Then you and I must suffer from the same psychological hangups or have some similar trauma that caused this type of crazy thinking. Perhaps it's just another way for us to get through another day in our pathetic lives (gasp - the Existentialism!)

Nooooooo! Why must you bring that up at night, when you know I must sleep?

But isn't that the mark of all philosophers? (Or wanna-be philosophers like me...)

Well, that's actually psychology not philosophy. Modern analytic philosophy is a methodology that can be applied to almost every field. Our patheticness is what you talk about in theology or just go to therapy for it

Oh. I just thought to wonder why and theorize on things was philosophy itself...

It is, but the process of wondering why and thinking about things has become more and more technical over the years.

In the early 20th century, there was a shift in philosophy that brought our thoughts out from working through how we know things to how we say things. It’s called the language shift. This shift has resulted in a far more technical philosophy than was known previously. It’s not that the answers come any easier, or that ancient problems are still not existent, but rather that the method of solving problems is more linguistically oriented (with that is pure logic).

This more analytic method has helped science and many other fields to define what their issues were and move forward. Many say that philosophy has gone nowhere whereas other fields have made heavy advances. This is a misconception in my opinion. Philosophy has contributed to the capacity of the other fields of study to expand in the way they have. It just so happens that philosophers still enjoy re-hashing old problems using this new method, which makes it appear that they aren’t getting anywhere.

So, the short answer to what is philosophy is that it’s just a process when people think hard about things. Philosophy, however, is much more than that. It is the backbone to everything we do. It really doesn’t have substance in itself, but rather allows us to use techniques to find the substance in other areas. Pure philosophy will not solve problems, but it will give you the tools to solve problems when applied to another field.

Hmm...I'd very much like to take Philosophy in college. But I wonder, what use is it besides being interesting?

It's value is in its analytic training. For most, a minor in philosophy would do a lot of good. I majored in philosophy and it has helped me with my financial management work more than any business training I've had. I love rubbing it in that I have nearly no formal financial training, yet I do financial analysis for grant management I personally believe that my training in philosophy gave me the tools to handle doing and thinking about things about which I have no real formal training.

Perhaps it would do well for someone like me who wants to be a journalist or writer, but I never imagined it'd help with finance

hello, you all... nice to see you again^^

-> very interesting conversation.......^^

it's almost blasphemy to think about how God could think *bows*... but......

i think that he doesn't have to know really what future brings.... my friend once in high school said to me when i asked him this question....
he said that if God knows the present, he also automatically knows the coming future... it's like in physics where everything(every collision of atoms) is pre-destined already for all the future(it's like billiard where there's only one possibility how things could develop because of this kind of construction of atoms in the universe and its changes and transfers of energies etc).........^^

why there's evil?
as guest and others already said: you first have to define evil(if it's really existing for you... moral etc).. but if you believe in it.. i think this is the freedom we have from God although he says it's bad.. it's the "salt in the soup" i think ^^;;

-> nobody is perfect.. that's why he knows that we're all commit sin at least once in our life-time..BUT -> in order to regret it and to do good thinks after it........

I haven't had any time to read in philosophy lately. I do have to give a demonstration at work on a shadow report system I have begun to develop. Perhaps I can work in some interpretive/hermeneutic and analysis theory into the demonstration.

I like philosophy a lot...but I still know a portion of it

Here's what I was looking for .

I wanted to revive this topic to talk about something regarding our ability to know things. I watched a show last night regarding a case study of a person who awoke from a coma after 19 years. This person can now speak, which has never happened before in the world according to the show. Anyway, it was interesting to look at this case and then look at a few other things about the brain.

What is of interest to me is that this person cannot remember anything that has happened to him after the accident that put him in the coma 19 years ago. In researching this, a doctor has found that he is missing much of his frontal lobe, which apparently is the portion of the brain that helps to encode sensory experience in a meaningful way so that your temporal lobe can remember it. Now this person has a healthy temporal lob (one of the lobes is unhealthy, but you can retain memory with only one apparently). So the hypothesis is that because this person doesn't have a functioning frontal lobe, the memories cannot be properly encoded to allow him to remember every day things after his coma.

In fact, this person believes he's fully functioning and capable. He doesn't realize that he can't get up and walk or do anything. Now here's the philosophical question, how can we be sure that we are not in this scenario? No matter how hard people tell him that this person has a 19 year old daughter, he still believes that his daughter is still a baby. No matter how much people tell him he can't walk, he still believes that he can. He believes he can do things even though he cannot confirm that he can do them.

