Clipmarks | Samharris.org Clips

Theodicy and the "Holiday in Hellmouth"

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:37:29 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: good read

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/holiday-in-hellmouth/

For the lucky few, there is reason to hope that life will be a business of evenly rationed suffering: stern parents perhaps, a few humiliations at school, then a love affair or two gone wrong, maybe a marriage broken. Our parents will die, and farther off, ideally deferred, will come our own steady demise. Plenty of suffering for a life, certainly, but most of us subsist on the plausible expectation that fortune will draw a circle around that personal portion, and that the truly unbearable—murder, rape, dead children, torture, war—will remain outside the cordon. Norman Rush, in his novel “Mortals,” calls this “hellmouth”: “the opening up of the mouth of hell right in front of you, without warning, through no fault of your own.” Without warning, and yet always feared. Job, whom God places into hellmouth to test him, knew that paradox: “For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.”

Tags: sam harris, the new yorker, atheism, belief, faith, religion, theodicy

The Devil's Delusion

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 14:28:00 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: More from the debates

Better to read the whole review...i could only clip a lil bit.

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/dont-write-off-religion-just-yet/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Don’t write off religion just yet

THE DEVIL’S DELUSION

Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

By David Berlinski

There is actually very little that is new in the so-called new atheism, whose claim to be based on science is as dubious today as it has ever been. A critique of the contemporary assault on religion is therefore much needed, and in The Devil’s Delusion, David Berlinski gives us a polemic that is powerful, erudite and often savagely funny. Berlinski - a mathematician and well-known critic of evolutionary theory, though not a proponent of “intelligent design” - has two targets in his sights: the conventional belief that religious thought is intrinsically superstitious and the materialist philosophy that Dawkins and his fellow “brights” - as members of the atheist community fondly describe themselves - mistakenly identify with science.

Tags: religion, debate, science, reason, www.samharris.org

Austin Dacey surprises

Sat, 24 May 2008 18:44:30 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: One of the surprised :
the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Roman Catholic priest and leading neoconservative culture warrior, has welcomed Mr. Dacey’s argument.

Good read: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/perceiving-2-fallacies-a-secularist-faults-his-fellows/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Perceiving 2 Fallacies, a Secularist Faults His Fellows

Austin Dacey is a philosopher by training and an active secularist not only by conviction but by profession as well: He is a representative at the United Nations for the secularist Center for Inquiry.

That he has written a book titled “The Secular Conscience” is not surprising. That his book is subtitled “Why Belief Belongs in Public Life” has lifted quite a few eyebrows — to say nothing of his claim that “secularism has lost its soul” by putting a “gag order on ethics, values and religion in public debate.”

Mr. Dacey argues that secular liberalism has come to hold that because conscience is private or personal, its moral conclusions must be subjective, and because conscience should be free from coercion, its moral conclusions must also be free from public criticism.

Tags: public discourse, put on yer thinking cap :)

Sam Harris on the FITNA film.

Mon, 05 May 2008 22:43:55 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: New Sam Harris

Clip Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."

Tags: religion, islam, fitna film, www.samharris.org

Calling all Christians, Sam Harris needs you :)

Mon, 05 May 2008 08:52:50 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Interesting study and a chance to participate...

Thanks

The surveys are here :http://www.samharris.org/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Research Volunteers Needed!

We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.

Please answer as many of the surveys as you can. If you only have time to answer one, please choose at random (otherwise, we will have many more responses to the first than to the others).

Feel free to post this message to your blog or to forward the relevant links to your friends. We especially need Christians to respond, as one of the goals of these surveys is to design stimuli that a majority of Christians will find doctrinally sound.

Tags: www.samharris.org

If God is Dead, Who get His house?

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:57:31 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: By Sean McManus via Sam Harris.org

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

It seems unlikely that many of the 850 or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually flicking away a few of His last crutches. Doesn’t God provide people some solace? asked an audience member. “Isn’t that a little childish?” Dawkins replied. “Just because something is comforting doesn’t mean it’s true.” Then someone asked about death, and Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: “I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born.”

The room erupted in loud applause. God had definitely left the building—if he were ever here at all.

Tags: atheism, richard dawkins, faith, religion, samharris.org

Finding the Voices of Moderate Islam

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:01:19 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: rest of article :

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/finding-the-voices-of-moderate-islam/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Finding the Voices of Moderate Islam

Jay Tolson
April 02, 2008

John McCain recently reminded Americans that the great strategic challenge facing the West—and, indeed, the civilized world—is extremist Islam. And more important than any martial aspect of that threat, he said, is the ideological struggle between moderate and extremist understandings of Islam.

Yet going on seven years after the attacks that brought America’s attention to the problem, it is hard to say that we as a nation—a government and a people—have gotten any closer to identifying, much less aiding, those voices of Islamic moderation that we hope will ultimately triumph.

Tags: islam, religion, samharris.org

Belief, disbelief and uncertainty

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:02:41 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/adams-maxim-and-spinozas-conjecture/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Adam’s Maxim and Spinoza’s Conjecture

By Michael Shermer
Belief, disbelief and uncertainty generate different neural pathways in the brain

During an early episode of the über-pyrotechnic television series MythBusters, Adam Savage was busted by the camera crew for misremembering his predictions of the probability of an axle being ripped out of a car, à la American Graffiti. When confronted with the unmistakable video evidence of his error, Adam sardonically rejoined: “I reject your reality and substitute my own.”

Tags: sam harris, belief, certainty, neuroscience

Prime Roller-prepare to meet your wiseacre

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 17:05:21 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Mathematician takes on religious lunacy.

