Three things I have to say, @bobknight33:
1. You're complaining about christianity being attacked. Ok, fine, I'll tell you something: I am tired of your religious beliefs invading my life like an middle eastern dictator a small, oily country. Oh, I have it good, I'm a straight, white middle-european man, I'm fine so far. Others are not. They're tired as well.
I can go on a meth-bender, marry one of the Kardashians in Vegas and annul the whole affair in less than a week. If I win the lottery, I can post on Craigslist and get myself a nice gold-digging whore who'll sign a certificate that makes us husband and wife if I'm willing to trade lackluster blowjobs for money. Best part, it ain 't prostitution if you're married, legally worldwide. Heck, I can even become an abusive piece of shit as long as I can beat her well enough so she won't complain to others.
Because marriage is sanctimonious.
If I was gay and would like to marry the guy of my dreams that I've been with for 20 years, that isn't possible. Because the book doesn't approve.
If my sister got raped, you people would force her to birth the child of her rapist. Her concerns don't matter, life is a holy gift from god. Care to explain to me the position of the catholic church (you know, those christians that make up the majority of christianity) on slavery during centuries slavery? How holy was life in all those european colonies back in the day with all these missionaries teaching the good book? What exactly was their statement as an organisation when millions or people were murdered during the third Reich?
All that silence but when it comes to abortion, you people show up with guns and show the value of this great gift by murdering doctors. Fuck my sisters concerns, right? It just rape, walk it off.
I'm well of, I could join the club as a full member anytime. As long as I'm not calling the cops on the pedophile priests and the self-loathing faggots can stand on their pulpits and tell little children they're broken. I could be among you.
But I have a conscience. I can't buy all that talk about love and forgiveness and ignore all that hatred and cruelty that is in the very basis of your beliefs, that wretched, old bible of yours.
I have to look that man in the mirror in the eyes.
The only way you can impose all that crap on me anymore if through the government. I believe your faith has as much place in there than Tom Cruise's. None.
The Prodigy said it best and I think the people who lived at the time the bible was written would agree: Invaders must die.
Your religion invades my rights as a human being.

2. Did he rise?
Nope, little, brown Jewish got killed. End of facts, begin of story. I don't trust the testimony of men (and I said this before) who consider a walkman witchcraft. People at that time could be convinced that they farted because they swallowed an angry spirit that wants to escape.
You book did a terrible job of explaining how the world came to be (we're golems that had so much incest that they inbred mankind), makes up the worst disastermovies (everything turns to Waterworld but we have a boat with a pair of every animal in existence [imagine all those different kinds of ants alone] and then incest till population is back up) and turns mushroomtrips/mental illness in supposedly accurate future predictions (you know it's the end of the world because none of the riders is called "Incest").
The only reason people buy into the mythology and the extended universe (where's that bible chapter about Satan ruling the Sarlac Pit and Santa being canon again? ) is because for centuries children were taught it at a young age. And then you told them not to question it as heretics get the stake. Ashes yes but not the quick Buffy way.
Don't get me wrong, I like that Jesus fellow and I'm willing to believe his basic message but let's be honest. If J.K. Rowling was born 2000 years earlier, we'd pray to Harry Potter and wear lightning shaped jewelery around our neck. You guys got big because the Roman empire made you relevant. That's it.

3. What's up with '53'? Is that the christian answer to '42'?

Ask the engineers whether religion influenced their lives or not - you don't speak for them.

"Religion" doesn't claim anything (it's not an entity). People who have religious beliefs sometimes have. I've never seen it claimed except in movies. Perhaps you live in an area where it is often claimed (and I feel sorry for you if that is the case). Either way - don't paint religious people the world over with the same brush because of your limited experience (note: everyone has limited experience one way or another - it's just the way it is).

Science doesn't do anything by itself. People use the scientific method to achieve things. In a device like this, it is a biomedical engineer doing most of the work. Funnily enough this happens to be my field (I moved over to it from health science a few years back - just a few years study left....).

Meanwhile, religious people built much of what you enjoy today which utilises the scientific method as a starting point.

Your idea of religion, while sometimes true in a very limited sense, is maligned and doesn't correspond with anything but the current anti-religion zeitgeist. Which is a pity because you seem like a smart person and could do much good for other people (and in general hating on people doesn't achieve that). Perhaps in time you'll reconsider people with religious beliefs in a better light.

Perfect and *quality reactions from the interviewer.

If the car breaks down they will be raped on the road...so instead we'll make them walk down the roads.
Our better solution is to have foreign female drivers drive them around.
I'm just guessing, but it seems the thought must be either, 'cars don't break down for foreign female drivers' or 'the foreign female drivers will be raped instead of the female passengers'?

