I don't totally agree with what Sam Harris says but I do agree with him on certain things. Such as religion allowing otherwise sane people to believe in completely insane things en masse. I think the example he used was if a person wakes up one morning and over his breakfast cereal, he says a few Latin words and believes that by eating his cereal he is ingesting the body of Julius Caesar then that person has lost his mind. But on the other hand drink some wine and eat some crackers you are somehow ingesting the body of Christ and somehow completely sane.
Not everyone can appreciate it, but symbolic ritual is a powerful and very useful tool. It gains people new perspectives, makes them mindful of things they might not have been before, motivates them, and perhaps above all, binds them to a long chain of people who've also participated in and been moved by that same ritual.
FWIW, from a medical standpoint, sanity is just a measure of how adaptive one's mentations are. If the way someone thinks and processes the world causes him distress or difficulty coping with everyday life, then by definition he has a psychiatric disease. By the same token, someone can think and process the world in a way that others might consider odd, inscrutable, or even repulsive. But if it causes him and the people around him no difficulty, he is not mentally ill. Broader and less relative definitions of "sanity" start us down the slippery slope of witch-hunting anyone even a little bit different or deviant. For example, if a person hears voices, but isn't bothered by them, can manage life just fine, and has no other odd mental symptoms, I would not offer them a script for an antipsychotic drug.
But isn't that what God essentially does in your opinion? I mean creating the Universe out of nothing seems to be kind of the same thing. As for verbal gymnastics sometimes I hate language. Words however important and profound they can be sometimes fall way short of describing what one truly feels. Not really a rebuttal to your statement just my thought on language and its limitations.
Good points. After all, if people are an embodiment of the divine, and the divine can create something out of nothing, why can't we? Never thought of it that way.
I guess I'd put my qualm with secular humanism thusly: I don't find "We're a random accident in a pointless and uncaring universe" a very good starting point for any sort of uplifting theology. If you do, proudaya.
Hey I have an imagination and intuition as well. Just because I am a so called naturalist does not mean I lack imagination. For example I doubt Charles Darwin or any scientist for that matter lack imagination. I would assert that the theory of evolution would have been impossible if not for Darwins imagination of what was and will be. And look at quantum physics. Need I say more? I think its somewhat unfair to label us as unimaginative just because we don't buy into the supernatural. Are all atheists writers for example unimaginative as well? I think not.
You misunderstand me. I never claimed you, or any other atheists, lacked imagination. (Trust me, some of the most ingenious and gifted fiction writers I've ever read have been unbelievers.) I said that the
notion of "There's nothing more than this" strikes me as boring and unimaginative. But that's just my opinion. I love to speculate on possible spiritual scenarios, both ones already thought of, and beyond. An atheist rolling their eyes at me and saying something to the effect of "fairy tales are for kids" is just being a wet blanket, if you ask me.
