forget the materialistic good life work on the hard problem of conscioueness then swing over to the I in awareness.

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I love the way Sam that you put Radical Muslims for depiction of women and you put women who do not have a faith maybe I do not know as the other half.  <This is from your TED conferance>Chistian women who are beautiful are right int he middle and be respectful.  I suggest reading Mein comf and reread Darwin’s book.  Alot of Similarities.

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Learn how to spell, David. ‘Mein KAMPF’ and Darwinian theory of evolution have little in common.

One is a piece of scientific genius. The other is a rambling load of crap from an Austrian megalomaniac.

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I found the TED discussion interesting, with the woman pretty far off track and somewhat nonsensical when she did speak. The most amusing part was when the physicist from the audience, after being asked by Deepak if he understood a phrase, responded with ‘I know what each individual word means.’ I found it interesting that Deepak kept on insisting they the talk be limited to “future religion or mysticism” and not religion as it is now, perhaps realizing that it is not defensible in its current form.

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Sorry, confused this with the Nightline discussion.

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Loved the presentation! Articulate, insightful, passionate and compassionate. I am glad to share the world with people like Sam Harris who make it a better place to live. Sometimes I despair that we’ll ever find a way to live peacefully together on this planet because of the religious dogma and moral relativism.
Is it ever possible to persuade people who live “unexamined lives” to question moral relativism and accept that it is possible to be good without gods. Hopefully, Sam, you’ll be able to persuade intelligent and educated policy makers to keep religion out of schools and expand the curriculum to include courses on ethics and morality based strictly on scientific evidence.

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1. You ‘can’ arrive at a real definition of good using scientific thinking (if you admit the dialectic is scientific thinking)—you just cannot find that “real good” in nature (is-to-ought fallacy). See the “Moral Truth Litmus” thread in your Project Reason forum (Philosophy section).

2. The real good requires self-sacrifice, which is a kind of suffering—so suffering, in and of itself, is not bad. And no one ever really understands “the worst possible misery” because those who choose it—don’t know it as such—they feel justified…as did and do so many tyrants in history.

I also replied in post 115, page 6

Sam Harris says that science can determine what is right.  In a sense, that is true.  Scientific thinking can arrive at the Golden Rule, which answers the question asked by all the theories in Ethics:  “How and why should we be and or behave towards others and self?”  The Golden Rule says that how we should do this is to treat others as self, because a self is an other to another self, and every other is a self to himself.  The Golden Rule, if true, is true for all persons, and so it is at once both universal and personal.  The Golden Rule says that to treat the Other as self is the definition of love, and that love is the answer to the great Why?.  Science can tell us that the Golden Rule is found in all cultures throughout history—that it is trans-cultural, it is common to all humans, that all humans are hard-wired to discover it, hard-wired with a hunger for it.  Science can describe what we already intuitively know.

Science can study the “moral center” in the brain, can try to figure out which genes work together to build a being who experiences empathy, can tell you which chemicals make a person more likely to feel prosocial feelings and carry out prosocial behavior.  Some scientists would say this explains our hunger for meaning, our moral hunger, that this shows how there is no objective moral truth which describes God.  Most of these scientists would say we are not morally responsible, because our moral thoughts, feelings and behavior are determined by these physical factors and our environment.  Other scientists, like Sam Harris, recognizing that we have the natural capability to choose how we respond to the influences of nature and nurture, think that being able to describe the biology and chemistry of morality translates to being able to tell us what is right, to “objective moral truth” being grounded in nature, rather than describing God.

But in order to call the Golden Rule, or any other standard, “objective moral truth,” science must be able to point to the real, fulfilled ought which that alleged truth describes.  Science must show us the being who is and does what we should all be and do—that for which we all hunger.  Not finding such a being in nature (who didn’t also claim to be divine), this suggests there is such a being whose existence does not depend on the physical universe, and some scientists who are Christians, like Dr. Francis Collins, accept this.  But Sam Harris denies the existence of such a being (or at least His claim to divinity), and so his ideas point at nothing except a hunger with no food to satisfy it.  But hunger evolves because there ‘is’ food to satisfy it.  We hunger for meaning that exists, or we would not have evolved a hunger for it.