In a sense, I'm modifying the "brian in a vat" scenario to say that we cannot know that we are not lying in a bed incapable of any movement, but fully believe we are moving. It's not a mad scientist that is tricking us, but our very own brain. We can't even say that we know people are refuting our belief because as soon as the belief is refuted, we forget that it has been refuted. How can knowledge be possible in this scenario? How can we prove that we have not just awoken from a coma and are not what we believe ourselves to be? Does this have any impact on our ability to know anything?

Just some thoughts for you all .

I'm going to go lie down before I try to contemplate what you said anymore. If I do so I might wipe out half my brain cells coming forward with a decent answer.

Although, some faith healers do play on what the brain can do to the body. If a sick person truly believes they have been healed then their brain will tell their body to function. They may still be quite ill. Just the same you can think yourself paralysed.

"Some", you say . . .

I still find that "brain in a vat" scenario very fascinating. I suppose, though, in the end, what does it matter, as long as I'm happy, and living life the way I think I would like to be living? Whatever this "life" really is, if I can "live" based on what I believe it to mean, then I could be satisfied. However, the keyword here is "could".

Doesn't the idea that we are all "brains in a vat" or not really real mean that ethics don't necessarily matter. What's to stop me from caring about others at all if they don't exist.

That's where it becomes a problem if I just think about making the best of the "vat" scenario. I'm just a brain to begin with and I can't prove others exist, so why not cause pain, suffering and other "evils" to make myself happy. It's not real anyway, right?

the idea that we are all "brains in a vat" somewhat reminds me of the matrix. lol.

I think I've mentioned before, but the matrix is simply a variation on the "brain in a vat" scenario.

But doesn't whatever you do to others "in your mind" have an impact on how your brain will experience this phenomenon we call "life"? If anything, I'd want to be kind to others just so this "illusion" can last, in that I won't be "killed off".

*Re-opens this thread*

I used to be hesitant about this topic. Mostly avoiding the big questions in fear of depressing myself.

But that always bites me in the but. Now I've been semi emo over the meaning of life for the past few days...

Can anyone offer me some conversation/sympathy to this who won't just smile and back away? (As do my peers)

Don't feel bad Toby, I'm kind of intimidated by this thread also.

As someone who was emo about life just a few weeks ago I'm game.

Let me put this Bauhaus album on and I'll be right with you.

*Lies on the Freudian couch*

Well, it all started with a dream I had that pretty much spelled everything out in a rather symbolic way, but kind of depressed me with the conclusion...

I'll just copy and paste from what I put in the PFYT thread first, coz I'm lazy.




These thoughts continue to hit me. I have one friend (An atheist) who was actually quite gung-ho over these ideas and made several comparisons to stories that theorize similarly. Unfortunately, that wasn't nearly enough to just talk with him for about ten minutes over lunch about the similarities between my theories and "His Dark Materials", and I'm not really quite satistfied.

I talked with my friend who's a passive Jehovah's witness... that didn't exactly go over well...

Today, feeling frustrated, I scribbled out this addendum in my psychology notebook in the minutes that we were supposed to be preparing for the test. (And I think it forced out all my info on Carl Rogers.)

The key mystery lies in whether or not the concept of 'consciousness' is merely an assemblance of chemical reactions adapted for movement of common matter (aka- us) or is 'consciousness' and self awareness a completely new dimension; one that transcends matter and energy, and cannot be recycled, but instead lingers beyond and stays as either a seperate or collective entity.

Then, that means that matter that has developed an awareness of itself has developed the biproduct of a veritable "Soul". Now if that soul, be it collective or a mass of different awarenesses, exists, does it also go by the cycling rules of matter and energy? Or does its new dimension allow it other rules, and does it continue to thrive and grow infinitely?


.....



I think I'm trying to be too scientific. It's kind of defensive though. I get the feeling that if I talk about this too much (like I did in ceramics, where they all just smiled and nodded and their eyes seemed to roll into the back of their heads) I'll be seen as a crazy crackpot spiritualist hippy, who won't just sit down and choose a side already, either that "Jeebus did it. End of story" or "God and souls don't exist. End of story." Considering the people around here... I'll probably get just that kind of reputation.

What does this mean, master?

*sits cross-legged on the floor in a wise manner*

The truh behind the meaning of life has been plauging man since time began. What is our purpose in this world? Do we have a purpose? Where do I go when I die? Do I go anywhere?

