TED Relents, But Whose Hash Has Been Settled? ~ Deepak Chopra

In the last go-round with Chris Anderson, the head of TED, I asked if he could locate and post the TED talk I gave in 2002 in response to a preceding talk by the militant atheist Richard Dawkins. Anderson has cordially complied, and for anyone who is interested, here are links to the pair of videos:

Dawkins on militant Atheism.

Chopra 2002 talk at TED. View HERE .

An open forum is all that I requested, and recognizing that TED is a private organization, they weren’t obliged to cooperate. It’s nice that they did, and I’m grateful.

In some quarters TED did me a favor by withholding the video of my talk, because I embarrassed myself and will draw even more ridicule from any scientists who view it. I am slightly embarrassed that I began by calling Dawkins a “fundamentalist and perhaps a bigot,” which sank to the level of discourse he specializes in. But the shocking part is that my points seem so eminently reasonable.

I held that modern science, although a great thing, makes the mistake of separating the observer and the observed. By positing a universe “out there” that can be measured at a safe distance, physics overlooks the obvious fact that we ourselves are part of the universe; in fact, we are an activity that cannot be separated from the total activity of the universe. This is by no means an outrageous claim. The eminent physicist John Wheeler argued passionately for a participatory universe, and the necessary link between observer and observed is part of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics.

That TED considers these ideas — which have far-reaching implications in every discipline — to be ridiculous underlines how out of touch their science board must be, or how enthralled by Dawkins-style propaganda. Atheism has nothing to say on these issues, anymore than believing in God or not has anything to do with the wavelength of infrared light.

My talk doesn’t promote God; I even have some skeptical things to say about religion and faith. But the moment I used hot-button words like God, spirit, intelligence, consciousness, and worst of all, design (not remotely in a creationist context), there was fluttering in the dovecote, Dawkins drew the wagons together at TED, and now, a decade later, the same dogmatism is in effect. The extent to which it is openly enforced remains TED’s business.

The affair that began with two suppressed tapes and open warnings to TEDx organizers that they must not step outside mainstream science has run its course. I imagine that TED now realizes there are more toes to be stepped on than Dawkins’. But I smiled at an anecdote that I began my talk with. A Christian fundamentalist was once conversing with the noted India spiritual teacher, J. Krishnamurti.

“The more I listen to you, the more convinced I am that you must be an atheist,” the fundamentalist said.

“I used to be an atheist,” Krishnamurti replied, “until I realized that I was God.”

The fundamentalist was shocked. “Are you denying the divinity of Jesus Christ?”

Krishnamurti shrugged. “I’ve never denied anyone their divinity. Why would I do it to Jesus Christ?”

That the audience laughed at this anecdote while militant atheists scowled, seeing an imminent danger to sanity, reason, science, and public safety, shows how far apart two worldviews can be. But I persist in believing that an expanded science will take consciousness into account, including higher consciousness. Until it does, our common goal, to understand the nature of reality, will never be reached. A universe that we aren’t participating in makes no sense, and our participation takes place at the level of consciousness, nowhere else.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE DEAD: A Former Atheist Interviews the Source of Infinite Being ~ Sondra Sneed

“As for the skeptic or fundamentalist, I have no interest in the exhaustive attempt to prove that I talk to the creator of the universe, or even that this great being talks to me. I leave that up to my reader to decide. To believe or not believe that I have had a discussion with the supreme nature we call God does not affect the content of this book.”

What to Do When You’re Dead is a fascinating dialogue between the creator of the universe and a 46-year-old woman who, in her life, has been to hell and back. Imagine finding out that you may hold the secret to man’s survival. Imagine also learning for the first time why you were born and that your work on earth is already recorded in the book of life. It happened to Sondra Sneed, and you get a front row seat to the life of a reluctant messenger bringing forth a message that could save humankind . . . if humans are willing to listen.

What you are about to read will change the way you think about your life. You will remember that you are a process of God. And when you discover what you are, God discovers you. You will find in this book the very reason you were born, and why it is so important to find your place on that path. This is not a touchy-feel-good spiritual guide as much as it is an awakening with a warning about man’s self destruction. The warning comes with a unique responsibility however, and that is to learn why death is not real, and that our experience of crossing over to the other side is directly linked to our state of mind while on earth before passing. Darkness must be overcome, or the soul will remain trapped in the past and attached to things of the world, rather than following spirit to the light of God.

