We’ve had a horrible tragedy back here in the United States. Thirty-three students are dead at Virginia Tech, with many others wounded. Our papers are going to spill a lot of ink on this story, as they should. But on the other side of the world, multitudes of innocent civilians…
At this site we have often debated the extent to which non-Believers are harmed by the beliefs of religious moderates. The main idea is that moderates are serving as human shields for whacked-out literalist fundamentalists. Society would be hammering fundamentalists with enough widespread ridicule to make them political untouchables, except that religious moderates continue clinging to “lite” versions of fundamentalist beliefs.
This concern has been well-articulated by Sam Harris:
Religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism.
This issue raises a serious question: Should non-Believers actively challenge the ubiquitous “mild,” religious pronouncements made by religious moderates? Until recently, I usually remained silent when my kind and decent relatives, acquaintances and neighbors, uttered things like this:
Assertions like this don’t imminently threaten me. The religious moderates who utter such things are not power-mongerers who dream of taking the reins of government to impose literalist versions of their sacred literature on people like me. These assertions certainly don’t pack the poisonous wallop of the commonly uttered fundamentalist accusations that non-Believers like me are morally unfit to participate in society. Rather, statements of faith uttered by religious moderates are usually …
I wrote a paper for one of my Master’s classes a couple of weeks ago, integrating what I’d absorbed from two textbooks into pages of my actual life. Shortly after I got it back from my professor, a friend and I were discussing this very blog, which led to a discussion of philosophizing in general. He lamented how lately, he’s seen an awfully lot of writing overwrought with words at the expense of actual ideas. This guy is an intellectual himself, a prolific writer and thinker, so his comment gave me pause.
As I’ve read for this particular graduate Communication class, I’ve worried more than once that some in my degree program seem to overstate the obvious. I love taking a fragment of seemingly mundane human interaction, analyzing its details and its place in our lives to parse from it a deeper understanding of our connectedness, yet I can’t shake the underlying fear that many would meet our research with a big, “So what?”
I thought I’d share some thoughts from this particular paper here, and ask for the feedback of the ‘blog’s readership. Based on responses I’ve received to previous pieces and the responses I’ve read here to the writing of others, I believe this audience falls toward the thinking end of the spectrum. There. I’ve laid out a blanket compliment. Be nice when you pick me apart, then, please??
Here goes:
Drama unfolds around us continually, though the mundane events of daily life often blur into methodical sameness …
At Dangerous Intersection, we have often encountered definitional issues when we’ve cnsidered whether someone believes in “God.” During a recent vigorous exchange several of us invoked the “Einstein” version of God. Although I had read a few quotes of Einstein regarding his beliefs, I had not comprehensively read Einstein’s own words describing his “God.”
The April 16, 2007 edition of Time Magazine features a new biography about Albert Einstein (Einstein, by Walter Isaacson). For that reason, I jumped at the chance to read this Time article, which focused on what Einstein actually meant when he said he believed in “God.” The bottom line?
[Einstein] settled into a deism based on what he called the’ spirit manifest in the laws of the universe’ and a sincere belief in a ‘God who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.
Einstein was born to two parents who were Jewish “by cultural designation and kindred instinct, [though] they had little interest in the religion itself.” Young Albert ended up attending a large Catholic school in his neighborhood. While there, he “developed a passionate zeal for Judaism.” At the age of 12, however, he gave this up, concluding that “much in the stories of the Bible could not be true. From that time on, he articulated (through many essays and interviews) a “deepening appreciation of his belief in God, although a rather impersonal version of one.”
At a dinner party in Berlin, one of the guests publicly expressed amazement that …
We're all glad that the British sailors are back home. Anyone following this story knows that these sailors were treated graciously by their Iranian captors. Nonetheless, while in captivity, the British sailors admitted that they had been trespassing in Iranian waters when whey were apprehended. But notice some of the things that…