Scapegoat, I just don't understand your concept of judging religions by historical accuracy. It's driving me up a wall that I don't understand it. But I don't.
If I write a "religious" tome with more historical accuracy than the New Testament, will you accept it and bow down to the God that I propose? And how do you feel about the Old Testament?
A while back I discovered the following. The 10 videos total 15-20 hours, so this isn't going to be immediately productive, but I would encourage everyone to get through them eventually.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=beyond+belief+2006highlights (my personal judgement) include:
- Neil Tyson's talk at the beginning of the video #2
- Carolyn Porco's presentation at the end of video #3 (starting at 1:20)
- V.S. Ramachandran's talk at about 0:39 into video #4
- Sam Harris' brief comments at about 1:36 into video #4
- Ayn Druyan's response to some idiot's confusion over religion and science as searches for truth vs declarations of truth (1:41 in video #4
- Loyal Rue's talk at 0:47 of video #6 (just after some great comments by Scott Atran, see below)
- video #8, beginning to 0:30
- unknown (ucsd dept of medicine) at around 1:47:20 in video #9, and around 0:30:30 in video #10 - absolutely hilarious
And a few of my observations that I don't have an interest in backing up, but which I feel confident in based on my not-insignficant experience exploring science:
- Jo*an Roughgarden has personal problems, and is willing to derail the conference repeatedly to spout her religious biases and misrepresentations of modern evolutionary biology.
- Charles Harper from the Templeton Foundation is the Devil... metaphorically, of course, but I think the metaphor holds. He is very clever in his rhetoric, but he ignores the central problem with combining religion and scientific reasoning. As Neil Tyson said, people who tend to appeal to divine power have no place in the lab. If a religious person wants to lock away the religious part of himself while doing science, that could work to a degree. However, as the computational neuroscientist pointed out in one of the videos, many scientific breakthroughs occur at odd times, and if someone is being religious at those times, he may overlook the scientific significance of those thoughts.
However, lest anyone think I hate all the detractors to the Dawkins/Harris camp, I would say that Scott Atran is very smart, and that while I'm not sure of his motives or ultimate suggestions of how to deal with the irrationality of religion, he almost always makes good points that were unwisely dismissed by the other attendees. See for instance video #4 at 0:42:30, and video #7 at 1:41:15.
What strikes me the most is that the kind of people I react very negatively to, namely that political-scientist/neuroscientist that Druyan demolished, and Charles Harper from Templeton, and Joan Roughgarden (from Stanford), are very clearly dual believers and scientists. In trying to present both sides of themselves at once in a conference like that (or anywhere else), they come across to me as being just short of incomprehensible. To me, that's the best response to Harper's claim that religion and science don't conflict. When the best dual-advocates are as miserable as those three (including Harper himself) are, it's worth considering that maybe the two concepts really are incompatible.
I have no problem with people who want to lock up their religion most of the time, and devote an hour or two nightly, or on weekends, to observing it. But that's fundamentally not what religion is about. Religions tend to require you to
live religion, which inherently provokes conflict with science, with rational public and foreign policy, and therefore with people like me.
