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Sam Keen: In The Absence of God

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Berkeley Arts and Letters

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Sam Keen: Where Religion Went Wrong, and How to Fix It

05 min 32 sec

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No longer interested in religious differences, In the Absence of God author Sam Keen explores what he believes is the fallacy of organized religion by tracing the five evolutionary stages through which most have progressed.

"We have to find the story that is everybody's story," he says."The essence of religion is a series of primal experiences, which belong to us only because...we share the human condition."
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54 min 25 sec

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Dogma

Posted: 03.24.10, 09:33 AM

Of course Dawkins is a literalist. All atheists are literalists. Anyone who doesn't even have enough imagination to leave open the posibility of a Divine Consciousness (for lack of a better term) is a literalist, since they read the universe as it literally appears to them. If they can't see it, taste it, hold it, it doesn't exist even though others say they have. Between Agnosticism, Theism and Atheism, Atheism is the most absurd and Agnosticism is the most logical. And at least a true Theist, acknowledges the component of BELIEF, (i.e. "faith"). Atheists leave NO possibility open for the possibility that their understanding of the universe is somehow lacking. They paint themselves into a rhetorical corner that relies solely on the scientific understanding (or lack of) of the day. At least Agnosticism and Theism understand the limitations of the notoriously unreliable human intellect. Remember, it was just a few hundred years ago science told us the Earth was the center of all the universe.

Dogma

Posted: 03.24.10, 09:15 AM

"Having said this, I'm already coming off as a radical because it's such a taboo to even begin questioning religion." .................. Oh PA-LEASE. Don't flatter yourself. Atheism is THE de facto belief among the educated. I'm not religious myself, but atheism is hardly the "radical" world view you fancy it, so come on down off the cross.

ZeleniLav

Posted: 03.24.10, 06:49 AM

Do I get this right? Religion is the effigy of the emotions that we have in the moment of wonder, awe and fear which happens when we realise that the universe/existence is something we can never, both as individuals and as society/species/whatever, fully understand? And that this is 'the human condition'? Sounds like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there, indeed.

theseanze

Posted: 03.21.10, 09:12 AM

Dawkins doesn't give sermons, and he is not a literalist who is just as bad as those he opposes. I stopped watching when he said that what Dawkins speaks out against a kind of religion that the speaker doesn't believe in. This is a redundant and meaningless complaint against the "New Atheists," and it's much like criticizing MADD because you're mental image of alchohol is a few friends drinking one beer in front of the TV. This kind of talk is intellectual saccharine. It makes those who don't comprehend and/or are offended by atheists feel justified in their anxiety in the way most republicans seem today (a la Sarah Palin). Most talking points of the republican party are implicitly supported by religious inertia that refuses to negotiate but continues to strong-arm policy. Having said this, I'm already coming off as a radical because it's such a taboo to even begin questioning religion. If the speaker or audience members actually bothered to read books by or listen to interviews of Dawkins themselves, they would see he's a humanitarian. He clings to the truth, and unfortunately the divide isn't an equal controversy but boiling frustration between those who live in reality and those who refuse to see things outside of their own interpretation. If this argument really is unsolvable, something we "can't talk about" as the speaker says, then why do we defer to the one side of religion? It's an embedded part of most cultures and nobody wants to take responsibility and discuss them honestly. If you never confront your beliefs, the motives for your actions that end up effecting all the rest of us, then you're ignoring the morals that the greatest teachers (Jesus included) were trying to spread. It's like they were talking to a brick wall...

Anders Berg

Posted: 03.19.10, 11:36 AM

For all the mention of religious sentiments, Keen seems to me to express, more or less, my sort of areligiosity and "non-belief", to use a useless term. I gather from the framework sketched out here, that it doesn't really matter if one is religious or not - as long as one is observant, perhaps. Metaphysics caught in a play with words. @Monalisa: Dawkins has provided many relevant points for anyone who might consider the implications of religious belief and its "opposite". Childhood experiences, although surely important and formative, has nothing to do with the validity of those points - many of which are not his own anyway, some dating to before Christianity. Consider it!

Monalisa

Posted: 03.18.10, 12:41 PM

I neber believed in Dawkins at all, becasue he just wanted to abuse those who have a religious believe,his denial of faith and religion seem to be related to things happened touring his childhood

d.toncini

Posted: 03.18.10, 10:46 AM

illuminating

Monalisa

Posted: 03.18.10, 10:45 AM

very much true Sam

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