The End of the End of Faith
Interesting book. He sure covers a whole gamut of ideas.
I did not start off liking his writing at all, but it changed quite a bit (and I acclimated) and towards the end I found I like his voice. I retract my previous pronouncement about not wanting to invite him to dinner. Sam, if you're reading this somehow, please call and we'll pencil something in.
I really admire the strength of his convictions and the courage it took to publish a thesis that will gain him such universal hatred (that religious faith is not just a waste of human time and resources, but is actually contributing to the world's danger and may be the cause of the fall of civilization).
Turns out, on that point I agree with him.
Not sure I agree that Islam is the most threatening. I'd like to read other information on Islam (as this negative outlook is really my first forray).
pg 26: If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.
pg 28: We have... declared a war on "terrorism". This is rather like declaring a war on "murder"; it is a cateogry error that obscures the true cause of our troubles.
pg 39: In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not.
pg 42: Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.
pg 65: ... religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern - specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death. Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse: constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and condor.
pg 72: But what is the difference between a man who believes that God will reward him with 72 virgins if he kills a score of jewish teenagers, and one who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hairdryer?
pg 73: Jesus Christ - who, 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 Burgandy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would *be* mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them *holy*. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still beseiged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature.
pg 95: It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millenia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew. (Ahahaha!!! That one's a knee slapper!!)
pg 116, quoting KH Pollack, The Crisis of Islam: Faith and Terrorism in the Middle East (2003): ....explanation of why the Islamic Middle East has stagnated, why its efforts at reform failed, why it is notably failing to become integrated into the global economy in a meaningful way and why these failures have produces not a renewed determination to success (as in East Asia over the past 50 years, and arguably in India, Latin America, and even parts of Sub-Saharan Africa today) but an anger and frustration with the west so pervasive and vitriolic that it has bred murderous, suicidal terrorism despite all of the Islamic prohibitions against such action.
pg 128: Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are enemies of God.
pgs 145-46: Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the 14th Century. There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must confront whole societies whose moral and political development - in their treatment of women and children, in their proseuction of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty -lags behind our own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist things to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is unscientific only because science has not yet addresses the moral sphere in a systematic way. Come back in a hundred years, and if we haven't returned to living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some scientifically astute things to say about ethics. Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed Muslim governments.
pg 149: Think of all the good things human beings will not do in the world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men.
pg 152: It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of "moderate" Muslims. ... Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented. ... there is no reason to believe that we will be any more successful at stopping their proliferation, in small quantities, than we have been with respect to illegal drugs.
pg 176, quoting Christpher Hitchens: what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
pg 197: There is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears. ...Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;...
pg 266: Reagan, to James Mills in 1971: "everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ."
pg 202, addressing pacifism as a response to terrorism: Gandhi's was a world in which millions more would have died in the hopes that the Nazis would one day have doubted the goodness of the Thousand Year Reich. Ours is a world in which bombs must occasionally fall where such doubts are in short supply. Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.
Duh... reading the names that pop up in my quotes-as-topics-for-further-reflection-list and the bibliography, I gather more suggested reading than my attention will no doubt support.
I particularly want to read the Chomsky he refutes in the section called Leftist Unreason starting on page 138.
I did not start off liking his writing at all, but it changed quite a bit (and I acclimated) and towards the end I found I like his voice. I retract my previous pronouncement about not wanting to invite him to dinner. Sam, if you're reading this somehow, please call and we'll pencil something in.
I really admire the strength of his convictions and the courage it took to publish a thesis that will gain him such universal hatred (that religious faith is not just a waste of human time and resources, but is actually contributing to the world's danger and may be the cause of the fall of civilization).
Turns out, on that point I agree with him.