I believe in the soul and I believe that all living things have a soul, not plants but humans and animals. Our bodies are just vessels for this life and when we are gone only our empty shell remains and our soul goes on to prepare for the next life.



You are correct. I think we are here to better our surroundings, not by launching some protest against the war on some street corner but by being a good person. It's like when you smile at someone on the street and they smile back, they may go smile at another stranger who will smile back and so on an so on. Little things may seem small on the outside but like the old woman pissing into the sea says "every little bit helps."

I hate to cop out and use a quote but Brad Warner said it best when he said.



I hope I was somewhat helpful to you.

Well, you have to start somewhere. Scientific thought is a model that has the appearance of showing progress where non-scientific thought often appears to fail, which is why it is very appealing. Of course I do not believe that scientific thought is any better or worse than non-scientific thought, but rather that the thinking in scientific terms has more pragmatic results lending itself to appear more "solid" or "correct".

Anyway, I obviously can't answer any of the concerns. I can try to help frame your concerns both theoretically and potentially historically. I think it's interesting to note that histoically there were always concerns about the meaning of life and what lies beyond life. In the Hellenistic period, there was such anxiety about life and the afterlife (i.e. Plato's reincarnation is just brutal and depressing thought), that many felt relief in the thought that there is nothing special about the world. More specifically I'm thinking of the Epicureans and their atomistic views, which reduced all complexities to the sum of atoms. With this comes a sense of relief because there is no need for anxiety or dread as you just are and can simply exist.

I put that out there to show one way that has been viewed, which somewhat resembles a modern scientific reductionism (quite interesting when you think that the Epicureans thought of this thousands of years before atoms were even a real scientific construct). It is also important to see that thinking about meaning and purpose is often a result of our individual psychology (fears, beliefs, anxieties). It's now important to not let our psychology dictate our answers, but rather to investigate the questions for what they are.

So, why do we exist? I don't know. Does it matter why, we just do exist. Whether the hand of God is involved or not, it appears it does not matter. We must now simply act and live. Of course this leaves us with the question of how should we act and live, but I do not want to burden myself with that yet as it requires me to lay more groundwork toward a foundation of ethics.

I then say that we must accept the fact we exist first without worrying about how or why we exist. To worry about the how and why puts the cart before the horse as it increases the anxiety/dread/dispair (or whatever you want to call it) to a point that we become unclear in our thoughts. Does it matter whether or not we have a soul or are just the agregate of our atoms or just brains in a vat? Does it matter at this point whether God made us or not? I say no. It only matters that we accept we exist and have the option to attempt an investigation.

I doubt this helped at all, but it is important in my opinion to try to break out of the "why" cycle until you are grounded in the "what is". From here we then move toward the "why" using whatever methods we can, but hopefully our methods will have a meaningful rationale and be sensible.

I think when it all boils down, it really doesn't matter how or why we exist... though, of course, I being human, I am curious and fear death and fear the possible levels of existence. But you cannot change anything. You can only be created, live, and be destroyed. It is an endless cycle.

I personally am a believer in the soul, or some sort of life force. Perhaps people who have seen ghosts are just imagining them because it has been hammered into our heads since birth that souls are real, or perhaps they truly do see a "spirit". I think that... perhaps, there is a plane out there, another dimension, that is not necessarilly what we think of as heaven or an afterlife. But a possible "space" for emitted energies released from death can occupy. Ghosts that people see here in our dimension on earth are lingering energies. Of course, I base none of this on fact, but I don't think anyone can disprove me, or even prove what they think. So ha. But, assume it is something like that... you have to think, are these energies, this lifespirit eternal like we believe? Or does it dissipate, like radioactive half-life?

I think that there is a life energy, whether it can exist on other planes or not because I believe that it can exist on this earthly plane, at the least. I do believe in ghosts. It can't just be coincidence that there is massive electric activity where ghosts have been seen or believed to exist. There are other things like distortions of light, sounds and objects moving on there on. Also people being chilled around 'said presences'. It sounds like a lame argument, but I don't think even the sharped physicists can explain it either.

Why do so few spirits linger? Does everyone really move onto that farplane that we call the afterlife? Thinking about what all I have said and believe, it makes me really question and wonder, do only certain people have such a life force that is of considerable strength and integrety to keep its composition after the body has died, without immediately dissipating back into the earth's atmosphere?

But can't you change your enjoyment of the life and the enjoyment others will have in life? Or is life just survival alone?



