The great divide

I am both fascinated and disturbed to continually discover how fruitless even highly rational dialogue can be. People see what they want to see, hear what they want to hear, and generally interpret experiences through whatever perceptual filter they were fitted with by the age of twelve. By no means do I exclude myself here. When I read through the Harris-Prager dialogue, it struck me as so one-sided as to cause me to feel slightly embarrassed for Prager. It seemed to me that Harris not only deftly handled every substantial argument Prager came up, but he made several points which Prager dodged, ignored, or misunderstood. Harris just mopped the floor with Prager. End of story. But wait, hold the presses! It seems some pretty intelligent people (including Matthew Dallman) saw things rather differently:

“[W]henever I read or hear ‘God’, I translate it as something like, ‘that mysterious force of human interaction’. The reason people worship this force is that it is so elusive of intellectual grasp, yet it tantalizes when we are seemingly least prepared to grasp it. Depersonalizing this force into ‘God’ ‘gods’ or the like is a way to worship something more tangible. But, at least as far as Christianity goes, an enormous part of the worship is that towards spirit. Or, put another way — the worship is of a particular kind of state of being, everyday in one’s life. Harris argues of one kind of ‘state of being’; Prager another. Seeing this is important, for clarity.

The other thing I wonder about is the sources of moral authority. Inevitably, these form a kind of dogma in Christianity. But, honestly, so what? Dogma means ‘seems right’. Moral codes based on the notion that following them ‘seems right’ strike me as perfectly acceptable. And, interestingly, when Harris attempts to create his own ‘religion’, what does it use for its tenets but dogma? Its use, like religion, is inescapable for humans.”

That Matthew and I could view the debate so differently interests me as much as the debate itself.

It would be pointless for me to rehash the Harris-Prager dialogue in detail. If Harris’s crystal clear thinking didn’t move you, then my muddled mind is unlikely to enlighten anyone. Yet, I can’t resist making a few points. First, if there is to be any clarity whatsoever in a discussion about God, we must come to an agreement as to what we’re discussing. Clearly, Harris is arguing against a fundamentalist or literalist notion of God as being the author of certain holy books, a notion which can and does lead to consequential beliefs about life and about the world. He’s not talking about God as a transpersonal principle or a label for all that is mysterious, wonderful and ineffable in the universe. There’s nothing unreasonable or dogmatic per se in acknowledging a transpersonal level of reality. But believing either the Bible or the Koran is the perfect, infallible word of the omniscient creator of the universe, and thus should be followed to the letter (according to your own or some authority’s interpretation),–this belief is highly unreasonable and dogmatic. And changing the use of the term “dogmatic” seems to muddy the discussion rather than clarify. Harris eschews dogma because beliefs based on unassailable principles are conversation killers. Dogma is not open for discussion or to revision. This has nothing to do with dogma as something that “seems right.”

If it’s true that something like half of the American populace believes Jesus was literally born of a virgin and is coming back soon to usher us all to heaven or hell, then reasonable people everywhere should be very alarmed. This has nothing to do with deeper, non-literal interpretations of scripture, nor does it have to do with broader definitions of God. If it’s true, then it means something like half of us (you choose which half!) are out of our fucking minds.

I know, I know… I dropped the “F-Bomb,” betraying the fact that I too must be an “angry atheist.” Well, first of all, I don’t deny being triggered (for personal reasons) by certain notions of “God,” as I discussed in a previous post. Secondly, if the prospect (or perhaps present reality) of a mass, cultural psychosis doesn’t make you say “Fuck!”, then what will? Finally, I have to admit that Prager really ruffled my feathers with this shot at non-believers:

“And secular Europe, like secular America, doesn’t even reproduce itself. Secularism either makes people too selfish to have more than one child and/or shatters any belief in sustaining one’s society and culture.”

When I read that, my ears slammed closed. I would expect the antagonistic rhetoric of Harris and Dawkins to have a similar effect on the ears of the faithful.

And so here we are, with our ears slammed shut, shouting past one another, the divide ever widening.