Available Soon

Sondra Sneed is a science and technology writer for industry, and a former atheist with a secret. All the years she spent interviewing scientists and engineers, translating their high-minded knowledge for lay persons, she has also been interviewing the highest mind, the Creator of the Universe. She is also the author of two as yet unpublished books, The Real Story of the Garden of Eden, and The Meaning of Life’s Design
My books came today

Intro: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, upcoming book by Sondra Sneed

To introduce her recently completed manuscript, WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE DEAD, this video essay describes branching, inter-connected networks as being the indications of life, and they work to facilitate flow. This manuscript was produced, she says, when Sneed sat down to write a book “for the rest of the world,” after seven years “in secret communion with God.” She comes forward with “great reluctance” because, she says, these messages have evolved from profound, spiritual teachings to all out warnings about the future of humankind. These warnings are that human beings are “on a path of self-destruction and may not make it past the next two generations.”

In the course of her years as a godscribe, Sneed noticed a pattern that repeats itself throughout nature. She says this pattern reveals nature as a creative being and becoming. She also says that while some of us can think of this essence as God, it is just as easily modeled through the lens of evolution by way of observing its processes. She believes these processes have meaning and indicate consciousness, but not the way humans think of cognition.

ON VIABILITY

“In this pattern there are mechanisms that uncover a process of life creating life,” she says. Sneed also says it is within this life-creating-life cycle that we have disrupted an ancient, bifurcating pattern, a replication of nature’s systems. As such we are now killing off our future as a viable species on the planet. This pattern, dubbed in 1996 as the constructal law of physics, is formed by the distribution of supplicating nutrients. “These nutrients are a product of the ‘will of being’ constructing a never-ending pathway toward the nature of becoming,” she says.
–
Her next video will reveal disturbing news about the conditions facing humankind today that may result in self-destruction in less than a few generations.
Are Humans Wiping Themselves Off the Planet?

Here are the issues facing humankind today, according to God and Science:

• We are choking ourselves off from our resources and the source of all life;
• We are depleting the oxygen levels that are essential for sustaining human life;
• We are making a big mistake to think fossil fuels are causing the planet to heat-up, what’s causing this is the destruction of the biosphere, and the elimination of trees that enable water cycles
• We are also poisoning our own food supply

SPIRITUAL ENVY: An Agnostic’s Quest ~ Michael Krasny

As the host of one of National Public Radio’s most popular interview programs, Michael Krasny has spent decades leading conversations on every imaginable topic and discussing life’s most important questions with the foremost thinkers of our time. Now he brings his wide-ranging knowledge and perceptive intelligence to a thoughtful and thought-provoking exploration of belief — and lack of belief.

Many books and pundits advocate for a specific God, while others adamantly declare there is no God. Yet these strident viewpoints often speak right past each other, rarely convincing anyone but the already convinced. In Spiritual Envy, Krasny helps believers and nonbelievers alike understand their own questions about faith and religion, about God and human responsibility.

Krasny challenges each of us to look closely at faith and its power, and to examine the positive and negative aspects of religion as expressed in culture, literature, and human relationships. Personal and universal, timely and timeless, this is a deeply wise yet warmly welcoming conversation, an invitation to ask one’s own questions — no matter how inconclusive the answers.
Spiritual Envy: Michael Krasny on Losing Faith

Michael Krasny, host of KQED’s award-winning radio show “Forum,” explains what led him to write his new book, Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest. Recalling the comfort of his unwavering childhood faith in the face of physical abuse, Krasny traces his later agnosticism to his intellectual pursuits.

—–

Unlike recent authors who emphatically say No! or Yes! to God, Michael Krasny joins the millions who know they don’t know. As a radio host, college professor, and literary scholar, he has spent decades leading conversations on every imaginable topic. He has discussed life’s most important questions with the foremost thinkers in virtually every discipline. And yet answers to some questions — the big, three-o’clock-in-the-morning questions — elude him. Despite this, Krasny does not discount belief systems or ridicule faith. Instead, he seeks. He explores morality, eternal life, why we do good, and why evil sometimes triumphs, and his quest is informed by artists, scientists, world events, and even films. Personal and universal, timely and timeless, Spiritual Envy is a deeply wise yet warmly welcoming conversation, an invitation to ask one’s own questions — no matter how inconclusive the answers.