It always feels better to think that we are more than the sum of the neurons in our brains. The kicker is showing how the soul (or mind) interacts with the body (brain). How do they interact if there is a soul/mind (what organ if any does this interaction or more simply what input/output device links the mind and body?



The lack of scientific explanation does not prove ghosts/spirits, but rather proves ignorance. The key here is that the human brain is known to lie to us when we receive inputs that are outside of our normal range (hallucinations, etc...). I don't like jumping to the conclusion that there is ghosts because of collective "senses". There are some collective experiences, which I have found out were based on the fact that a room had high Carbon Monoxide content that went undetected. The "senses" people got mirrored the standard symptoms of a slight poisoning.

In all, it's a question of whether we've looked at every angle both phyical and mental taking into consideration the weaknesses of the mind reason properly.

Well, I mean you cannot change the physical cycle of life, but of course you can change the level and enjoyment. Even if there is no afterlife, I think it is best to enjoy what time you have here *shrug*

What do you mean how they interact? The mind is electrical signals in your brain. They aren't all that separate.

That is true. I do find myself debating on whether ghosts or spirits linger in this world or not. But I am still befuzzled as to how there is always high levels of electricity in the air when people go and investigate places with alleged spirits. Unless all these people are lying and tweaked their tools, which I don't think they would do since it doesn't really help them in any way, it is a very strange occurance. Plus, in haunted places, it's not just "seeing" things. I mean, unless you're really hullucinating, it is kind of hard to see and hear things so vividly. There are many accounts by multiple people who have been in a certain place at various times (days, months, years) with no connection to each other who have seen and heard the EXACT same thing. I mean, unless this hullucinagenic triggers something in the brain so specific that everyone in a certain place sees and hears the same thing while in a euphoric state, well then you have me beat, sir.

There is an afterlife, but what exactly is the afterlife? Is it that your atoms scatter and reinvest into the cosmos or does your soul decompose to be re-used again? Perhaps there is a heaven and hell. The world will never know (until you get there ).


You assume that it is electrical signals in your brain. But if you think there are souls, do those souls interact/have impact upon those electrical signals in your brain? If so, how do they interact?



Multiple experiences are hard to debate, but I still do not consider it evidence in itself. Electrical activity can happen for many reasons.

Here's the question about ghosts/souls. Does the soul retain its identity after death? In essense, is it really the case the when a person dies, that person retains their soul bound together in such a way that it causes the person to have the same identity when it dies.


On a side note, Thomas Aquinas really went down an interesting path regarding the identity of the soul after death because he tried to Christianize Aristotle, who had no concept of individual identity of the soul. People asked whether the soul has eyes, nose, mouth, when disconnected from the body. I think the booklet from Aquinas that talked about some of this was, Against Averroes......

Please read the following, it is another article intended to provoke thought. Whether or not you agree with the following statements, I hope you provide a good basis for intelligent debate, so feel free to read. Rather than trying to offend people, I'm merely trying to provide food for thought. Enjoy...

-Jay

Why Religion Must End: Interview with Sam Harris

A leading atheist says people must embrace rationalism, not faith--or they will never overcome their differences.

Interview by Laura Sheahen

Sam Harris is not your grandfather's atheist. The award-winning writer practices Zen meditation and believes in the value of mystical experiences. But he's adamant in his belief that religion does more harm than good in the world, and has sparked controversy by suggesting that when it comes to faith-based violence, religious moderates are part of the problem, not the solution. Beliefnet editor Laura Sheahen spoke with him about his provocative book "The End of Faith" and his comments at the World Congress of Secular Humanism, where this interview was conducted.

You've said that nonbelievers must try to convince religious people "of the illegitimacy of their core beliefs." Why are these beliefs dangerous?

On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them. Propositions like "Jesus is going to come back in the next fifty years and rectify every problem that human beings create"--or, in the Muslim world, "death in the right circumstances leads directly to Paradise." These beliefs are not very contaminated with good evidence.

There are beliefs--like kids believing in the tooth fairy--that I wouldn't say are dangerous.

Right. Those are not as consequential. But this whole style of believing and talking about beliefs leaves us powerless to overcome our differences from one another. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.

You're saying we should be part of the human race, not part of any particular religious or national group?

Yeah. It is still fashionable to believe that how you organize yourself religiously in this life may matter for eternity. Unless we can erode the prestige of that kind of thinking, we're not going to be able to undermine these divisions in our world.

To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we're deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We're talking about Islam being a religion of peace that's been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that's not a religion of peace, it is Islam.

If 9/11 hadn't happened, what would be the example atheists would point to--another egregious, contemporary misuse of religion?

