Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

THE END OF FAITH:  RELIGION, TERROR, AND THE FUTURE OF REASON      By      Sam Harris Reviewed by      Geoffrey W. Sutton The 9/11 Islamic terrorists emblazoned the psychological truism of the path from belief to behavior on the minds of millions. The world saw the lethiferous power of religious belief. We witnessed the purpose driven death. Sam Harris pummels readers with invidious images of destruction associated with religious belief. We may well dispute many of his conclusions but the ineluctable truth is that beliefs matter. At times acerbic, Harris has prepared a puissant polemic focused primarily upon the terror of Islam with ample scathing visited upon Christianity and Judaism.  His thesis is that the beliefs of religious people have become unhinged from reason to the point that meaningful conversations cannot take place.  He asserts that reason is in exile (chapter 1) and that survival requires a return from unproven beliefs to evidenced-based reason when makin

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon     By    Daniel C. Dennett Reviewed by   Geoffrey S. Sutton One Sunday I had the occasion to view both spells in action. A Christian scholar was presenting various theological perspectives on the apocalypse when an attorney interrupted with challenges to the speaker’s shifting from literal to metaphorical interpretations and to textual problems with the doctrine of the trinity. At one point, the theologian, notably frustrated with the challenger, raised his hands, and decried that he did not know the answers to all the questions, noting that humans are ‘‘peanut-brained’’ (repeated twice for emphasis), and that anyone who pretended to understand such mysteries was arrogant.  And that is the problem in discussing religion. It is notably hard to analyze using logic and any questioner is cursed (though I suspect the lawyer had been called worse than "peanut-brained").In this blog, I will summarize and