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Apparently Sam thinks free will is illusion, so the above should actually read:  “Most of these scientists would say we are not morally responsible, because our moral thoughts, feelings and behavior are determined by these physical factors and our environment.  Sam Harris agrees free will is an illusion http://www.samharris.org/faq/full_text/how-can-you-derive-an-ought-from-an-is/P200 (post 203), but still thinks that being able to describe the biology and chemistry of morality translates to being able to tell us what is right, to ‘objective moral truth”’ being grounded in nature, rather than describing God.”

This part of the above:  “I also replied in post 115, page 6” refers to the link just provided.

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How come religion can be a fact that we can choose to take as true or false, at the same time of arguing that facts show you what is there to know as true and they (facts) don’t necessary care what you think about them? So if religion is a fact then how can we choose to take it true or false when the definition of fact is that it is true?

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Doni, “Facts” (as opposed to opinions)—including factual statements made by a religion, like “God exists”—are only “true” if they correspond to reality.  If someone is lying, they are deliberately giving you false facts.  If the facts endorsed by a religion are not “true”—they are false facts.

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Enjoy a little skit I just wrote in post 2:  http://www.project-reason.org/forum/viewthread/14855/#189527

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How do we know that science is not giving us false facts when it comes to God? Science cannot prove God’s nonexistence. When it says “God doesn’t exists” isn’t it making a religious-like factual statement that may as well not correspond to reality if God really exists? How can we save science to be really factual and not another religion? Because if science is another religion, what right does it have to claim authority over the others?

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@ Doni, I believe that God is our collective humanity as a conscious people, which is to say that God is the ‘conscience’ of our entirety.

Science cannot prove God’s nonexistence nor can it prove God’s existence.  If you look at the conversation that one Buddha had with its pupils who demanded answers to outrageous questions (such as our purpose and origins), he makes mention that to question something without any definitive answer is to invite worry and stress since it cannot truly be answered.  Why should we concern ourselves with a God that may or may not exist when we, as a people, have the intellectual capacity and potential to strive for a better society?  Is our time better invested in procuring a hospitable and eco-friendly environment rather than toiling away at the projective deity of a singular entity?

Science cannot truly say that God exists or doesn’t.  To invite this is to invite intellectual suicide since it cannot be affirmed or not.  The only way to counter this is to argue against those who believe in God by listening to their reasoning for such faith and dissecting it.

Science doesn’t have the right to denounce the religions but it does have the right to claim a certain intelligence and awareness by utilizing logic.

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@ Ryan,

So are we collectively God or striving to be one?

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free will as it is being taught is an illusion.

now a better term might be choices within boundries.

what are those boundries?

discover that and you will be on your way of seeing the likeness of religion and atheism and scientism and materialism.

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At 7:30 you start off with an opinion, I’m 21 years old and I was hit as a child to be punished and looking back it did do allot to shape me and I’m glad in some ways I got hit. I’m not talking about being beat till I bleed but I got a good smack. So my point is this, opinion still exists on both sides and both sides have reasonable points that science cannot provide an answer to. My parents also are not very religious so I wasn’t hit do to our faith it was because that what their parents did and that what they did and most likely may be why I will do it to. You make the assumption that it is religious when it may be traditional or even reasonable. They don’t like pain if they do something wrong they feel pain so they won’t do it again to avoid pain. Then you talk about poison and food then I must ask why do people use drugs? Its poison yet people consume it and some believe it evil and others fight for the right to use it and I’m not just talking about cannabis but tobacco and alcohol as well. So I ask how can these questions have definite answers? (To me it seems a battle of opinions)

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