Time to move beyond Faith vs. Reason

Science has been unable to resolve the discovered basic forces in the universe for a hundred years and I doubt that they ever will, no matter how many zillions they spend on their particle machines or how detailed their arcane workings with "strings" gets.

They are still blind men trying to describe the elephant and atheists are their cheering section for describing the beast as a tree trunk.

Fortunately for the world, science has successfully undermined the simpleminded religions - the Abrahamic cults, mainly Christianity and Islam.

Christianity and Islam have had a good 2000 year run preying on ignorance and the ignorant. This ended for Christianity in Europe with the development of science. It is now looking for the ignorant and uneducated in Africa and South America.
Islam - a strange combination of ignorance and intolerance - has been picking the lowest lying fruit for a 1000 years as apparent in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Now is the time for science, logic, and deeper & truer spirituality - not supremacist, intolerant cults like Christianity and Islam that proselytize and force their views on others. This results in conflict, violence, and suffering.

Now is the time for Vedanta & Hinduism. After 1000 years of anti-Hindu propaganda, many are not prepared to hear the wisdom or absorb the deep & complex monistic philosophy which is consistent with science. Now is a good time to start; at least some will benefit.

A new age of rational spirituality is again arriving, and Hinduism and Vedanta will lead the way again.

Hello bandwidth,

My sisters and brother don't blog, alas. How is Turkey?

I learned very little about the film "Collision" from this, but I did learn that Ms. Miller has disdain for "middle-aged white men", "adolescent boys" and "white men in a pub". Hmmm...this middle aged white woman appears to have issues. Perhaps you could find someone else to inform readers of the actual content of the film?

"The atheists are, more than other interest groups, joyous cannibals and regurgitators of their own ideas. They thrive online, where like adolescent boys they rehash their rhetorical victories to their own delight."

The reason that atheists repeat their arguments is because religious people keep repeating the centuries old, unfounded, unreasonable claims about the scientific validity of their gods. The religious people are the ones who are altering our schools, our medical clinics, our health care, our national politics with their ad nauseum, never can be proved, statements about the perils of disobeying their own personal god.

If the religious people would keep their religion inside their own hearts and minds and not force it down other people's throats, atheists wouldn't have to fight back, ad nauseum, to maintain separation of church and state.

"Vocal atheists promote a distorted idea of what science can prove and what it was never meant to prove."
Specifically, what are you referring to?
Oh, that's right -- I forgot that believers are incapable of making specific criticisms of atheist arguments. It's always extremely vague generalities, and never, ever a specific example. That's because atheists use actual, physical evidence to support their point of view, while believers can only count the angels dancing on the head of a pin.
It isn't faith vs. reason, its unreason vs. reason.
I'll take reason, thank you very much.

So many atheists cling to reason as the God antidote, yet their arguments are often based upon stereotypes of what a Christian or person of faith is. Worse than this, these vocal atheists promote a distorted idea of what science can prove and what it was never meant to prove.

Is love subject to reason or is the question itself ridiculous? Is love as some scientists say, nothing more than a chemical reaction necessary to propagate the species or is there something more? Why do science and reason fall short when describing what is possibly the most powerful thing in the world? Or in the absence of absolute scientific proofs, is love nothing more than a commonly shared delusion?

Love, hope, faith and God are all especially difficult things for science to measure or dissect. Yet that is no proof that they do not exist. If Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens were really men of science they would recognize the limitations of the measures they use, but since they do not I can only assume they are propagandists who pretend to be scientists.

Those who say that religion is the source of most of the World’s problems are especially tiresome. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot are always the exception to their little rule and the Crusaders, Inquisitors and Pat Robertson are each personally responsible for the world slowly sliding down the toilet. Do the atheist extremists who make these morality charges have the first idea how ridiculous and hypocritical they sound? Do they not realize that extremists come in both atheist and al Quida varieties.

Science can tell you how to build an atomic bomb, but places no moral judgment upon those who unleash it upon others. Reason tells us what we did to Japan was justified when compared to what might have been.

Science can provide people with affordable birth control, but it doesn’t tell us what to do when the birth control fails. Reason says 99.5% are pretty good odds but doesn’t tell you that this self imposed lottery has tens of thousands of losers every day.

Science teaches, but it fails to make us any wiser.
One man’s reason is another man’s folly.

Science ignores goodness and reason tries to negotiate with it.

I find it sad that we blame religion for the few. Only two religions consistently kill in the name of their god. (By consistently I mean century after century as an organized slaughter, not random acts of violence that happen everywhere.) In defending themselves these two religions say they all do it. I don't know of any recurrent genocidal history by the Hopi, ancient Roman, Greek, Mayans, Egyptian, Buddhist, Hindu groups. If we see the Torah as metaphorical teaching rather than history, then Jews also fall into this class of non-violent groups. Even when genocide does occur, it still requires a very specific ideology - mine is more ---- than yours. Thus a denial of the universality of being.

I agree it is a human rights issue. But I would look at it as a critical issue, rather than an issue for all religions. (all governments kill but some kill more than others, all machines make a mistake, but some are more often mistaken...)

hariaum

"I don't think it's so bad if religion survives, if it's getting together once a week and singing a song in a beautiful building, to commemorate life's most important moments."
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I'm very fond of Jennifer as a scholar, poet, and acquaintance, and this sort of remark is typical of her.

The "Doubt" book is fun, but unlike most of her other work, it is not academically rigorous. (Neither are the gents' tome.) As for the substance of the quote, the simple problem is, as Hecht well knows, that religion is not a weekly choral gathering.

It may well be the single force most responsible for the bloodshed of the past two thousand years. A simple tally of the good vs. evil that organized religion has engendered will make the point admirably.

If believers could keep this business to themselves, relinquish tax exempt status, swear off on lobbying Congressmen, we'd have a chance at what Hecht finds problematic. However, organized religion cannot do this.

In America, all over the world, it has become a force for violence, physical and psychological, for war and bloodshed.

Salmon is correct about the male trio. For one thing, the sanctification of REASON was demolished by Horkheimer and Adorno sixty years ago. For another, myth/religion is not merely "unreasonable," it is amoroal, if not immoral.

Frankly, I think it has become a human rights issue, fully warranting UN intervention, that is, if the UN could intervene--in anything.