Michael Krasny, PhD, hosts the nation’s most listened to locally produced public radio talk show, Forum with Michael Krasny. Forum is heard weekdays on KQED-FM in San Francisco, an affiliate of National Public Radio, as well as on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio. An award-winning broadcaster who has interviewed many of the great cultural icons of our era, he is the author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life (Stanford University Press) and coauthor of Sound Ideas (McGraw-Hill). Krasny is also an English professor at San Francisco State University. – Commonwealth Club of California

Michael Krasny, Ph.D., is host of KQED’s award-winning Forum, a news and public affairs program that concentrates on the arts, culture, health, business and technology.

Before coming to KQED Public Radio in 1993, Dr. Krasny hosted a night-time talk program for KGO Radio and co-anchored the weekly KGO television show Nightfocus. He hosted Bay TV’s Take Issue, a nightly news analysis show, programs for KQED Public Televison, KRON television and National Public Radio, and did news commentary for KTVU television.

Since 1970 he has been a professor of English at San Francisco State University and is a widely published scholar and critic as well as a former regular contributor to Mother Jones magazine and a fiction writer. He has also worked widely as a facilitator and host in the corporate sector and as moderator for a host of major non-profit events.
Authors@Google: Michael Krasny

Michael Krasny visits Google’s San Francisco office to present his book “Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest”. This event took place on January 26, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Books by agnostics about their agnosticism (unlike the prolific atheists) are anything but a dime a dozen. In fact, Krasny’s latest is one of only a dozen or so published this century. Krasny may be a university professor, but he doesn’t address his questions as an academic. He explores agnosticism the way he explores topics on his daily NPR show—in a thoughtful, informed, and almost conversational tone. The main difference is this isnt just any issue; it’s Krasny’s own story. The author’s honesty begins with the book’s title. He obviously envies the feelings of peace and comfort that people of faith experience. Keeping him from it, though, are innumerable questions.

The book presents these ruminations with only hints to the answers. The questions involve issues like the Ten Commandments, God’s existence, evil, and tolerance. Along the way, Krasny brings many people into the conversation—fellow agnostics like Thomas Huxley, atheists like Richard Dawkins, and even biblical characters like Job. The author’s nondogmatic stance will please virtually all readers.

Lennox Vs. Dawkins Debate – Has Science Buried God?

Oxford Museum of Natural History hosts this fascinating and controversial debate on the existence of God. Professor John Lennox explains how science points to an intelligent creator and Richard Dawkins offers a counterargument.

When Dawkins was asked if he ever considered God, he said, “”Yeah maybe I have, but if I have, so what? It doesn’t make it true. That’s what it matters.”

To this I’d like to ask him, how does he know if “it” is not true? Haven’t see any evidence? How does it matter to the very existence of God? Does God disappear just because someone thinks there’s no “evidence?” Someone is appealing to his own ignorance here if you ask me.

Richard Dawkins & Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury discuss human nature & ultimate origin

Richard Dawkins & Rowan Williams The Archbishop of Canterbury discuss Human Beings & Ultimate Origin, 23rd February, Oxford, moderated by Anthony Kenny.

Richard Dawkins And Archbishop Rowan Williams To Go Head-To-Head Over Origins Of Man

The Archbishop of Canterbury and atheist Professor Richard Dawkins are set to go head to head to discuss man’s greatest question.

The leader of the Church of England will meet Britain’s most famous non-believer to take on the complex subject of “The nature of human beings and the question of their ultimate origin”.

The pair – who may be unlikely to find much common ground – will be joined by philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny at the event at Oxford University.

The discussion, which organisers expect to be “invigorating and enlivening”, is fully booked but will be streamed live online on February 23.

The two men have exchanged views on evolution and the existence of God before.

In a programme broadcast on Channel 4 in 2010, Prof Dawkins asked Dr Rowan Williams if he would see God as having any role in the evolutionary process.

Dr Williams said: “For me, God is the power or the intelligence that shapes the whole of that process.

“As creator, God’s act is the beginning of all creation.”

At which point Prof Dawkins intervened and asked: “So by setting up the laws of physics in the first place in which context evolution takes place?”

Dr Williams replied: “Things unfold within that.”

In the programme Prof Dawkins said that Dr Williams uses “poetic language”, adding: “There does come a time when you worry that people are going to misunderstand it.”

