiatrists and neuroscientists.]…. It is a process by which the self comes to understand the world. The contents of meaning derives from the impact of the world, principally the social impact of actions of other humans upon ourselves, and they include the entire context of history and experience we have already acquired. Although the contents of meaning are largely social in origin, the mechanisms of meaning are biological and have to be understood in terms of brain dynamics.” Meaning is a kind of living structure that grows and changes, yet endures.” [Note the ‘homomorphism’ with biological evolution].

Structure comes from chaos which is an expression of self-determination. The chaos of multiple self-expressions in the external environment impacts upon the individual’s senses [that’s the dimension that science investigates, but note that it is not the ONLY dimension that exists], and in the process of ‘assimilation’, the brain responds to the world by destabilizing the primary sensory cortices of the brain. The result is the construction of neural activity patterns, which provide the elements from which meaning is made.

Once the meaning in an individual’s consciousness is made, this meaning gets embodied in his ‘mind’ and becomes totally divorced from the raw sense data that triggered them. This dynamic isolates the meaning in each brain from all others (maybe experiencing the same raw sense data). It thus endows each individual with ultimate privacy and loneliness as well, which creates the challenge of establishing companionship with others through communication. This condition is termed ‘epistemological solipsism’, in conformity with the philosophical argument that all knowledge and experience is constructed by and within individuals. The loneliness induced in the individual consciousness or isolation of meaning in each brain from all others is an essential condition of sanity, indispensable for each human to build coherence in his perception of the world. [Scientists who investigate psychiatric/neural dysfunctions, such as Dr. Salman Akhtar, Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and Vilayanur Ramchandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and Professor with the Psychology Department and Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute, dubbed ‘the Marco Polo of Neuroscience’ by Richard Dawkins, have highlighted the sense of ‘raw data’ feeling in ‘ghost limbs’ – limbs that the patients have long lost in accidents but for which they still the sense of touch because the neurons in the brain have been imprinted -- in psychiatrically impaired patients]

Having constructed his ‘personal meaning’, the individual overcomes this isolation and maintains his sanity by sharing it with others, verifying his ‘meaning’ against others’ perception of reality and inducing the construction of similar meanings in others. This is the mechanism of the construction of individual quanta ( things : a pen, a pen as distinct from a table -- what I mean when I say ‘pen’ must be in accordance with what you mean when you say ‘pen’), qualia (the qualities of things – the concept of unity is essential, when I say ‘pen’, it should not convey the concept of a ‘pen on a table’ but the pen as a separate entity, then we can have numbers the way the Mathematician David Hilbert started with the notion of a ‘set’, then derived numbers, relations among numbers, etc,; the concept of ‘redness’, and concepts (relations between and among things and qualities, number, number systems, etc.), constructs (the complex of relations defined in Mathematics, the idea of science, etc) and values (social codes, morals, etc. necessary for survival). The concepts, constructs and values arise from brain activity patterns in which inputs from all the senses and the lower-hierarchy quanta, qualia and concepts are blended and structured. This blending, when shared with others, make up the original ‘common sense’, rather than the street-smart worldliness that is often mistaken for folk wisdom. [The street-smart worldiness is a psychological dysfunction resulting from insufficient ‘isolation’ for the deeper meaning that can be corroborated with others’ experience to emerge; thus lack of ‘common sense’ leads to asocial and anti-social behaviour.]

This brings us to the idea of God and How God Wills.

One of the most important systems of concepts, constructs and values that have emerged out of the millennia of human experience is the idea of a deity, of God. Now, if a qualia like ‘redness’ cannot be exactly shared by two ‘minds’ in all the aspects in which the qualia can be perceived [and cognitive scientists have demonstrated that no such exact sharing occurs], one starts to measure how infinitely more difficult the sharing of a concept-system like ‘God’ can be. Those who question the idea of the existence of ‘God’ should instead be asking themselves which operative idea of the deity is being talked about. As Naom Chomsky and the language and epistemological specialists point out, and as Stuart Kauffmann and evolutionary biologists emphasize, much misunderstanding about values and morals derive from not understanding the language and the meme, that is the neural activity patterns, the behavioural responses that such activity patterns have imprinted in the minds and souls of our interlocutors, the nurtured survival values that emerged from the common experience as a result of sharing the same environment, the same risks the same opportunities.

Now, How Does God Will? He does it through the agency of humans, but also through Cosmic forces. We have seen above that

Concerned The Christian Now Liberated:

I noticed the dogs are still barking day and night.

If only TED members and/or Karen Armstrong would address the flaws of Islam:

(Again to counter all the bible thumping, some flaw thumping)

The first four flaws of Islam:

1. Belief in "pretty/ugly wingie thingies".

2. Belief that an hallucinating, illiterate Arab did actually talk to the "pretty Gabriel" in the hot "Gabe" cave and therein received the warmongering and anti-female words and resultant laws now listed in the koran.

3. That Sunnis are superior to Shiites in all aspects of life. And Shiites think the same way about Sunnis.

4. That Islam is perfect and the koran inherently condones no sin even though the 24/7, 800 year-old blood feud between Sunnis and Shiites gives significant credence that greed, hate, suicides, assassinations, maiming, and murder are condoned by the koran. Having multiple wives also gives significant credence to the sins of rape, adultery, lust and polygamy. The condoned treatment of these wives gives credence that the koran allows the sins of hatred, anger and greed.

Patel, you just mentioned one Islamic scholar- Karen Armstrong but you did forgot to mention others like Rushdie, Ayaan Ali Hirsi, Robert Spencer (all under death threats by Muslims), Vincent Van Gogh (killed by a Muslim)....

Their work and experiences are great reading as well.

You are just learning about TED? How unfortunate that such a wonderful conference can escape the mainline news media for so long because it doesn't have the "star power" the media is looking for. Please go to youtube or Google and find Sir Ken Robinson's talk from 2006 on education. It is fascinating. By the way, the great thing about presentations at TED is that they can only be 20 minutes long. If you can't make your point in that amount of time, I guess you should become a politician.

THANKS ALOT T. OWENS-

http://www.ted.com/index.php/themes/list

I am unsure how a discussion on truth and religion will "change" things. Truth is unchanging, right? So is the goal here to change people's perception of religion in the world?

"Celebrities are jointly and severally the Antichrist."

Well, that's an inherently silly statement. Celebrities are not a homogenous group and celebrity is not an eternal state, nor even an absolute description. The implication of your statement is that the more well-known somebody becomes, the more automatically anti-christlike they get. By this standard, you yourself just became significantly more evil.

Besides, the majority of TED attendees are scientists and technical people, who almost never become famous, regardless of their moral state.

When I want a brain jolt, I just click on TED.com and watch a 20-minute mindblower. I recommend it to anyone, and I don't even work for TED.

"And her TED Prize Wish focused on spreading the ethos of compassion central to all faiths (with a particular focus on the Abrahamic traditions) across the world."

Please get real, Eboo:

None of the Abrahamic religions is at all compassionate in practice. Read the Old Testament and consider the histories of Christianity and Islam.

The Abrahamic religions want compassion? They can't handle compassion!

You want compassion, Eboo? Become a Buddhist.

Celebrities are jointly and severally the

Antichrist.

'Nuff said.

Thank you for your reporting. I've been watching video from TED conferences for several years now, and have been moved to both think and act. I look forward to seeing Karen Armstrong's talk online -- hopefully in the near future?