There are so many. Let's take the extreme case, honor killing in the Muslim world. Imagine the psychology of a man who, upon hearing that his daughter was raped, is inspired not to console her, not to seek immediate medical and psychological treatment for her, but to kill her. This is an honor-based, shame-based psychology. You cannot name a Muslim country to my knowledge where it doesn't happen. It even happens in the suburbs of Paris. It falls right out of the theology of Islam.

What are some problems with Judaism and Christianity?

There is no text more barbaric than the Old Testament of the Bible--books like Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Exodus. The Qur'an pales in comparison.

Richard Dawkins, a vocal atheist, has said the Old Testament God is a "psychotic monster."

Not only is the character of God diabolical in those books, but there are explicit prescriptions for how to live that are not metaphors; they are not open to theological judo. God just comes right out and says "stone people" for a list of offenses so preposterous and all-encompassing that the killing never stops. You have to kill people for working on the Sabbath. You kill people for fornication.

Doesn't the evidence show that people take their sacred texts with a grain of salt?

That's the point: in the West, we have delivered the salt. Obviously, people are no longer burning heretics alive in our public squares and that's a good thing. We in the West have suffered a sufficient confrontation with modernity, secular politics, and scientific culture so that even fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews can't really live by the letter of their religious texts.

We now cherry-pick the good parts. That's easier to do with the Bible because the Bible is such a big book and it's so self-contradictory; you can use parts of it to repudiate other parts of it. Unfortunately, the Qur'an is a much shorter and more unified message.

But you ask me what the scariest things are in Christianity: this infatuation with biblical prophecy and this notion that Jesus is going to come back as an avenging savior to kill all the bad people.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that Christians believe that Jesus is going to come back, period? They don't necessarily believe that he's going to come back as an avenging person to kill people.

One of the things that is overlooked by many Christians is that there is a wrathful Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus comes out and condemns whole towns to fates worse than Sodom and Gomorrah for not liking his preaching. You can find Jesus in some very foul moods.

Look at the theology of the "Left Behind" series of novels and all the religious extremists in our culture who describe a Jesus coming back with a sword and punishing those who haven't lived in his name.

Cherry-picking is a good thing and it's to be hoped that Muslims will eventually cherry-pick as well. But the Qur'an, virtually on every page, is a manifesto for religious intolerance. I invite readers of your website who haven't read the Qur'an to simply read the book. Take out a highlighter and highlight those lines that counsel the believer to despise infidels, and you will find a book that is just covered with highlighter.

Let's return to your idea that people must be convinced of the "danger and illegitimacy" of their core beliefs. How can they be convinced?

It's a difficult problem because people are highly indisposed to having their core beliefs challenged. But we need to lift the taboos that currently prevent us from criticizing religious irrationality.

How do you bring it up, and in what context? At a party?

I'm not advocating that people challenge everyone's religious beliefs wherever they appear. In a crowded elevator, if someone mentions Jesus and you start barking at them, that's not really the front line of discourse.

Whenever you're standing at a podium or publishing a book or article or an op-ed, that's when it's time to be really rigorous about the standards of evidence.

Interpersonally, we don't challenge everyone's crazy beliefs about medical therapies or alien abduction or astrology or anything else. Yet if the president of the U.S. started talking about how Saturn was coming into the wrong quadrant and is therefore not a good time to launch a war, one would hope that the whole White House press corps would descend on him with a straitjacket. This would be terrifying--to hear somebody with so much power basing any part of his decision-making process on something as disreputable as astrology. Yet we don't have the same response when he's clearly basing some part of his deliberation on faith.

Many people consider America to have been founded as a Christian nation. They think many of the Founding Fathers were specifically Christian and very religious, whereas many secularists argue they weren't. You've said the issue is a dead end.

I just think that it's the wrong battle to fight. Even if the [Founding Fathers] were as religious or deranged by their religiosity as the Taliban, their beliefs now are illegitimate. Secularists are on the right side of the debate and fundamentalists in our culture are distorting history. The Founding Fathers--many believed that slavery was a justifiable practice; we now agree that it's an abomination. Anyone trying to resurrect slavery because Thomas Jefferson, that brilliant man, didn't free the slaves--that's an argument that would be so appalling to us now, in terms of 20th-century morality.

You've said the First Amendment is insufficient to protect against encroachments of religion. What would you do to supplement what the First Amendment does?

I'm not eager to monkey with the Constitution. It has to happen at the level of popular, grassroots expectations of what it means to be a rational, well-educated human being.