In an article on his website, published earlier this month, Prof Dawkins said of Dr Williams: “My suggestion is that the best way to understand Rowan Williams is to remember that he is a poet.

“And maybe this is the best way to understand other theologians.

“When Williams speaks of ‘silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark’, we laugh because we read it through rational spectacles.”

In the article, Prof Dawkins suggests that theologians, such as the Archbishop of Canterbury, don’t really “understand the difference between literal truth and poetry; or literal truth and metaphor”.

He goes on: “And this is where I would take issue with them, because for me a question like “Does God exist?” is not just a matter of poetry or metaphor.

“It has an answer, true or false (which is not to say the answer is easy to discover: it may even be impossible).”

Rationality and Irrationality in Believers and Atheists ~ Deepak Chopra

An outspoken band of atheists has chalked up an impressive record of articles, best-selling books, and wide public recognition. To buttress their arguments against the existence of God, leading anti-religionists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have borrowed the prestige of science. Which makes for a clean and simple dichotomy. Religion is irrational, bound up with superstition, emotions, and wishful thinking. Science is rational, dedicated to data, fact-finding, and impartial objectivity. The problem with such a simple picture is that it isn’t true and never was.

Without a hint of irony, New Scientist magazine has just published an article by Jonathan Lanman entitled “Religion is irrational, but so is atheism.” It’s an eye-opening piece, although by the time one gets to the end, it seems self-evident that atheists are of course emotional, biased, blinded to arguments that don’t fit their world view, and prone to gross over-statement. Lanman, a lecturer in anthropology at Oxford, makes the following points:

To begin, he cites research which questions the popular assumption that the more educated you are, the less likely you will be religious. In fact, the “Enlightenment assumption,” on which atheists lean heavily (equating religious belief with ignorance, to put it bluntly), isn’t proven to be valid. Lanman asserts that we have little real knowledge about why some people believe in God and others don’t. He points to a wealth of evidence that shows how vast the unconscious brain is and how mysterious the forces that shape us. This mystery applies to everyone, not simply the devout.

Instead of claiming that something has gone wrong in the brains of believers — another ploy favored in atheist rhetoric — Lanman suggests that environment has a great deal to do with what we believe. There is abundant evidence for that, too. Yet as a first step, we have to ask what we are studying. There isn’t one atheism but many, according to Lanman’s extensive research in the U.S., U.K., and Europe, ranging “from a lack of belief in God to a lack of belief in all supernatural agents to a moral opposition to all religions.”

In the midst of this confusion, he found that two phenomena leapt out as his studies progressed. The first was that a large number of people don’t believe in any supernatural agents in the universe, despite the fact that religion is worldwide. The second is moral opposition to religious belief. “For many, religions are not just factually wrong but morally harmful and to be opposed.” Looking at these two factors, Lanman notes that “nontheists,” people who have no particular religious beliefs, aren’t the same as “strong atheists,” who judge against and condemn religion. Lanman was intrigued that these two groups, which seem like allies, are negatively correlated. “Denmark and Sweden, for instance, have the highest proportion of non-theists but very little strong atheist sentiment or activity. The U.S., however, has a very low proportion of non-theists but significant levels of strong atheism.” Why?

In a word, threat, he says. There is compelling evidence that societies that rank high in security and well-being are much less religious than insecure societies where life is hard. Presumably, if you feel good about your life and others around you aren’t religious, there’s not much reason to adopt an attitude of moral outrage and condemnation of believers. Yet Pres. Obama wasn’t exactly right that people “cling to guns and religion” when life goes wrong — rather than turning to consoling beliefs, people in distress have negative religious views (as is evident from the hell fire and damnation style of much Bible Belt preaching). In contrast, the most comforting religious ideas, such as New Age spirituality or hell-less Christianity, flourish in the affluent west.

Here Lanman strikes down one of the cherished arguments of strong atheists: “Psychologically, we have little to no evidence that our minds will believe in something just because it would be comforting to do so.” It was always short-sighted — and incredibly condescending — for science-minded atheists to claim that believers are basically children looking for comforting fairy tales. If the comfort thesis is wrong, there’s a better explanation, which Lanman calls “threat and action”: there is strong evidence “that feeling under threat increases commitment to in-group ideologies, whether they are religious ideologies or not.” It should make atheists think twice to realize that their motives for attacking religion are kin to those who defend it. Both in-groups are motivated by emotion, bias, peer pressure, and the habit of “us” versus “them” thinking.

