[MD] The End of Faith

[MarshaV]

Stephen,

Liking Ayn Rand doesn't make his review totally bogus.   He both 
praised and criticized the book.  I thought it worth 
consideration.  I call myself an atheist, not because I have a 
feeling of affection for the word.  I use the word because it's not 
wishy-washy.  Such deeply embedded dogma needs more than wishy-washy 
platitudes to challenge it.  Whether god exists is as interesting to 
me as whether Tinkerbell exists.  It's too silly for 
consideration.  But the doctrine and dogma warrant a noisy challenge 
from all who would dare to.

Marsha

At 10:04 AM 1/22/2008, you wrote:
>Hi Marsha,
>
>This guy seems to be a big Ayn Rand fan and dismisses mystical 
>experience out of hand. Harris has gotten a lot of flack from 
>atheists for his openness to mysticism.
>
>In a lot of this guy's critiques he seems to miss what Harris is saying.
>
>He wants The End of Faith to be a philosophy book, and I can relate 
>to his wanting a more systematic philosophy. Reading the book 
>through the lens of the moq, I think it holds up well.
>
>One of his main critiques is one suggested by Platt that reason 
>requires a leap of faith.
>
>He says, "A grave weakness of this book is that it neither 
>summarizes nor points its reader to an adequate defense of reason as 
>a means of gaining valid knowledge. Rather, the book seems to either 
>assume that the reader agrees with the validity of reason, that no 
>such validation is necessary, or worst, that no such validation is 
>possible. As a result, the book is vulnerable to the charge that its 
>author is asking us to accept -- on faith -- the validity of reason! 
>As I have already said, the book is quite sloppy philosophically..."
>
>Harris doesn't say that reason is how we "gain" knowledge, he just 
>says that our knowledge should stand to reason. In MOQ terms reason 
>is just a synonym for intellectual quality.
>
>In evaluating whether faith is a good or bad thing we don't need to 
>define what intellectual quality is or prove the "validity of 
>reason." We only need to say that it is bad to believe things that 
>are of low intellectual quality which in MOQ terms is obvious.
>
>When people appeal to faith in religion while they appeal to reason 
>and evidence in every other area of their lives,  they are admitting 
>that what they are claiming is of low intellectual quality and then 
>patting themselves on the back for believing it anyway.
>
>Regards,
>Steve
>
>
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DEFINITION of  Marsha, I, me, self, & etc.:   Ever-changing 
collection of overlapping, interrelated, inorganic, biological, 
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