Another Hero

Rest of article:

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/prime-roller-prepare-to-meet-a-wiseacre/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

The latest entry in the God wars is “Irreligion” by John Allen Paulos, the mathematician best known for his best-selling book “Innumeracy.” In this hasty and very lumpy volume Mr. Paulos proposes to expose the irrational basis of religious thinking, much the way he exposed rampant mathematical illiteracy in “Innumeracy,” this time providing some brisk refutations of the greatest-hits arguments for God, from “the golden oldies of religious thought to those with a more contemporary beat.”

The volume gets off to a bracing start, deftly dismantling creationist arguments that the astonishing complexity of life could have come about only through the efforts of a master designer, by succinctly showing how Darwin’s theory of natural selection and free-market economics provide well-confirmed alternative explanations for the evolution of complex systems.

Support the Reason Project: get a paperback copy of Letter to a Christian Nation.

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:06:29 GMT

clipped by: Antara

Clip Source: us.mg1.mail.yahoo.com

Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage Paperback)

with a New Afterword

The Vintage paperback edition of Letter to a Christian Nation is now available on Amazon. This edition has a new, twenty-page Afterword.

All books purchased through the above link will help support the work of Sam's new foundation, The Reason Project, whose advisory board now includes: Peter Atkins, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Harry Kroto, Steven Pinker, Lee Silver, Ibn Warraq, and Steven Weinberg.

www.samharris.org

email: author@samharris.org

web: http://www.samharris.org/

Tags: sam harris, the reason project

Ian McEwan: The TNR Q&A

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:17:49 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Good short read

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/ian-mcewan-the-tnr-qa/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

What they have discovered to their own great surprise is that in the United States, and right across the South too, there are an enormous number of people who also think this way. I don’t think they have suddenly been persuaded by this rash of books--the feelings were there anyway--but they didn’t have a voice, they didn’t have a focus. When Hitchens took his book across the Bible Belt and debated with Baptist ministers in churches, there were huge audiences, most of whom, it seems, from when they spoke to him afterwards, were somewhat irritated that the place in the United States that they lived in was called the Bible Belt. I think there was something there that people had not taken into account. Quite heartening really, given that America is meant to be a secular republic with a strong tradition of upholding all freedom of thought.

Your Nose, Your Brain, Your Faith

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:02:56 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: Sam Harris article....very interesting!

Rest of article:

http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/my-nose-my-brain-my-faith/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

By DAVID VAN BIEMA
Jan. 10, 2008

Your nose is one of the less complicated parts of your body, and yet we credit it with considerable intelligence in the area of truth vs. falsehood. We “sniff out a lie.” We say “something smells fishy.” Now studies suggest that something more than metaphor may be at work here--specifically, brain science. The same research may also shed unexpected light on religious faith.

Believing or disbelieving something is always as much about feeling as fact. Sam Harris, a doctoral candidate at UCLA, wanted to see what that means in physiological terms. To many readers, Harris is best known for his antireligious book The End of Faith. But he is also a neuroscientist. In a study reported in the Annals of Neurology, Harris presented 14 people with 360 statements designed to elicit belief, disbelief or uncertainty. He tracked their brain response with a functional magnetic resonance imager (fMRI) and got some very revealing results.

Tags: sam harris, neuroscience, faith, religion

Moderates Storm The Religious Battlefield

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:57:11 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/moderates-storm-the-religious-battlefield/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

Most recently, these champions of godlessness emphatically (and correctly) argued that nonbelievers have the same rights under the Constitution as believers do. The strength of their arguments forced Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney to concede the point. “Obviously in this nation our religious liberty includes the right to believe or not believe,” Romney told NEWSWEEK in December, after a speech he made on religion lit up the Internet like a pinball machine. In a solid tactical maneuver, Romney had allied himself with believers of all faiths against the creep of secularism. It’s a testament to the power of the atheists that he had to answer to them at all.

Lifechanging experience for Dallas student

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:51:32 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: I know how he feels- Sam Harris has impacted my life in a big way too

Just a short article:
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/dallas-isd-student-picked-to-participate-in-forum-with-world-leaders/

Clip Source: www.samharris.org

For the third year, the Aspen Institute hosted the festival in Aspen, Colo., as a way to engage public high school juniors and educators. According to its Web site, the festival draws speakers from a variety of fields from around the world. The program features four different weeklong tracks and 11 four-day tracks.

“It was humbling, but at the same time, I was star-struck,” Donivon said.

He attended forums on numerous topics. He remembers meeting leaders he is now learning about in government class.

The TAG senior said the most memorable speaker was Sam Harris, a best-selling author and Stanford University graduate.

“I’d never heard a person speak so candidly about religion,” he said. “It’s a touchy subject. I wanted to argue with him. I thought it was honorable for him to speak out.”

Donivon had considered not returning for his final year, Mr. Correa said, but the festival refreshed him.

“It had a big impact on my career path,” he said.

Happy Holidays from Sam Harris

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 01:56:22 GMT

clipped by: Antara
clipper's remarks: and me too

Clip Source: us.f906.mail.yahoo.com

Letter to a Christian Nation (Vintage Paperback)

with a New Afterword

The Vintage paperback edition of Letter to a Christian Nation is now available for pre-order on Amazon (with a new Afterword).

All books purchased through the above link will help support the work of Sam's new foundation, The Reason Project, whose advisory board now includes: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Steven Pinker, Ibn Warraq, and Steven Weinberg

You will hear more about The Reason Project in the coming year.

Wishing you all a very happy holiday.

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