Letters to the Editor
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Anonymous
It probably wasn't always that way, but it probably evolved before we became what we would term "Humans." We are pack animals, and thus we feel for social emotions like compassion in order to further our own survival.
Indeed the evolution of compassion may have been in some ways more significant to us than the evolution of the thumb.
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6Stringer
Free will is a concept.
God is a being.
The two are not equivelant.
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M. 6stringer
You miss my point, although you do bring up another one, which is that both "free will" and "god" are very slippery terms, and it's impossible to prove the existence or nonexistence of either one either through logic or experiment. And it's hard to get two people to agree what they mean by it.
The difference is, subjective "free will" (at least in the sense that I see it) is something that we all experience that we have to fall back on all the time whether we want to or not. God, on the other hand, is not. You can lose your belief in God and function just fine, but you can't lose your subjective sense of free will while remaining both conscious and sane. Likewise, theories of punishment in criminal law, whether based on deterence or retribution, assume that people can make choices. Whether you believe they these choices are metaphysically "predetermined" or not is irrelevant. If we have no free will in our choices, then we didn't have free will in setting up the system of punishment in the first place. To think about making a choice based on lack of free will is to become Buridan's ass, paralyzed between two haystacks. It's silly.
Also the debate between free will and the lack thereof (the opposite is not necessarily determinism; adding stochastic processes doesn't necessarily turn an 'automaton' into a 'freewillaton') is independent of the god/no god debate, and is a lot less interesting to non-philosophers. There's no churches and clergy devoted to worshipping and tithing free will.
Lastly, your agnostic slur against atheism is a silly bit of nomenclature-based name-calling. You realize that agnosticism is compatible with both theism and atheism, right? Very few atheists are 'strong atheists' with the position that they know God exists. They just don't have the belief that he does.
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Religion isn't the only path to transcendence
What about art?
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addendum on that note
[oops, I mixed it up where I obviously meant that so-called "strong atheists" take the position that god does NOT exist]
Just as everyone experiences a subjective awareness or sensation of "free will" (which need indicate any actual freedom), everyone has occasional subjectively transcendental experiences, which through human history have been explained by spirits, monsters, demons, witches, ghosts of the dead, gods, the One True God, or the Holy Spirit. This does nothing to indicate whether there is anything "transcendental" about these experiences. Neuroscience suggests that these experiences are biologically based and similar across beliefs (and nonbelievers) and cultures. If anything, that would tend to negate the idea that these experiences are caused by a particular personal deity of one exclusive faith. But of course it doesn't say anything about whether there is an additional supernatural power or effect at work, or its nature if any, which is a metaphysical matter which cannot be "proven."
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oh my...a new brand of self help..
This interview further supports my view of the absence of God. The largest issues here are under the surface. Our need to extinguish the fear of being part of the continuum is so very evident.
As beings with ego, we found it very necessary to create a complete world, create a god in our image and find a meaning and purpose for suffering. Without it, we'd have gone mad or become a society of animals set on killing each other. There is no doubt our immature requirements of a loving Father leading us to salvation is all that has kept the world from more Hitlers and random shooters. We have to come away from this requirement.
To me, faith as well as atheism is orthodoxical bullshit. A true scientific position is that of the agnostic, which states what is obvious to all: there is no way of knowing.
My 82 year old father has seen it all and lived a quiet, peaceful and loving life without the presence of God. At the age of 19 he was a death camp liberator. He witnessed a great deal in a short time, witnessed enough to sense there wasn't a man in the clouds to pray to for mercy. This prayer is a drug to opiate us all.
What he does believe is that life, at least for now, is a mystery. "I believe in the mystery...that's all...there is something, but what that is I cannot say." I am with him on this matter.
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Old and new atheism
No, the newer critics like Dawkins have a thorough grounding in theology and history, however they're criticizing religion from a more modern perspective that dispenses with a lot of the wrestling with old ways of framing things.
Sartre and Camus were from an earlier time and still engaged the old system of thought, still struggling with extracting us from it.
What the author is saying, paraphrased, is that since you won't include debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, just a LITTLE, anyway, in your critique of religion, then you can't have a valid viewpoint.
I disagree. Or rather, no, knowing all the byzantine twists and turns of the circular debates that made up theology as a philisophy is not a prerequisite to having an opinion about its usefulness.
It's useful as history, sociology, of course. But as an explanation of reality, you can actually live quite well without it altogether.
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alc
1st: Hitler was a Christian. His reign was enabled by Christians. Stop buying into the BS that he wasn't a Christian.
The general rule of thumb is: We get the communists, the theists get the fascists.
Also, the agnostic "It will never be knowable" is both a copout and unscientific. We might not know yet but that doesn't make something unknowable.
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Gone but not forgotten
I'm not canceling my subscription, but cripes.
Why not interview someone with a brain? Steven Weinberg has written beautifully and sensibly in the pages of the New York Review of Books -- talk to him.
'Theology' is a nice neo-greek word (and 'theologian' has an even nicer ring to it). But it and its adepts haven't contributed one iota to our knowledge of the world -- ever.
They had their millennia. Let's move on.