Not sure I agree that Islam is the most threatening. I'd like to read other information on Islam (as this negative outlook is really my first forray).
pg 26: If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.
pg 28: We have... declared a war on "terrorism". This is rather like declaring a war on "murder"; it is a cateogry error that obscures the true cause of our troubles.
pg 39: In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not.
pg 42: Your brain is tuned to deliver the vision of the world that you are having at this moment. At the heart of most spiritual traditions lurks the entirely valid claim that it can be tuned differently.
pg 65: ... religious faith is simply unjustified belief in matters of ultimate concern - specifically in propositions that promise some mechanism by which human life can be spared the ravages of time and death. Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse: constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and condor.
pg 72: But what is the difference between a man who believes that God will reward him with 72 virgins if he kills a score of jewish teenagers, and one who believes that creatures from Alpha Centauri are beaming him messages of world peace through his hairdryer?
pg 73: Jesus Christ - who, 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 Burgandy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would *be* mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them *holy*. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still beseiged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature.
pg 95: It would appear that Western civilization has endured two millenia of consecrated sexual neurosis simply because Matthew and Luke could not read Hebrew. (Ahahaha!!! That one's a knee slapper!!)
pg 116, quoting KH Pollack, The Crisis of Islam: Faith and Terrorism in the Middle East (2003): ....explanation of why the Islamic Middle East has stagnated, why its efforts at reform failed, why it is notably failing to become integrated into the global economy in a meaningful way and why these failures have produces not a renewed determination to success (as in East Asia over the past 50 years, and arguably in India, Latin America, and even parts of Sub-Saharan Africa today) but an anger and frustration with the west so pervasive and vitriolic that it has bred murderous, suicidal terrorism despite all of the Islamic prohibitions against such action.
pg 128: Saddam may have tortured and killed more Muslims than any person in living memory, but the Americans are enemies of God.
pgs 145-46: Any systematic approach to ethics, or to understanding the necessary underpinnings of civil society, will find many Muslims standing eye deep in the red barbarity of the 14th Century. There are undoubtedly historical and cultural reasons for this, and enough blame to go around, but we should not ignore the fact that we must confront whole societies whose moral and political development - in their treatment of women and children, in their proseuction of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty -lags behind our own. This may seem like an unscientific and potentially racist things to say, but it is neither. It is not in the least racist, since it is not at all likely that there are biological reasons for the disparities here, and it is unscientific only because science has not yet addresses the moral sphere in a systematic way. Come back in a hundred years, and if we haven't returned to living in caves and killing one another with clubs, we will have some scientifically astute things to say about ethics. Any honest witness to current events will realize that there is no moral equivalence between the kind of force civilized democracies project in the world, warts and all, and the internecine violence that is perpetrated by Muslim militants, or indeed Muslim governments.
pg 149: Think of all the good things human beings will not do in the world tomorrow because they believe that their most pressing task is to build another church or mosque, or to enforce some ancient dietary practice, or to print volumes upon volumes of exegesis on the disordered thinking of ignorant men.
pg 152: It does not seem much of an exaggeration to say that the fate of civilization lies largely in the hands of "moderate" Muslims. ... Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons cannot be uninvented. ... there is no reason to believe that we will be any more successful at stopping their proliferation, in small quantities, than we have been with respect to illegal drugs.
pg 176, quoting Christpher Hitchens: what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
pg 197: There is no ethical difference to be found in how the suffering of the tortured or the collaterally damaged appears. ...Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that pistol rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners;...
pg 266: Reagan, to James Mills in 1971: "everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ."
pg 202, addressing pacifism as a response to terrorism: Gandhi's was a world in which millions more would have died in the hopes that the Nazis would one day have doubted the goodness of the Thousand Year Reich. Ours is a world in which bombs must occasionally fall where such doubts are in short supply. Here we come upon a terrible facet of ethically asymmetric warfare: when your enemy has no scruples, your own scruples become another weapon in his hand.
Duh... reading the names that pop up in my quotes-as-topics-for-further-reflection-list and the bibliography, I gather more suggested reading than my attention will no doubt support.
I particularly want to read the Chomsky he refutes in the section called Leftist Unreason starting on page 138.