Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:12PM In this meeting, we talked a little bit about Hitchens' background and then we jumped into the text, focusing on the first 100 pages of his book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything".
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:11PM In this meeting, we continued to discuss Christopher Hitchens' book and focused on his critique of revelation as it relates to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:11PM In this meeting, we talked about Hitchens' examination of Mormonism and the Cargo religions as examples of the role that fraud plays in the formation of religious traditions. We also discussed Hitchens' analysis of Martin Luther King and Ghandi and asked what role religion played in their success as champions of human rights.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:10PM In this meeting, we looked at Hitchens' contention that Religion is not only immoral, but positively amoral. We also tried to make sense of his analysis of secular dictators and their regimes as a manifestation of the "religious".
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:10PM We began this meeting by listening to a segment of a debate that took place in New York at the end of January between Christopher Hitchens and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. We reached the end of God is Not Great and discussed Hitchens' call to war at the end of the book. We also talked about Spinoza and the difference between Pantheism and Atheism.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:09PM In this meeting, we moved on to discuss Daniel C. Dennett's book "Breaking the Spell". We touched upon issues surrounding the definition of religion as well as his criticism of Stephen J. Gould's concept of "NOMA". We also discussed Dennett's controversial support for the idea of calling atheists and agnostics "Brights".
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:09PM In this meeting, we focused on Dennett's reductionist approach to studying religion. We discussed some of the particular models that he borrows from the biological sciences to better understand how religion operates in the world. We also spent a good deal of time discussing the difference between Monism and Dualism and the problems that each worldview poses.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:08PM In this meeting, we talked a little bit more about ideas and the philosophy of mind. Next we turned to Dennett's foundational arguments borrowed from Anthropologist Pascal Boyer, about what makes religious ideas particularly sticky and how it is that such ideas are transmitted. We concluded by discussing Dennett's contention that religious rituals serve as vehicles for the transmission of religious ideas.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:08PM In this meeting, we discussed the structure of Dennett's conceptual understanding of how religion works. In particular, we looked at his understanding of the difference between folk religion and organized religion and we contemplated the three models of religious adherence that he presents.We also discussed the strengths and potential weaknesses of Dennett's model.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:07PM In this meeting, we talked about Dennett's attempts to preempt some of the objections he anticipated his readers might have to his application of a natural sciences model to the study of religion. We also got a glimpse of some of Dennett's personal beliefs about the meaning of "spirituality".
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:07PM In this meeting, we grapled for quite some time with the idea of Memetics. The discussion led us briefly into the realm of Heidegger and Existentialism before we returned to discuss the end of "Breaking the Spell". We concluded by considering Dennett's proposal that we increase the breadth and depth of religious education in this country and make it a mandatory part of every American's education.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:06PM In this meeting, we began to discuss Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion".We noted the differences in style between Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens, and focused on Dawkins' operational definition of "God" along with his exclusion of the "Einsteinian God" from this definition. In addition, we took a look at Dawkins' Kinsey-like scale of belief from 1(absolute Theist) to 7(absolute Atheist) and discussed his dislike of agnosticism. My apologies that the first 10 minutes of the discussion didn't make it into the podcast.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:06PM In this meeting, we looked at two video clips of Richard Dawkins. The first was an appearance on Bill Maher's HBO show "Real Time" and the second was an interview he did with the Bisop of Oxford. We talked about Dawkins' shrill writing style and the fact that in what we've read so far this style is not bolstered by particularly strong substance. We focused on Dawkins' charicature of some famous arguments for the existence of God and talked briefly about his dislike for Gould's "NOMA" concept.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:05PM In this meeting, we discussed Dawkins' central claim that the existence of God is highly improbable. We looked closely at his argument that the God hypothesis ends up posing more questions than it solves and we also saw that his methods for understanding religion were more or less in line with what we have already seen in Hitchens and Dennett. We concluded by taking a look at Dawkins' helpful insights into Memetics.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:05PM In this meeting, we started by discussing issues related to the possibility of definitions as well as the possible limits of reason and rationalism.We proceded to have a discussion of Ben Stein's documentary film "Expelled" which led us to discuss whether there were institutional biases that might have detrimental effects on possible reserach programs in the field of Evolutionary Biology. We concluded by taking a close look at Dawkins' idea about where the ethical impulse comes from.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:02PM In this meeting, we devoted the entire discussion to the issue of moral absolutism and moral relativism. This was appropriate given our location in "The God Delusion" as we had just finished reading Dawkins' section on morality (which had been followed by a number of instances in which Dawkins applies his moral understanding to critique religion). We talked about Dawkins' false assumption that consequentialsm is a non-absolutist system of ethical principles. We also looked at a passage from the appendix of "Breaking the Spell" in whcih Dennett defends a form of moral absolutism.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:01PM In this meeting, we read some listener feedback, wrapped up our discussion of "The God Delusion", and watched excerpts from a video called "The Four Horsemen", in which Dawkins, Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens all talk about the reaction to their bestselling books on atheism and religion. We also had a special guest appearance by my good friend the Physicist, Matthew Wettstein.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 05:00PM In this, our final meeting of the academic year, we continued to watch excerpts from "The Four Horsemen". We started by examining the question of whether critics of religion have the obligation to be even-handed in their portrayal of religion. We continued with clips of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, talking about what they hoped to accomplish along with the question of whether it is possible to reason people out of faith. We concluded by taking a look at Hitchens' distinction between the supernatural and the numenous and asking what an atheistic spirituality might look like. Thanks for listening!