… ist der Titel einer beeindruckenden, sehr gut verständlichen Rede von Sam Harris beim Aspen Ideas Festival 2007. Unter anderem geht es um ‘Problems with Miracle Stories’, ‘Morality and Religion’, ‘History of Slavery’ und ‘Unequal Treatment of Women’.
Wie meistens bei FORA.tv gibt es ein (mitunter fehlerhaftes) Transcript zum Mitlesen, einzelne anklickbare Kapitel, und diverse Downloads (mp3, pdf und iPod und PSP Video).
Hier ein Auszug zum Thema „intellectual honesty and creationism“:
One of the profound ironies of religious discourse is the frequency with which you can hear religious people praise themselves for their humility while tacitly claiming to know things about cosmology and physics and chemistry and paleontology that no scientist knows.
Any person who dignifies Genesis as an account of creation or even as informative is essentially saying to someone like Stephen Hawking, Stephen you are a smart guy and there are a lot of equations over there but you don’t know enough about cosmology, you know it says here that God did this six days and then rested on the seventh and I don’t see how you really grapple with the nuiances of the Biblical account.
And this would be amusing if we are not having such a disastrous effect upon our public policy. It is impeding medical research and the teaching of science in this country. 30 percent of biology teachers in the United States at the high school level don’t even mention evolution because of the hassle occasioned by the religious hysteria that it provokes in their students and their students’ parents.
We all remember the recent presidential debate where three Republican candidates for the presidency solemnly raised their hands to testify that they don’t believe in evolution. And there was no follow up question. I mean this is embarrassing. And it seems like every few months the opinion page of The New York Times publishes another defense of this kind of ignorance. There is no question that this is eroding our stature in the eyes of the rest of the developed world. It’s not arrogant or dogmatic to point this out. It seems to me that our intellectual honesty lives or dies in this trench.
Zum Thema “creationism” auch immer wieder köstlich: Bobby Hendersons “Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” -> http://www.venganza.org/