X-Message-Number: 29556 From: Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:30:24 EDT Subject: Sam Harris is brilliant, one of the finest thinkers of our ti... Hello, Fellow Cryonetters! This is Rudi Hoffman from Florida. After a bit of a hiatus of cryonet posting...which evidently others are doing as well, because content has been minimal recently, I am compelled to write an "plug" for two Sam Harris books. I wanted to share that I have finished two books by Sam Harris. His first is called "The End of Faith" and second is "Letter to a Christian Nation." Sam Harris is one of three influential and articulate writers in public discourse currently. The other two being my other heroes Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. This "Troika" of unflinching writing about the dangers of religious dogmatism are doing VERY important work, in my not so humble opinion. May I respectfully suggest that you would find either of these books among the most thought provoking you have ever read? Here is the Sam Harris site: _http://www.samharris.org/_ (http://www.samharris.org/) While people should make up your own minds, of course, about what to think, this freedom should not extend to giving irrationality, or belief with no evidence, the same standing as well reasoned and provisional belief. Cryonet is not a forum for idle philosophy or metaphysics or religion bashing. (Well...except when it is.) We aren't writing at this point, certainly, of the bunny rabbit brought back from liquid nitrogen temperature last week, since this is not yet happening. But public policy...much BAD public policy...is driven by irrational religionists who are unquestionably in power in contemporary America. The ideals of the Enlightenment have been subsumed under religious mythologies. It is time for some of us to take a principled stand against mythologists and theocrats who would take us to equivalent of the Dark Ages. And people can spout all kinds of unlikely and irrational and contradictory nonsense, and, if it is under the banner of "religion" we are not supposed to question this silliness. Sam Harris points out, correctly, that given the number of people in the world with competing mythologies, the very idea that we should have unquestioning belief in "Faith" as a GOOD thing is dangerous. I won't try to do justice to his premise...the website and his books do a much better job of this than I can. But Sam Harris does question the very foundational idea that religious FAITH is a good thing. Even those of us who are skeptics/agnostics/brights/atheists have heretofore not thought this out to the extent Harris does. And he does this in such a compelling, entertaining, and precise manner that the ludicrous nature of the current situation becomes crystal clear. You are considered odd if you don't share the collective delusions of your neighbors. Well, I am about ready to come out of the closet, and become more verbal in my defense of reason and rationality vs. superstition. (We'll see how this goes at my family reunion this Summer...should be interesting. LOL!) I hope I have encouraged at least a few of you to check out these entertaining and refreshing ideas. Thanks for listening. :) Rudi Rudi Richard Hoffman CFP CLU ChFC Board Member Financial Planning Association fpafla.org Board Member Salvation Army salvationarmy.org Member Alcor Life Extension Foundation alcor.org Certified Financial Planner(TM) CFP Board of Standards Member Libertarian Party libertarianparty.org Member National Rifle Association nra.org Member World Transhumanist Association http://transhumanism.org/ World's Leading Cryonics Insurance Provider rudihoffman.com ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com. Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=29556