Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 360 Editor's Choice: 12
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@ Allie
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]I remember reading in the Avestas that when a guy accidentally pees on his foot ten million demons are born. Sounds stupid, until you think a moment and realize it's absolutely true if you substitute "germs" for demons. Just because something is inexplicable right now doesn't make it magic.
Urine is sterile.
The other thing I find interesting is that depending on how you read the Bible, it's not necessary to believe in a soul separate from the body at all. William Blake didn't. The creed talks about "the resurrection of the body." Many parts of the Bible deny the concept of free will - God "hardening Pharoah's heart," for example. Depending on whose version you place your faith in, it's possible to be a Christian and believe in a completely mechanistic universe.
But it doesn't matter how you read "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies." Clocks still measurably slow down relative to a stationary reference frame when you go fast enough.
There are no multiple interpretations leading to different methods for successfully making an electrical circuit. The very fact that your authoritative texts permit such wildly inconsistent states of the world to be considered true makes the texts unreliable.
And it doesn't matter what happens in the world anyway. It's pretty much clear that bodies buried, or cremated, in much of the last 2000 years cannot rise bodily. The molecules that made up those bodies at the moment of death will be in use elsewhere, and you'd need a demon way cleverer than Maxwell's to reconstruct the bodies.
These ideas simply don't hold up to any scrutiny if you have a natural understanding of the world that was not available to the people writing the scriptures or the Egyptian Book of the Dead. You don't believe, do you, that the kas of those mummies are hanging out with all their stuff in the afterworld, do you?
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one of the many anonymouses says:
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think almost everyone agrees that it’s possible that “supreme intelligence” of some kind may exist --- but how do people make the leap from that to instantly believing that that God is the identical God of Hebrew mythology?
Okay – is it possible that some kind of super-universal consciousness may exist?
Yes.
No. It isn't possible. It's actually, on its face, ridiculous, a bizarre projection of deep human belief in intentionality. Pinker actually has written about that--and if I recall a review in the NYRoB correctly (it's behind a subscription wall)--does so in his most recent book.
The big leap is not from the belief that an omnipotent, universal intelligence would exist to its caring about people. The big leap is from the belief in nothing supernatural to some supernatural consciousness existing.
Just because you can think up something, like the warp drive engines or cold fusion, or super-universal consciousnesses doesn't make the something exist.
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FinFangFoom
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]Daniel Dennett does fine working the philosophy/science stand. It's not that hard, and, in fact, it's nearly impossible to discuss the nature of consciousness without bring in philosophical questions. There's a reason that neuroscientist Antonio Dimassio entitled book Descartes' Error or another Searching for Spinoza.
Almost all of the interesting questions of mind/brain/consciousness have been prefigured by philosophers. They've come up with all the good metaphors already, if nothing else.
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So now it's 10,000 demons
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]if you have hepatitis C or a bladder infection, not "whenever" some guy misses the pot.
The larger point, of course, is that these "reinterpretations" are silly, clearly ex post ways of making the words mean something that they didn't. The guy who wrote about the 10,000 demons either really meant that there would be 10,000 demons, or was using metaphoric hyperbole. In neither case is the reinterpretation enlightening.
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No, everything is not possible
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]but then again EVERYTHING in this universe is posisble -- though the likelihood of some things occuring is so remote as to be, for practical purposes, impossible).
No everything is not possible. In fact, the class of impossible things is much larger than the class of possible things--as evidenced by all the impossible and fantastic creations that people think up.
There really is a very big difference between something that would be very surprising given what we currently understand, as with plate tectonics, and something that is impossible. As to your example of anaerobes living in steam vents, you're overestimating the improbability. We know that the first life on earth was anaerobic in what we could consider very hostile environments. The large variety of them has been surprising, but that's more a testament to convention than to possibility. Nobody said, as they did to cold fusion, "No way. That's impossible." The reaction was, rather, "Wow. Really?"
As I said, just because you can think up a transporter beam machine doesn't mean that you can make one.
Or, as Sagan put it, extraordinary assertions require extraordinary evidence. The existence of an intelligent, super-universal intelligence is way out of the realm of possibility, up there with astrology.
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@pantanal
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[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why is Dawkins depicted as a radical neoatheist is a mystery to me.
It's because he, and Hitchens, and Harris, don't pull punches. They don't mouth the smarmy Templeton schtick, but come right out and say "So, do you really believe this?" Dawkins has a chapter on the psychological abuse that parents subject their children to when they are brought up to believe in a literal hell and eternal damnation.
Cary Tennis just had a letter from a divorced guy whose daughter, with evangelical exwife/mom, was deeply afraid of her father going to hell.
To tell people that there religious beliefs are abusive is going to tick them off. And, when they really have no coherent response to make to being told that, well, you can imagine that some unpopularity and name-calling would ensue.
And that traditional media would shy away from it.