Hey Orlando Residents!

Thursday September 17 Christopher Hitchens will be debating Dinesh D'Souza at the UCF Arena. The tickets are free, and I'll be there! For a little perspective on Hitchens, see him passionately defending the right to free speech in the face of violent threats here. If you want to know something about D'Souza you should check out the quotes at the end of this article.

Bill Moyers interviews Robert Wright

In an earlier post I talked about my visit to an atheist meetup group today. One of the things that was mentioned was this PBS interview with Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God. Wright is a god-believer with a fairly enlightened point of view overall. The book mainly discusses how god belief and religion have evolved over time from stone age spirits that account for everyday events to bronze age pantheons that require animal sacrifices and on up to the modern day. He says in the interview that God is a 'construct' that has the traits that people have assigned to him.

It's when Wright starts talking about ethics that I have a real problem. He acknowledges that our moral sense and intuitions come from biological as well as cultural evolution. He uses game theory to show how in most situations ethics is not a zero-sum game, and cooperation can help everyone. I agree with these points. Wright goes on to say that our evolved moral senses are not perfect, which I also agree with. Then Wright delivers the surprise: belief in a personal god can help our moral development - we're better off with faith than without.

After all the good sense he was making before, I'm not sure why he chooses this moment to jump off the wagon. All of the great moral advancements of the past two centuries have been made not because of religion but over the loud objections of religion. The end of slavery, the expansions of voting rights, the civil rights movement all had prominent clergy quoting the bible trying to stand in the way of progress. Certainly some of the the people involved in these positive developments happened to be religious, but they often took their inspiration from outside their faith and brought the new understanding inside, reinterpreting the bible or other source of dogma through a new perspective.

ROBERT WRIGHT: One of my own closer contacts with, I would say, a form of consciousness that's closer to the truth than everyday consciousness, came at a Buddhist meditation center. These were essentially secular Buddhists and that was the context of the experience.

But through the meditative practice performed intensively for a week. No contact with the outside world. No speaking. Five and a half hours of sitting meditation a day. Five and a half hours of walking meditation a day. I reached a state of consciousness that I think is closer to the truth about things than the form of consciousness that is kind of natural for human beings.

BILL MOYERS: Was it a consciousness that had an ethical and moral issue in it or was it a state of being? A state of simple acceptance?

ROBERT WRIGHT: Well, it absolutely had ethical implications because it involved much broader acceptance of other beings and it involved being less judgmental of other beings. I mean it reached almost ridiculous extremes. Look looking down at weeds and thinking, "I can't believe I've been killing those things. They're actually as pretty as the grass. Prettier."

But in the realm of humanity, I mean I was just by the end being very much less judgmental about just people I would see on the street.

'Weeds' are what we make of them - they're any plant that the gardener is not interested in growing in a particular spot, a completely constructed idea. It took Wright ten hours of meditation a day to realize that some of them are pretty, and that you might at some point change your definition of what a weed is? It took him ten hours of meditation a day to be less judgmental to strangers?

I hardly see this as a great triumph of religious moral reasoning. If anything the environment Wright describes is the near lack of any culture whatsoever. Simply being absent from his judgmental patriarchial religious context for a short while allowed Wright to decompress a bit and refine his moral understanding. Did the Buddha do this? No, he did it himself. Kudos to Wright for the tentative advancements, but I'm not sure how he credits religion for this.

At the end of the clip I'm scratching my head and wondering why it came so highly recommended.