Met Sam Harris AND Michael Shermer!!

Today I got up extra super early and drove up to CalTech University with fellow ODer An Atheist to hear Sam Harris on a stop on his tour to promote his new book "Letter to a Christian Nation".  Ok, so by extra super early, I mean about 10:15. I’m a dedicated kind of person … nothing, not even an early morning start time can keep me back.

I drove to AA’s place, and we got on the road. It was a good trip… 2 hours long; we sort of listened to a CD that I got this past week — a story which I’ll relate now:

Last Wednesday, on my campus, there was a booth manned by several people with signs that said things like, "Got questions about Islam? Ask Here." and "What does the Koran say about Jesus?"

I was drawn to this booth…because I had so many questions. The guys (all guys) manning the booth seemed eager to answer any and all questions. I talked with them for about 45 minutes… asked a bunch of questions like;
Why do you believe in God? (rough answers ‘i can’t see how the universe came to be unless it was through a creator’)
Why do you believe that there was only one creator; not creators? (because they would fight if they had power… why should there be more than one?)
Why do you think the Koran is true? (because it hasn’t been proved wrong; it has science that people didn’t know at the time; and no one has written a book like it ever since)
Where did Ghandi (not a muslim) go after he died? Heaven or Hell?
(don’t know, Allah gets to choose).

It was a good discussion, but the people in the booth implored me to take several small pamphlet/books, and several audio CDs which "explains things better than we are right now…"

Perfect listening material for two atheists to listen to on the way to hear an atheist speak about the evils of faith/religion. 🙂

The best part was that as I was leaving this booth, they told me to come back next week because they’re planning on having the booth on the walkway every Wednesday for the rest of the year! Expect more entries on that front soon.

All right, so we got the the talk about 45 minutes early, and the place was already getting packed… half hour before it was to begin; they stopped letting people ine. A completely full house. It was pretty ridiculous to see…

There were three speakers, and I took a few notes throughout.  The first speaker was Harvard Astronomer Owen Gingerich. He’s a theist, and he was definitely speaking to a mostly atheist/agnostic crowd (the event was sponsored by The Skeptics Society). His take was that the common question, "if we need an explanation for the universe, saying "god made it" only pushes the question back to ‘who made god?’" wasn’t thinking about the subject correctly… rather, "God doesn’t exist — he is the source of existence."

People tried to get him to clarify what he meant by that in the Q&A section later, but he didn’t add anything to explain himself.

The next guy was Dr. Sloan who wrote "Blind Faith" talked about faith in medicine.  His talk was polished and clear.

It boiled down to this:
Is promoting religion good science? No.
Is it good medicine? No.
Is it good theology? No.

Finally, Sam Harris spoke.

His style was completely different from the first two speakers. He didn’t speak slowly… more like he took his time to make sure each statement he made was completely out there and understood. It was an effective style. His statements were all crafted to have the feel of a sentence that you should write down — a guy even yelled from the audience to repeat a sentence because he was a slow writer.

That reminds me, it was interesting to see how many people around me were taking notes. Out of the 15 people that were immediately around me, 7 were writing notes. My guess is that over the entire auditorium, probably 1/3 were taking active notes. I think the Skeptics group is a different bunch.

The things that made an impact on me about Harris’ talk was the information he gave about the concerted effort by the Christian right.  Patrick Henry College, apparently, has 246 total students – is a fundamentalist Christian college with a specific purpose to produce Christian leaders.  The college puts more interns in the White House and Congress than ANY other university. More than Harvard, Yale, Georgetown… What? That’s crazy. The college has only been around 6 years.

Most of the other things he said, I agreed with.

He said that the reasons that people who are religious give as to why are that either 1. it’s true. or 2. it’s useful.

And he went on to discuss why both of these options fail miserably.

One of the quotes that I wrote that I particularly liked, "Faith is the permission that the religious give each other to believe something when reasons fail."

Other neat things about today: I got to meet Michael Shermer and Sam Harris… I got "Letter to a Christian Nation" signed by Harris to "A Thinking BUM" …