I would be interested, Kara, if it is a treatment of philosophical dualism.
I guess this IS about dualism, but a particular application of it, namely the mind-brain division inspired, or reinforced, by Descartes and underwritten for him by the Christian notion of the soul-body division. I like to think of dualism in the sense of epistemological bifurcations of the world into opposing parts in general. This is where the so-called yin and yang of life is seen in terms of opposing divisions rather than complementary facets in which each facet defines the other (as yin and yang do) and together form unities.
The problem with "faith" is that a person expressing "faith" is essentially insisting that a guess about an unknown...
...IS CORRECT!
They make a guess....call it a belief....and then insist it is correct by claiming "to have faith" in the guess.
It really makes very little sense when you examine it stripped of the nonsense.
Agreed, Frank. What I object to most about "faith" is that it is usually presented, by the faithful, as obligatory and virtuous. A "belief" is functional for the guesser or it is not. S/he will give it up when it ceases to serve its (usually psychological or social) functions. But to insist that others adopt it is profoundly objectionable.
-edited
JLN, I have heard the argument more than once that religion is a source of our values: personal, community, national. I don't think the argument refers to one religion but, rather vaguely, to all of them because most religions have similar sets of values or beliefs. I think that non-religious or secular people are suspect because an observer doesn't see them as connected to a value system, or at least one they can identify. So the secular person is an object of doubt and mistrust. E.g., do we know if that secular person believes, for example, in: Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not covet. Faith, hope, and charity, and the greatest of these is charity. Etc.
We do not trust the atheist or the secular because we do not know what he believes. If he were a Jew, or a Christian of any tradition, or a Muslim, or a Zoroastrian, we know the tenets by which he lives or is supposed to live. Maybe he doesn't live up to his faith but we assume he is trying. If a person eschews any religion, we do not know where he stands on the great moral questions.
Anent this topic, I read an interesting review by Natalie Angier in last Sunday's NYTimes book review. The book is Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. I'll patch in her review if I can retrieve it from the websit.
September 5, 2004
'The End of Faith': Against Toleration
By NATALIE ANGIER
THE END OF FAITH
Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.
By Sam Harris.
336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $24.95.
hen I was 8 years old, my family was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
It's not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but ''The End of Faith'' articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity's long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ''We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.' '' To cite but one example: ''Jesus Christ -- who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death and rose bodily into the heavens -- can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad?'' The danger of religious faith, he continues, ''is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.''
Right now, if you are even vaguely observant, or have friends or grandmothers who are, you may be feeling not merely irritated, as you would while reading a political columnist with whom you disagree, but deeply offended. You may also think it inappropriate that a mainstream newspaper be seen as obliquely condoning an attack on religious belief. That reaction, in Harris's view, is part of the problem. ''Criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.''
A zippered-lip policy would be fine, a pleasant display of the neighborly tolerance that we consider part of an advanced democracy, Harris says, if not for the mortal perils inherent in strong religious faith. The terrorists who flew jet planes into the World Trade Center believed in the holiness of their cause. The Christian apocalypticists who are willing to risk a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East for the sake of expediting the second coming of Christ believe in the holiness of their cause. In Harris's view, such fundamentalists are not misinterpreting their religious texts or ideals. They are not defaming or distorting their faith. To the contrary, they are taking their religion seriously, attending to the holy texts on which their faith is built. Unhappily for international comity, the Good Books that undergird the world's major religions are extraordinary anthologies of violence and vengeance, celestial decrees that infidels must die.
In the 21st century, Harris says, when swords have been beaten into megaton bombs, the persistence of ancient, blood-washed theisms that emphasize their singular righteousness and their superiority over competing faiths poses a genuine threat to the future of humanity, if not the biosphere: ''We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation,'' he writes, ''because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.''
Harris reserves particular ire for religious moderates, those who ''have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths'' and who ''imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.'' Religious moderates, he argues, are the ones who thwart all efforts to criticize religious literalism. By preaching tolerance, they become intolerant of any rational discussion of religion and ''betray faith and reason equally.''
