On CSPAN2 - Breaking the Spell 12:45pm eastern

[Viva_La_Revolution]

I caught this last week, excellent and entertaining.


Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennett analyzes the purpose of religion in his new book, "Breaking the Spell." The author describes religion as a cultural phenomenon that was developed by natural, evolutionary processes. During his presentation, Mr. Dennett challenges the idea that belief in religion is an outgrowth of supernatural forces. This event was hosted by Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.

Daniel Dennett is a philosophy professor and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of "Brainstorms," "Elbow Room," "Consciousness Explained" and "Darwin's Dangerous Idea," a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.


Beyond belief (review)

snip>
Intellectual honesty and courage are not the only qualities required to read to the end of Breaking the Spell. In his preface, Dennett remarks that every foreign reader who saw drafts of the book complained of its American bias. His defence is that it is aimed at an American audience, since it is American fundamentalism that most threatens what he values about his own society. So, after the preliminary pep-talk to the choir, he gives a very forceful and lucid account of the reasons why we need to study religious behaviour as a human phenomenon: apparently this programme comes as a tremendous shock to those Americans who have never heard of Hume, William James, or even Terry Pratchett.
This is followed by an excellent and clear summary of the state of some new-ish scientific research into the psychology of religious belief. If you want to naturalise religion, as Dennett does, and to show that it is a human activity arising from the normal workings of nature, then you need to discover what parts of our evolved human nature it appeals to. There is in fact quite a lot of psychological research into our capacity to believe in ghosts, spirits and other things for which there is no experimental warrant. The anthropologists Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran have both written interestingly on the subject, and Dennett summarises and credits their work in a way that should do much to promote it.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1716948,00.html

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. What might happen to Religion in the next 100 years...

5 scenarios

1.Religion sweeps the world, but which one?

2.Religion is in it's death throes

3.Religious transforms itself into creed-less moral "teams"

4.Religion diminishes in popularity, like smoking

5.Judgment day

[JDPriestly]

2. Most likely:

The emphasis of religion becomes the individual's spiritual search for the meaning of life.

The history of religion and the study of religious texts are viewed as aids in that search.

The search itself is viewed as an inherent part of being a thinking, feeling being, albeit with very limited capacity to understand the vast universe in which it finds itself due to the individual's limited consciousness, experience, perception, experience and sensory ability.

[ginnyinWI]

3. #4

Religion will go the way it's gone throughout Europe. The harder our gov't. pushes a religion, the more quickly it will die.

[AndyTiedye]

4. Religion Is Diminishing in Popularity But Increasing its Power Anyway

They realize that the only way their repressive religion can survive
in the long run is to impose itself on the people by force, and
that is what they intend to do.