9 posts tagged “islam”
Remarkable story, if you are unfamiliar with Ayaan Hirsi Ali and her story please watch this speech given at AAI 07. The Q&A is well worth your time as well.
Lou Dobbs recently interviewed Christopher Hitchens and discussed his new book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It's a fantastic interview. Bill O'Reilly could learn a thing or two from Lou Dobbs. And congratulations to Christopher Hitchens on becoming an American citizen.
I went and picked up Christopher Hitchens' latest book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I am already through the first chapter and this book is quite exciting. Hitchens' prose alone is worth the price of admission. Rest assured I'll be posting some excerpts as I plow through this one.
The prophet died in the year 632 of our own approximate calendar. The first account of his life was set down a full hundred and twenty years later by Ibn Ishaq, whose original was lost and can only be consulted through its reworked form, authored by Ibn Hisham, who died in 834. Adding to this hearsay and obscurity, there is no agreed-upon account of how the Prophet's followers assembled the Koran, or of how his various sayings (some of them written down by secretaries) became codified. And this familiar problem is further complicated—even more than in the Christian case—by the matter of succession. Unlike Jesus, who apparently undertook to return to earth very soon and who (pace the absurd Dan Brown) left no known descendants, Muhammad was a general and a politician and—though unlike Alexander of Macedonia a prolific father—left no instruction as to who was to take up his mantle. Quarrels over the leadership began almost as soon as he died, and so Islam had its first major schism—between the Sunni and the Shia—before it had even established itself as a system. We need take no side in the schism, except to point out that one at least of the schools of interpretation must be quite mistaken. And the initial identification of Islam with an earthly caliphate, made up of disputatious contenders for the said mantle, marked it from the very beginning as man-made
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is due for release May 1st.
I hate the way BIll O'Reilly interviews people, it doesn't aid in the understanding of the guest. This interview was a bit too short and O'Reilly dominates most of it rather than allowing Dawkins to make his points. As for the "Hitler and Stalin" argument, I've talked about why that is untrue before (and is personally one of my favorite posts I've written).
Hitchens:
The American Revolution is the only one still standing. The only revolution that has any combat or merit or virtue left in it. And this I think confers upon us ... a certain responsibility.
The latest from Sam Harris in his debate with Andrew Sullivan on beliefnet. I'm hard pressed to find much to disagree with Harris on.
Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected by-what, religion? No, by good science.
I do not deny that there is something at the core of the religious experience that is worth understanding. I do not even deny that there is something there worthy of our devotion. But devotion to it does not entail false claims to knowledge, nor does it require that we indulge our cultural/familial/emotional biases in an unscientific way. The glass can get very clean-not sterile perhaps, not entirely without structure, not contingency-free, but cleaner than many people are ready to allow. One need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to experience the "ecstasies of Teresa" (or those of Rumi, for that matter). And those of us with the benefit of a 21st century education can be more parsimonious in drawing conclusions about the cosmos on the basis of such ecstasy. Indeed, I think we must be, lest our attachment to the language of our ancestors keep their ignorance alive in our own time.
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