Harris, no pure materialist, acknowledges the human need for a mystical dimension to life, and he conveys something of a Buddhist slant on the nature of consciousness and reality. But he believes that mysticism, like other forms of knowledge, can be approached rationally and explored with the tools of modern neuroscience, without recourse to superstition and credulity.
''The End of Faith'' is far from perfect. Harris seems to find ''moral relativism'' as great a sin as religious moderation, and in the end he singles out Islam as the reigning threat to humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, Inquisition-style Christianity of the 13th century, yet he never explains how Christianity became comparatively domesticated. And on reading his insistence that it is ''time for us to admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,'' I couldn't help but think of Ann Coulter's morally developed suggestion that we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert their citizens to Christianity.
Harris also drifts into arenas of marginal relevance to his main thesis, attacking the war against drugs here, pacificism there, and offering a strained defense for the use of torture in wartime that seems all the less persuasive after Abu Ghraib. Still, this is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.
Natalie Angier has written about atheism and science for The Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
I would probably enjoy Harris's book, except that I already believe most of what appears to be his argument. I don't like to be part of the choir. My position has been for many years that fundamentalism or literalism in religion is both a major threat to the world and not even genuine religion (in the sense of re-ligare: reconnecting us to the Cosmic ground of our being--but that's a long story). At the same time, I don't understand the nature of Harris' condemnation of moderate religion. Does he want moderate believers to attack extremist for their beliefs or only for their actions? I'm sure even moderate Muslims disapprove of the actions of Islamacists already. I do think that within Islam, Christianity and Judaism there SHOULD be an active struggle against the more dangerous aspects of their religions' irrationality, namely the moral absolutism that "justfies" the physical destruction of unbelievers.
I have an anecdote as painful as the one recounted in the review. When my father, an atheist, died,a christian fundamentalist relative whose father, a baptist minister, has been trying for decades to save my soul, while I have been trying to save his mind (we have both failed), wrote to me saying that although my father is now burning in Hell, there is still hope for me. Agh! To me such fantastical beliefs are the stuff insanity is made of.
Faith can be good or bad, it is tied to spirit and courage of your convictions. Who would argue Martin Luther King or Ghandi didn't have great faith and bring great social change and improvements. Is it faith or spirituality. Faith is an anchor that can help you stay your charted course. Of course the plot can be good or bad. Hitler had great faith and courage of his convictions too, and achieved great change too.
Faith maybe isn't the enemy, perhaps empty or mis-placed faith is the malady. I think that a vibrant, questioning faith is a healthy thing.
g...day:
A "QUESTIONING faith" .....? Isn't that
an oxymoron of the most blatant kind ? Wow!!!
No it isn't, its asking only the most obivous of questions - what do you believe in and why? Its peeling back layers of the onion to discern faith from fiction, science from magic.
Most faith systems and all sciences require study and have researchers. I'm surprised that you're surprised!
Right, Alikimr. Don't know how I missed that. That would be like a doubting confidence.
"Faith is the substance of all things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
"Without faith and hope you have nothing, but with it you have everything."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
-Martin Luther King
"We think that having faith means being convinced God exists in the same way that we are convinced a chair exists."eople who cannot be completly convinced of God's existence think faith is impossible for them. not so. Peopl who doubt can have great faith because faith is something you do, not osomething you think. in fac the greater you doubt the more heroic your faith."
indecisive8 wrote: "Faith is the substance of all things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."
"Without faith and hope you have nothing, but with it you have everything."
"Faith is permitting ourselves to be seized by the things we do not see."
-Martin Luther King
"We think that having faith means being convinced God exists in the same way that we are convinced a chair exists."eople who cannot be completly convinced of God's existence think faith is impossible for them. not so. Peopl who doubt can have great faith because faith is something you do, not osomething you think. in fac the greater you doubt the more heroic your faith."
Yep...people who are trapped in "faith" sure have a high opinion of it.
So what?