It's always amazing to me how certitude in religious beliefs, especially those that benefit/elevate the speaker over others, can make people so thoroughly blind to their own position's complete insanity and ridiculousness.

"you appear,and please correct me if i am wrong,to pigeon hole anybody who claims a religion as being a fundamentalist"

I hereby correct you, I did no such thing, and did not mention fundamentalism.

"to say religion has not produced a single novel or new idea,totally ignores the massive contributions in regards to:philosophy,math,astrology,physics.the list is pretty extensive."

Extensive, huh? I'd like to see that list, in fact, enlighten me, and mention just ONE idea that was actually helped along by religion? Do you mean any idea that comes from a person defined as religious in any way? Can you show, in no uncertain terms, that it was the persons religious beliefs that helped solve a particular problem?

The closest I can think of is someone like Mendel, a monk, because his monastary allowed him to spend lots of time growing and studying pea-plants. But you can hardly call it a result of religious studies. If anything, Mendel must have skipped some biblereading to count all his peas.

What I'm talking about is when a proper good idea or concept has emerged from studying or following religious scripture or teaching.

I do appreciate her skepticism, but she gets so worked up about it I think she is a little batty. And if she used her own reasoning on what I believe are her religious beliefs, I think her head would spin off. It' s also brought up that there's lots of information available to explain evolution, but she's not willing to seek it out and this is also why she's not a scientist.

A simple "no" does not allow the man to drop some knowledge though. A simple "no" does not cause anyone to possibly rethink their position.

I don't think NDT thinks he is going to convince anyone that their religion is false. He probably feels his time is better spent trying to get people to stop rejecting science just because it might go against or does not support their religious beliefs and that science does not have to be the enemy of their religion.

He never said "religion tells you how to get to heaven". He used Galileo as an example of how one can keep religion and science separate....how what they believe or are taught "how to go to heaven" vs "how the heavens go".

Yes....it is superstitious bullshit from A to Z. But if the man answers the question with "NO, because its all superstitious bullshit"...the only people listening at that point are the people that already agree with that statement.

Derren Brown has publicly stated something to effect of his goal is to blur the line between what is possible and what has been staged. I forget the exact quote, but when I read it certainly explained some of his more 'extreme' mental 'tricks'. In particular his trick of taking a 'random' crowd and instantly converting them to some religious belief, and taking random normal people and very quickly talking them into performing an armed robbery in short order. Sorry, but using plants in the audience is well enough for me in most magic tricks. When the SOLE magic trick though is controlling or reading the audience member's mind using plants isn't a 'trick' anymore. It's just lying and I no longer count that as interesting or at all impressive.

On the subject of feces, I am reminded of an aspect of the Uygur/Harris debate that I wanted to pick up.

As they were discussing torture, Harris was rather convinced of his understanding that death would be worse than having your holy book mistreated or being sprayed with (fake) menstrual blood.

This fails to appreciate a major drive behind the use of torture: to "reset" a human mind, to have the subject betray whatever is most sacred to him/her. The torture at Gitmo/Baghram was directly aimed at one of the most defining aspects of their victims' personalities, namely their religious beliefs.

All of this was beautifully illustrated in Southern America when the torturers' aim was to completely negate the societies' strong sense of solidarity by forcing selected people to betray one another, by putting them into either-you-or-them situations. As horrible as death is, to have the core of your very being negated by force is, in fact, worse for quite a significant percentage of people, as proven by those who would rather endure torture/death than deny what made them human.

They manage to wipe a human's mind alright, as you can see by the mindless husks in those torture camps that were once human beings. And by setting them up as examples, entire societies are reprogrammed.

The more "civilised" version of it would be the treatment of whistleblowers. It sends ripples through society, just like its uglier cousin, inducing a chilling effect that I would at some point love to see quantified.

I can't believe Cenk couldn't understand Harris's point that there's a difference between a disagreement and factually misrepresenting another's viewpoint.

Cenk also then fails to understand the nuance in religious beliefs and how those differences matter. I mean, this seems really obvious. Yes it matters how many layers of improbability people layer on their belief system since it's their belief system we're concerned with.

That's why Harris treats Islamic doctrine differently, because it's so obviously different then the other major belief systems and deserves the extra attention.

Then Cenk goes on to say lay the blame of WW2 on Christianity? Yea Germany and Japan attacked their neighbors due to their Christian beliefs. Seriously? He smugly says: "oh when Muslims do something it's because of Islam but when Christians do it, it's complicated."

Cenk is so out of his depth throughout this interview that it's embarrassing.

I can't believe someone wrote that Cenk won this "debate". Get your head checked, this isn't even a debate, this is Harris trying to get Cenk to understand basic concepts.

