Comparative Reading

Handsome Bob

Hi all,

I've taken my first venture into becoming a learned(:pac:) person on the subject of Religion today after buying Sam Harris's "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, And The Future Of Reason".

Once I'm finished reading Harris I'd like to continue reading on the subject so I'd love to hear suggestions of work from authors who would both compliment Harris's work (my interest would be the social impact rather than from a scientific angle) and be critical of his stance (so I'd like suggestions from both the religious and non-religious).

On a sidenote, I could feel my face drain of all colour upon reading this passage in Harris (from the 2002 violence between Hindus and Muslims in India, it's not for the weak of heart so BEWARE);

Mothers were skewered on swords while their children watched. Young women were stripped and raped in broad daylight, then...set on fire. A pregnant woman's belly was slit open, her fetus raised skyward on the tip of sword and then tossed onto one of the fires that blazed across the city.

Bloody animals and it's quite scary that man can be inspired to commit such heinous acts.

Húrin

LZ5by5 wrote: »

On a sidenote, I could feel my face drain of all colour upon reading this passage in Harris (from the 2002 violence between Hindus and Muslims in India, it's not for the weak of heart so BEWARE);

...

Bloody animals and it's quite scary that man can be inspired to commit such heinous acts.

Indeed, the work of Harris is celebrated in my signature.

It is one of the mysterys of life from a western POV that people can do such things. Germans and Japanese did just as bad in WW2. I doubt that these people are "animals" - given the same disastrous circumstances many of us would likely do the same. This is a horrifying conclusion but I don't think that I can pretend otherwise.

robindch

LZ5by5 wrote: »

Once I'm finished reading Harris I'd like to continue reading on the subject so I'd love to hear suggestions of work from authors who would both compliment Harris's work (my interest would be the social impact rather than from a scientific angle) and be critical of his stance (so I'd like suggestions from both the religious and non-religious).

Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought is an excellent description of the social and psychological foundations of religious belief. While Harris' books tend to be well-researched polemicals, Boyer's book is generally free from excessive moral outrage and, I reckon, it's a more plausible read for it.

Incidentally, if you're interested in reading up on what's generally referred to as "evil", I recommend Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil which is a book-length look back upon the notoriously awful, but fascinating, Stanford Prison Experiment that Zimbardo ran in 1971.

robindch

and an aside...

From the wikipage on the Stanford Prison Experiment, there's a link to a page on a similarly bizarre social outing that took place in a school in Palo Alto in 1967. Documentation is sparser than seems usual for these kind of things, but if the reports are accurate, it seems that the school's history teacher couldn't explain to his pupils how the German people could credibly (to themselves at least) claim ignorance of the Holocaust. So, in a weird piece of social improvisation, he created, in the space of five days and out of thin air, a distinctly creepy student movement which demonstrated, with a great deal of clarity, exactly how easy it is to lapse into totalitarianism and irrational self-belief at the behest of a charismatic leader. The movement contained rather a lot of the social markers that show up in religion.

A description of the experiment written by the history teacher, Ron Jones, is available here here, while a less idiosyncratic and more plausible account, written by one of the students, is available here.

Der Spiegel resurrected the story and it was subsequently turned into a film by Dennis Gansel -- there's a review here.

Has anybody else come across this one, or seen the film?

Mickeroo

robindch wrote: »

and an aside...

From the wikipage on the Stanford Prison Experiment, there's a link to a page on a similarly bizarre social outing that took place in a school in Palo Alto in 1967. Documentation is sparser than seems usual for these kind of things, but if the reports are accurate, it seems that the school's history teacher couldn't explain to his pupils how the German people could credibly (to themselves at least) claim ignorance of the Holocaust. So, in a weird piece of social improvisation, he created, in the space of five days and out of thin air, a distinctly creepy student movement which demonstrated, with a great deal of clarity, exactly how easy it is to lapse into totalitarianism and irrational self-belief at the behest of a charismatic leader. The movement contained rather a lot of the social markers that show up in religion.

A description of the experiment written by the history teacher, Ron Jones, is available here here, while a less idiosyncratic and more plausible account, written by one of the students, is available here.

Der Spiegel resurrected the story and it was subsequently turned into a film by Dennis Gansel -- there's a review here.

Has anybody else come across this one, or seen the film?

I heard about this yeah, sounds fascinating, I'm dying to see the film. The film is pretty recent yeah?