Desire Armed

But I've been wrong before.

I would call it relationship, which is, as you say, the basis of all community. Christian or otherwise. that it may be a particular relationship, unique even, makes it no less a relationship.

i think the Dr.'s question overlooks the greater issue, which is why has the essential nature of Christianity been so misconstrued. warped or whatever word best suits everyone's concerns?

Or perhaps that is what he is getting at. either way you didnt answer my question, just informed me that, as i feared, it was a foolish one :D

and either way, coffee table, holy reality or simple venue for a meal the Lord's table would be a table, according to His words, teachings and promises, that we all get to sit at, which would imply a connection, which is another term for relationship which, if an honest, should be as genuine with coffee as it is with wine and motzah. Assuming the Lord's presence is present, naturally. but then, how does one side step omnipresence?

forever your loyal, well meaning agitator

I'm not at all interested in starting a debate, not even a conversation - are we not all so tired of "talking" all the time, perhaps at the expense of thinking, or praying, if you're so inclined - really, but I just want to say a few things. I for one, agree with Harris, in that I'm just tired of listening to people all the time, as if they always had something good to say. That said, you're under no obligation to read the following.

I found this video very interesting, and I'm not unsympathetic to many of Harris's concerns, but what is perhaps more disturbing to me about his type (Dictchkins, new, fundamentalist atheists, whatever one wants to call them) is both a fundamental gap in logic and a seeming ignorance about the contingency and provisionality of all the "scientific" "moral" "reasonable" "advanced" and "evolved" contexts from which they preach.

The fundamental gap of their reasoning (which is, unless, I'm wrong, the exact thing their asking of everyone else--consistency and reasonableness) is their conflation of scientific discourse, practical discourse, and ethical/moral/spiritual concerns. Harris speaks as if it's only too easy to compare the verifiability of a diamond and a God, or that performing an experiment in Canada and Baghdad will have the same result. But issues of ultimate concern are not so easily answered. Something that is scientific or verifiable is in no way eo ipso more "true" (as if "truth" were the issue at stake in any of this--that's perhaps the biggest delusion, God or otherwise; if one still believes that, one should just consider how all of the new atheist presumptions and arguments are based on re-actions to violence, which is anything but a concern for "truth" per se) than anything else. Therefore, any judgment based solely on scientific "fact" (again, an ignorant faith and prejudice if every there was one) or reason that is then transposed into a strictly and absolutely non-scientific arena of knowledge, experience, discourse, is done so on a basis exclusively NOT scientific. I would suggest that that ground that goes deeper than the scientific is always "religious" in nature: that means, I think, that the thread of legitimation of authority (scientific, political, religious, etc) can always be followed to an empty space, a place where utter faith is required to tie it down, for otherwise the whole thing falls apart . In this sense, Harris and others have to provide a thorough argument for why they think they can equate the scientific with the moral, as he did on numerous occasions in the video, if they're to live up to their own standards, standards I fundamentally reject. Funny enough, the argument he made against a fundi who can make a nuke is the exact moral argument one could level at the people who made the atom bomb in the first place, let alone most technological or scientific advances--if they couldn't reckon with the consequences of their work, they should not have done it or had the capability to do it. So by his standards, a number of scientific achievements should be nixed based on the ignorant spiritualists that fostered or perpetuated them: this, I hope I don't have to spell out, is "lunatic," as he would say (cf. Pasteur, Einstein, Kepler, Darwin (apropos social Darwinism), Oppenheiemer, whoever invented penicillin and benodril (the company itself, perhaps) et al, literally every scientist and thinker that could not reckon their knowledge with their discovery or capability due to the inherent limitations of their human knowledge, ethical or scientific). Combine this last point with other moral and spiritual examples (MLK was an adulterer and Gandhi killed his wife) and you literally have a human species that should still be amoebas--even earlier--, for even the first striking of two rocks together would unleash untold consequences and violence that it would be hard to justify such an advance, especially if you base your ethic upon an evolutionary one, which as I'm suggesting, is untenable and is no ethic at all. If someone wants to conflate ethics and science, as Harris wishes, let's just look at the impossible field of bioethics, which is something that most of your TED enthusiasts don't seem to want to acknowledge. Just because we have the ability doesn't mean that we are ethically obliged or even permitted to do this or that, not because the Bible says so or "we can't play God," but because of the unwitting consequences of our actions that we cannot foresee, which could very well be the end of the species long before Global Warming shirks us all into the seas. Ironically enough, this same line of reasoning, responsibility, duty to the future humans being, could be extended into his particularly short-sighted example of stem cells--Oh, well, those are just zygotes, and after all, they can't feel anything.

So, I've already wandered into the second point, which is the contingency of all things, every view, every position, every word, from the highest "arrogance" of religious folks certainty that JC is coming back in half-a-century, to the full-blown historical elitism of the new atheists. Both are equally historically ignorant. Harris's et al's faith resides in their conviction of the necessity of the world as it stands. à la Nietzsche and Foucault, they completely seem to fail to see that their way of seeing the world is a new invention, and that it is simultaneously not necessarily the best one, and that its justification relies on just as essential a mystification as the fundiism--both rely upon Ideological justification. "Reason" did not birth them or the world we live in today, or science, but religious violence itself, power, drive, pleasure, desire, contemporarily and way back when at the beginning of the Enlightenment with Descartes, Bacon, Berkeley, et al.--of course, that's just the religious violence part, the latter forces are the constituents of each human being for all of human history. Are they not, then, trapped in a cycle of action-reaction: they don't even get to have the privileged position as actors but only actors-out? Their position is not necessary or "true" because it doesn't even exist without the other position to war against, to be against; it is, reactionary, not revolutionary.

I'd like to go on about this second point, but I gotta go to bed.