Pretending to know what we don’t and can’t know
Thought for the day. Sam Harris replying to Jonathan Haidt at Edge.
The point is that religion remains the only mode of discourse that encourages grown men and women to pretend to know things they manifestly do not (and cannot) know. If ever there were an attitude at odds with science, this is it. And the faithful are encouraged to keep shouldering this unwieldy burden of falsehood and self-deception by everyone they meet – by their coreligionists, of course, and by people of differing faith, and now, with startling frequency, by scientists who claim to have no faith.
Just so. Often we’re not just encouraged to pretent to know what we don’t and can’t know, we’re more or less ordered to. That’s why we keep resisting.
I’ve only just gotten around to reading this, and wanted to make sure it came to the attention of the other B&Wers.
“More on Dawkins”
Excerpt: “[Dawkins’s] sense of ‘Fascism’ is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument.”
Great stuff
YIKES!
Jeez. I see that I failed to provide a link to “Review of Richard Dawkins’ new book ‘The Fascism Delusion’
by TheValve.org”
Here it is:
http://richarddawkins.net/article,1622,Review-of-Richard-Dawkins-new-book-The-Fascism-Delusion,TheValveorg
Or:
http://tinyurl.com/2zafxy
You should have more trust, Doug – I posted that in News days ago!
I know, OB, that’s where I got it. But since I saw no comment on it, I wanted to bring it up again for the B&dubsters.