Sunday, December 16, 2007

New Atheists - The Four Horsemen

Awesome -- the big four in the New Atheist "movement" got together to talk about their agenda. It's worth the two hours to watch the whole thing. [Thanks to ~C4Chaos for the heads up on this.]

Early in the first hour, Sam Harris brings up the distinction between spiritual experience and religion, and it was only Dennett who took his point and added to it. Dawkins disagreed with the idea of spiritual experience, but acknowledged that making a distinction is useful.

Dennett and Harris (and I've been really hard on Harris on this blog) are the two most open-minded of the group. But, damn, I like how literate Hitchens is.

On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion, convened by RDFRS and filmed by Josh Timonen.

All four authors have recently received a large amount of media attention for their writings against religion - some positive, and some negative. In this conversation the group trades stories of the public’s reaction to their recent books, their unexpected successes, criticisms and common misrepresentations. They discuss the tough questions about religion that face to world today, and propose new strategies for going forward.

Authors’ Recommended Books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; Breaking the Spell by Daniel C. Dennett; Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris; The End of Faith by Sam Harris; God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens.


First Hour:


Second Hour:



1 comment:

Hokai said...

Not only did Dawkins disagree with the idea of spiritual experience, but in the second part he got annoyed when Harris mentioned mystical experiences again, so much that he remarked, "Alright, you made your point" or something to that effect. However, I liked the whole discussion very much, though they tend to take themselves too seriously, as if they were Giordano Bruno. Also, they tend to ignore any other approach to solving the fundamentalist problem and see the only strategy in converting people.

Godspeed,

Hokai