3 Common Defenses of Religion

[KipBond]

Sam Harris spoke at the Aspen Ideas Festival where he discussed 3 common defenses of religion. [download video here]. I hope that NotReady & other believers will watch this video with any confirmation bias minimized, and then respond here with their thoughts.

Sam Harris discusses these 3 defenses of religion:

<ul type="square">[*]A specific religion is true[*]Religion is useful, and might be necessary[*]Atheism is essentially another religion[/list]
I think Sam does an exceptional job on the 2nd point in his discussion of morality.

I'd really like to see what some of the more thoughtful religious believers on here can find the most fault with in Harris' arguments. So, that is the challenge to believers: listen to Sam's speech, and return here with the top 3, specific, most egregious faults with his arguments.

[NotReady]

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I'd really like to see what some of the more thoughtful religious believers on here can find the most fault with in Harris' arguments


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I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

[KipBond]

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I'd really like to see what some of the more thoughtful religious believers on here can find the most fault with in Harris' arguments


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I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

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Wow.

So, you didn't even listen to the very next sentence following his: "Well, why not?"

Wow.

EDIT: By the way, he's talking about Jesus' miracles, not his resurrection. You must not have been listening very closely -- just looking for the first excuse to hit 'stop' and not question your irrational beliefs. Sorry for not being nice, but you are being looney and I'm trying to help you snap out of it.

[im a model]

i think notready is saying that the speaker is obviously an idiot and not worth listening to because he said "even if there WAS" and failed to use the subjunctive, making all further points irrelevant.

[Duke]

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i think notready is saying that the speaker is obviously an idiot and not worth listening to because he said "even if there WAS" and failed to use the subjunctive, making all further points irrelevant.

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I doubt he would have really heard any of the talk past that point, even if he tried.

This would be a decent psych project for someone. Gather up 50 or so really faithful people, and show them 2 videos. One video completely ignores religion across the board, and then give them a test to see what they can recall.

Then show them another video. One that starts out bashing the entire concept of faith from many perspectives, and ends with some unrelated topic. Test them on their recall of that unrelated topic.

My guess would be that the latter case would yield far worse results than the first. This is based on my idea that the only way to preserve that sort of thought process at all is to hard-wire in some sort of shorting mechanism to prevent attacks of it.

I could easily be wrong, but I think it'd be interesting to test. The other point would be that they can't know what's going to happen, either, or they could follow along to the second video randomly without really listening except to detect when the subject matter shifted, and then try really hard to remember everything from that point forward - harder than they tried the first time - to skew the results.

[Duke]

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I'd really like to see what some of the more thoughtful religious believers on here can find the most fault with in Harris' arguments


[/ QUOTE ]

I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow.

So, you didn't even listen to the very next sentence following his: "Well, why not?"

Wow.


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hahahhahahha

[siegfriedandroy]

**deleted until poster sobers up**
-wacki

[Nielsio]

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I'd really like to see what some of the more thoughtful religious believers on here can find the most fault with in Harris' arguments


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I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

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Hold on..

You think that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event? Jesus represents the sun, which is at its lowest point for three days during December and then starts rising again.

It's a story celebrating the cycles of the year.


Who told you Jesus is a historical character? How does that make any sense? Die and resurrect?

Please elaborate.

[KipBond]

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I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

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So, NR apparently thinks this is the most egregious fault in Sam Harris' arguments:

Claim: A specific religion is true.

Rebuttal: The evidence for the religious doctrines is either terrible or non-existent.

Example: Christianity is predicated on the idea that the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus is true. This is why people believe Jesus was the son of God, divine, etc.

This is problematic because the Gospels followed Jesus' ministry by decades, and there is no extra-biblical account of his miracles. But the truth is worse than that: even if we had multiple, contemporaneous, eye-witness accounts of the miracles of Jesus, this still would not provide sufficient basis to believe that these events actually occurred.

Well, why not?

The problem is that first-hand reports of miracles are quite common, even in the 21st century. I have met literally hundreds of western-educated men &amp; women who think that their favorite Hindu or Buddhist guru has magic powers, similar to those ascribed to Jesus.

People who tell these stories desperately want to believe them -- yet they lack the kind of corroborating evidence we should require before believing natural laws have been abrogated in this way. And people who believe these stories show an uncanny reluctance to look for non-miraculous causes.

Yet it remains a fact that Yogis &amp; Mystics are said to be walking on water, and raising the dead, and flying without the aid of technology, materializing objects, reading minds, foretelling the future -- right now. In fact, all of these powers have been ascribed to Sathya Sai Baba, a south-Indian guru, by an uncountable number of eye-witnesses.

He even claims to have been born of a virgin, which is not all that uncommon a claim in the history of religion; or in history in general. His followers threw a birthday party for him recently, and a million people showed up. There are vast number of people who believe he is a living God. You can even watch his miracles on YouTube. Prepare to be underwhelmed.

Miracle stories of a sort that today surround a person like Sathya Sai Baba become especially compelling when you set them in the pre-scientific religious context of the 1st century Roman empire, decades after their supposed occurrence. We have Sathya Sai Baba's miracle stories attested to by thousands upon thousands of living eye-witnesses, and they don't even merit an hour on the Discovery Channel. But, you place a few miracle stories in some ancient books, and half the people on this Earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around them. Does anyone else see a problem with that?

[Nielsio]

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I got about 8 minutes in where he's attacking Christianity and says basically, there's no contemporaneous account of Jesus' resurrection, and even if there was , blah, blah, blah ... no need to go further.

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So, NR apparently thinks this is the most egregious fault in Sam Harris' arguments:

Claim: A specific religion is true.

Rebuttal: religion doesn't make any scientific claims. Religion is not in the business of knowledge.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xq7dcNJDhOE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrERN87nvIE