That's not what he's saying at all.

The bible, or the Quran, or many other texts, just like historical events as they were, or works of literature, or other even historical texts as complex as this often have contradictory ideas. The US constitution is founded on a set of beliefs and ideas that almost all of us subscribe to, yet there are Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Socialists, pragmatists, etc. all deriving very different ideas from the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and more. The reason this is true is because those values often come into conflict, and can outright contradict each other. Freedom vs security, equality vs prosperity, I could go on and on.

With the Bible, you have Catholics, Protestants, subdivided into a plethora of different religions in their own right under the umbrella of Christianity. You have the running joke even within Catholicism that American Catholics aren't really Catholics at all. Not only do different Christians interpret the bible differently, the amount they count on the bible varies between fundamentalists like Jehovah's Witnesses who take the bible extremely literally to extremely secular Christians who have absolutely no problem discarding any part of Christian doctrines when scientific evidence proves otherwise.

You have Christians who act as saintly as Mother Theresa to mobsters.

That's just Christianity. There are extremist Islamic groups that sound more like the Westboro Baptist Church than other Muslims.

But within Christianity, there's "honor thy mother and thy father" and "thou shall not kill". What if your parents are murderers?

That's a crude, and obvious example of conflicting values, but the 10 commandments are simple rules that don't completely resolve every situation.

What's stupid is to believe that you can know about a person's specific ideology just by their religion. Does their religion play a role in their ideology? Absolutely, but how it impacted their ideology has much more to do with their experiences, their natural tendancies, etc. than necessarily their religion. If you grew up in a mob family, honor thy mother and father was more likely the lesson you took from the Bible than thou shall not kill.

And if you look around you, this is plainly obvious. Even look within yourself. We're all a melting pot of lessons and ideas we've learned from school, personal life experiences, our religious beliefs, our parents, our socio-economic backgrounds, our friends, etc. That's why you are different from everyone of your religion, your friends, who you went to school with, your socioeconomic class, etc.

Be pretty boring if we all agreed on everything. I've never really noticed him ad hominem attack anyone here unless he was attacked first for posting his opinion, which he's entitled to. Think of it as practice for arguing those ideas in real life...

The people I really don't like are of the ShinyBlurry ilk. Not even due to his religious beliefs (which I don't think are real) but his basic pigheaded judgmental verbal diarrhea of people here, let alone on the videos. He can go.

Dammit!!!
Meant to (quietly) down-vote this comment - not up-vote it.
Sorry bobknight33, I don't agree with you.

It's not a matter of them not paying for something they don't agree with.
It's a matter of telling their employees how to spend their earned benefits and how to live their lives.

As employers, they shouldn't have the right to tell their employs how to live. This is forcing their religious belief systems on other people - people who don't share the same beliefs. they should NEVER have that right, that control over others.
Period!

I seem to recall awhile back that Muslim cab drivers were told they couldn't refuse a fare at the airport here in Minnesota just because someone had alcohol in their luggage. I'm not sure how that is much different than what Hobby Lobby is trying to do. I can't wait until some company comes along and claims that all medical procedures are against their religious beliefs and therefore are not required to offer any medical insurance at all.

Listened to this the other day.

Everyone pretty much ignored the philosopher because he had nothing substantive to say in a debate grounded in fact.

Traumatic brain injury can result in significant personality changes, and I recall reading on occasion that one of these can be a predisposition to religious belief (can't find a source right now).

I wonder if this is the case for the neurosurgeon here as nothing he says really explains why what he perceived wasn't simply imagined reality.

I thought the really straightforward and clear cut rebuttal here from the con side was that people's interpretations of the afterlife always seem to mirror what their religious upbringing would have assumed to be the case.

Also, that of course no revelatory information seeming to confirm the veracity of the experience (say the location of a valuable buried family heirloom) has ever been recorded to occur.

To say, "see, no harm done" is like cutting off your baby toes at birth. you never had them, so you never missed them. But the toes are still missing. Why? because someone thought it would be a good idea.

Now, the foreskin isn't being removed for no reason at all, it's being removed because someone with power had really-sick, messed-up, uneducated attitudes towards sex. Then they wanted to control everyone else's attitudes towards sexuality. So they came up with this sadistic surgery to stop teenage boys from masturbating. The thing is, this is all in the name of religion as well.

So, regardless if you feel like you've lost nothing in the process, you are continuing the mutilation in the name of one or two people's interpretation of religious beliefs and purposefully hacking off pieces of new born babies.

I have no idea how anyone can think, oh, ya, well, they did it to me so... I must do it to all my children.
That is just messed up....

OK, seems, I have a strong opinion on this.. I'll disengage now