Quick Personal Aside
Honestly I am afraid of debating with the ones I love, let alone anyone. I grew up thinking it was funny to say that the only thing I will argue about is why arguing is not for me….as a result, I missed the boat named Academic Dialectic or even missed playing with the toys Bicker and Banter. I am afraid to speak my point of view for fear that I might offend, confuse, sever ties, etc. It is about time that I have a few proddings to extract me from this shell. I have been forcing myself out for quite some time now. The skill of back and forth exchange (without instantly conceding or confusing the matter) is rudimentary. Please bear with me! I know these Harris-types are tedious, seemingly hollow, but please wash away any previous filth you received from them!
I love you John and Ed and see you as a father figures…the ones that I wish was there to sing lines of Shakespeare when feeling depressed; the grandpap (there goes the father figure…
) that gets off his keister each day to participate in the activity all around us….yet I want for you to know me, to understand me, even if only “screen-a-screen”. Posting an introduction would not do justice to who I am or what I am about. We are in a friendly space here where nothing can offend us, our words cannot hurt, for we know better. We have little attachment to each others’ beliefs, though we are interested in such beliefs, for our sake, for the purpose of understanding. Thank you for trekking through this jungle when you could be off to better terrain.
I am reminded of the time vs space argument we expressed with Sloterdijk…where is he going with all this…c’mon, get to the point! I also remind myself that faster progress may be a treadmill-like journey. In this post Globes, by Peter Sloterdijk – Conversation #1 - #22 by Douggins I reach a conclusion (though without having read a word of Sloterdijk, mind you!) that the rebirth we are searching for might be found in this lack of urgency. The slow drawl of Harris (Southern? 
), the tedium of remaining on one issue, beating the dead horse has its advantages.
I believe Harris is making progress. He is, in a self-serving manner, taking a mass of atheists, nihilists, science-driven, minion minded, religion bashing blowhards and shaping them into a form of spiritual individuals. We are all approaching the same conclusion from different walks of life. some of us have reached the conclusion sooner, some of us can articulate this better than others. Some of us do not know what the hell is going on. Some of us deny what is right in front of us.
Sam’s turning point was the Weinstein episode #41 (great episode, though I do not want to bore you with more Harris!..I listen at 2x speed, BTW) in which he allowed the guest to politely and intelligently critique Sam’s flaws, to make him aware of the crowd (such as most of us here) that does not wish to hear these religious attacks, arrogant claims…that he fails to see religion for what it is. Harris claimed in that episode to be willing to talk about Rumi and other religious beauty and greatness to his minions but they wouldnt understand…yet Weinstein made it clear that this is not a valid reason for leaving it out. Since then, Sam Harris has cleaned up his presentation style, willing to let things go, and lightened up on religion…though no Rumi or other religious material has been presented…maybe he feels he would lose his street cred and massive amounts of funding from his followers.
I may be living in a pipe dream, but I feel that his psychological changes can influence a mass of individuals to hold hands with religious minded folks and also to allow the religious minded to wade in the rational waters. Even Metzinger, for whatever this guy did to ruffle your feathers, has great ideas and seems to be on our side. The idea of “consciousness ethics” sounds amazing, tangible and reasonable. Please point out what I am not seeing here.
And finally, and hopefully the last I have to add to the conversation via this tangential monstrous space, consider listening again to the final five minutes of the episode again or reading the part of the transcript below.
transcript @ 1'48"
1:48: Clearly what we need is a “spiritual” … and ethical worldview and methodology to put in place of all of the indefensible versions that have come to us courtesy of religion…it has to be embraced in the spirit of science and logical and empirical rigor, but clearly there is more to the story than just understanding the brain and the mind in third person terms…we have to figure out what we mean by a life worth living what the horizons of the well-being of conscious creatures actually encompass…how good is it possible to feel personally and collectively as a human being given our circumstances…and how do we build a civilization that maximizes for the flourishing of conscious creatures like ourselves.
1:49:52 -but I suspect that its possible that our navigation of the space of possible experiences are more open ended…we just have to figure out how to navigate a landscape of mind or possible minds where it is possible to suffer excruciating and pointless misery for a very long time and its possible to move as far away from that as we can conceive into spaces of just purely creative, aesthetically beautiful, intellectually rewarding contact with the cosmos both within us and without us…