It’s crucial to note that Lanman isn’t defending religion, which he explains as a set of actions and beliefs rooted in many kinds of irrational responses to threat. Belonging to the in-group creates fertile ground for superstition and irrational behavior to grow. Atheists look much the same as viewed by an anthropologist: “Strong atheism is not the absence of an in-group ideology but the defense of one: modern secularism.” The ideology underpinning secularism sprang up in the West after the Reformation, leading to its present secular form, in which “citizens use their rational minds to cooperate and improve their lives.” Thus when religions stubbornly adhered to a belief “that the purpose of life should be transcendent rather than earthly well-being, religions themselves became anti-social and even immoral.”

Lanman has more evidence to cite, but his overall conclusion is simple. Our beliefs and behaviors are not based on dispassionate reason. In hindsight this may seem blindingly obvious, but in fact the cutting edge of brain research delves into the merging of reason and emotion in the brain, following the pathways that connect the two. Neuroscience has concluded that decisions are never devoid of emotion and that “lower” brain responses like emotion have privileged pathways that the higher brain cannot override until time has passed and the cerebral cortex is allowed to enter the picture with its rational faculties (that’s why you jump first when you hear a gunshot and only a few seconds later decide that it was only a car backfiring).

Speaking personally, as an advocate for spirituality but not for organized religion, I have rarely met debaters more disputatious, biased, close-minded, unfair in argument, and blinkered in their certainties than professional atheists. They believe that they are completely rational. Yet experience shows that people who think they have excluded their emotions in reality are unconscious about what emotions are and the power they exert over all of us. Science has much to say about spirituality, and vice versa. They aren’t enemies or natural opposites. What we should be aiming at is an expanded science that reveals the whole person, and using that perspective, we may be able to understand the wholeness of nature. At least we can take the first step, which is to throw out the claim that believers are superstitious and ignorant while atheists are the epitome of rationality. Neither, it turns out, is true.

Richard Dawkins: One Fact to Refute Creationism

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/10/07/Richard_Daw…

Biologist Richard Dawkins identifies what he views is the single most compelling fact to refute Creationism — but states that the real problem lies in convincing Creationists to listen to the evidence. “What they do is simply stick their fingers in their ears and say ‘La la la,’” says Dawkins. “You cannot argue with a mind like that.”

—–

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion created a storm of controversy over the question of God’s existence. Now, in The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins presents a stunning counterattack against advocates of “Intelligent Design” that explains the evidence for evolution while keeping an eye trained on the absurdities of the creationist argument.

More than an argument of his own, it’s a thrilling tour into our distant past and into the interstices of life on earth. Taking us through the case for evolution step-by-step, Dawkins looks at DNA, selective breeding, anatomical similarities, molecular family trees, geography, time, fossils, vestiges and imperfections, human evolution, and the formula for a strong scientific theory.

Dawkins’ trademark wit and ferocity is joined by an infectious passion for the beauty and strangeness of the natural world, proving along the way that the mechanisms of the natural world are more miraculous — a “greater show” — than any creation story generated by any religion on earth. – Berkeley Arts and Letters

Richard Dawkins is a world-renowned evolutionary biologist and author. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and, until recently, held the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. His first book, The Selfish Gene, was an instant international bestseller, and has become an established classic work of modern evolutionary biology.

He is also the author of The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, A Devil’s Chaplain, The Ancestor’s Tale The God Delusion, and most recently, The Greatsest Show on Earth.

Professor Dawkins’s awards have included the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London (1989), the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday Award (1990), the Nakayama Prize for Achievement in Human Science (1990), The International Cosmos Prize (1997) and the Kistler Prize (2001).

He has Honorary Doctorates in both literature and science, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Can We Trust The Bible Written 2000 Years Ago? Dr. William Lane Craig

Can We Trust The Bible Written 2000 Years Ago?

Best Argument for Belief in God? Dr. William Lane Craig

Best Argument for Belief in God?
Answered by
Dr. William Lane Craig

Who Designed The Designer? a response to Dawkins’ The God Delusion by Dr. William Lane Craig

Who Designed The Designer? a response to Dawkins’ The God Delusion

Answered by
Dr. William Lane Craig
Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology

http://www.reasonablefaith.org