You've said that people perceive the word "atheist" as along the lines of "child molester." How should atheists present themselves?

I'm very distrustful of finding the right label because labels are ultimately sloganeering. You had the label the "brights," which is stillborn. I think atheism and secularism are also names that ultimately we don't need. We don't need a name for disbelief in astrology. I don't think we need anything other that rationality and reason and intellectual honesty.

In our society, people are rewarded for pretending to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about. You cannot have presidential aspirations without being willing to pretend to be certain that God exists. You have to pander to the similar convictions of 90% of the American population. 70% of Americans claim to feel that it is important that their president be strongly religious. No aspiring politician can fly in the face of those numbers now, so we are rewarding people for false certainty, false conviction.

Clearly, anyone who claims to be certain that Jesus was literally born of a virgin is lying. He's either lying to himself or he's lying to others. There's no experience you have praying in church that can deliver certainty on that specific point.

You're saying it's not verifiable?

It's just not the kind of thing that spiritual experience validates. You can pray in a room to Jesus and even have an experience of Jesus being bodily present. Jesus shows up with a whole halo and the beard and the robes and it's the best experience of your life. What does that prove? You wouldn't even be in the position to know whether the historical Jesus actually had a beard on the basis of that experience.

Yet one thing I argue in my book is that experiences like that are very interesting and worth exploring. There's no doubt that people have visionary experiences. There's no doubt that praying to Jesus for 18 hours a day will transform your psychology--and in many ways, transform it for the better.

I just think that we don't have to believe anything preposterous in order to understand that. [We can] value the example of Jesus, at least in half his moods, and we should want to discover if there's a way to love your neighbor as yourself and generate the kind of moral psychology that Jesus was talking about.

What is your response to people who like science, who agree with it, but who say "It's not enough, it doesn't satisfy me, I need more?"

With religious moderates, you have people talking about just wanting meaning in their lives, which I argue is a total non-sequitur when it comes down to justifying your belief in God.

If I told you that I thought there was a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my backyard, and you asked me, why do you think that? I say, this belief gives my life meaning, or my family draws a lot of joy from this belief, and we dig for this diamond every Sunday and we have this gigantic pit in our lawn. I would start to sound like a lunatic to you. You can't believe there really is a diamond in your backyard because it gives your life meaning. If that's possible, that's self-deception that nobody wants.

What if people prefer self-deception to despair and chaos?

I would argue that is really not the alternative.

What is the alternative? If there's no God who orders things, some people would say there's chaos, it's all random, their life is meaningless. There really is despair out there--especially about evolution.

You don't have to believe in God to have the most extraordinary, mystical experience. Personally, I've spent two years on meditation retreats just meditating in silence for 12-18 hours a day.

You can try to be a mystic, like Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition, without believing Jesus was born of a virgin. You can realize the value of community and compassion and love of your neighbor without ever presupposing anything on insufficient evidence.

There are many ironies here. The [sacred texts] themselves are very poor guides to morality. The only way you find goodness in good books is because you recognize it. They're based on your own ethical intuitions. In the New Testament, Jesus is talking about the Golden Rule--a great, wise, compassionate distillation of ethics. You're doing that based on your intuition.

Hopefully, also, you recognize that stoning someone to death for not being a virgin on her wedding night, or beating your child with a rod, as it recommends in Proverbs, and which millions of Christians do in our country, that's not a good thing. You know that based on your own intuitions and the evolving human conversation about what is ethical and most conducive to human happiness.

You're saying that we can figure out moral, ethical behavior on our own, without benefit of religious concepts.

All we have is human conversation to do this with. Either you can be held hostage by the human conversation that occurred 2,000 years ago and has been enshrined in these books, or you can be open to the human conversation of the 21st century. And if there's something good in those books, then it is admissible in the 21st century conversation on morality.

Some people say the good that religion does outweighs the bad things they get away with because they're religions.

We can do all that good--and we are doing all that good--without any affiliation with religion. It's true there are Christian missionaries doing very fine work in Africa. There are secular groups like Doctors Without Borders doing the same work. They don't need to believe in Jesus coming out of the clouds in order to do that work.

It's not that people don't do good and heroic things on the basis of their dogma, it's just those things aren't best done on the basis of religious dogma. We can agree that famine in Africa is intolerable to us for perfectly compassionate and rational and modern reasons that have nothing to do with beliefs. We just have to believe that it is unethical that people are starving to death while we are throwing out half of our meals.