Christopher Hitchens hasn’t turned inward since his cancer diagnosis in June. Nor, as some might have anticipated, has he budged from his atheist views outlined in his 2007 bestseller God Is Not Great. And if you hear rumors of an eventual deathbed conversion, don’t believe them. That’s the message he passes along to Anderson Cooper in a new CNN interview (above). Also, Hitchens has just published a new piece in Vanity Fair where he talks about his introduction to (esophagus) cancer in a way that only Hitchens can. Regardless of what you think about Hitchens, it’s definitely worth a read…
As he grows older, Woody Allen increasingly finds himself positioned as the philosopher filmmaker. Fresh Air host Terry Gross asked him some heavy existential questions in an interview last year. (Listen here). And, more recently, we have Allen grappling with some big life questions in an interview conducted by Father Robert E. Lauder in the Catholic magazine, Commonweal. The conversation begins:
RL: When Ingmar Bergman died, you said even if you made a film as great as one of his, what would it matter? It doesn’t gain you salvation. So you had to ask yourself why do you continue to make films. Could you just say something about what you meant by “salvation”?
WA: Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so it’s what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem, and I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief. I have said this before in a facetious way, but it is not so facetious: I am a whiner. I do get a certain amount of solace from whining.
What’s good, and what’s evil? Traditionally, religion and philosophy have answered these questions, pushing science to the side, asking it to stick to the world of natural laws and knowable facts. But Sam Harris wants to change things. At TED, he’s arguing that science (particularly neuroscience) can address moral questions precisely because these questions fall into the world of knowable facts. And, even better, science can provide definitive, highly objective answers to such questions. Just as there are scientific answers to all questions in physics, so there are clear answers in the moral realm. This applies, for example, to whether children should be subjected to corporal punishment, or how society deals with very meaningful gender questions. (Things get a little emotional on this topic at about 11 minutes in.) The upshot is that Harris isn’t buying a radically relativist position on morality, and this will disappoint many post-modernists. The Enlightenment project is alive and well, ready to make its comeback.
Christopher Hitchens — he’s an irritant to the left (a big defender of the bungled Iraq war) and to the right (an atheist who wrote the controversial bestseller God is Not Great). He’s an equal opportunity polemicist. Now, in the April edition of Vanity Fair, he’s back. This time, he’s deconstructing the Ten Commandments and offering his own updated set of commandments for our modern times. I’m normally not the biggest Hitchens fan. But, I’m on board with the gist of his guiding principles.
More and more, the Dalai Lama has been developing an interest in what modern science has to say about human emotion — or, more particularly, how neuroscience makes sense of meditation and compassion. Partly as a result, Stanford University has launched The Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education, which is delving deeper into these questions. The clip above features Daniel Goleman, the bestselling science journalist (Emotional IntelligenceandDestructive Emotions), talking about the Dalai Lama’s work on this front. You can find the full conversation with Goleman at Bigthink.com, a good resource for thought-provoking video.
Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize-winning philosopher, mathematician and peace activist, died 40 years ago today. And so, above, we rewind the video tape to 1959, to Russell explaining why he doesn’t believe in God. This was a viewpoint that he otherwise elaborated upon in his well-known lecture/essay, Why I Am Not a Christian. To be sure, some readers won’t share Russell’s views on religion. But don’t take umbrage. Just remember, we offer media from across the divide too.
Taught by Yale professor Dale B. Martin, this course offers an introduction to New Testament History and Literature, and covers the following ground:
This course provides a historical study of the origins of Christianity by analyzing the literature of the earliest Christian movements in historical context, concentrating on the New Testament. Although theological themes will occupy much of our attention, the course does not attempt a theological appropriation of the New Testament as scripture. Rather, the importance of the New Testament and other early Christian documents as ancient literature and as sources for historical study will be emphasized. A central organizing theme of the course will focus on the differences within early Christianity (-ies).
You can watch the 26 lectures from the course above, or find them on YouTube and iTunes. To get more information on the course, including the syllabus, visit this Yale website.
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The lines below are taken from Voltaire’s “Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne,” written in response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Then, as now, there’s a little wisdom here for those (hint: Pat Robertson) inclined to infer moral superiority from the suffering of others.
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?
In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.
Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,
Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,
Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,
Let them but lash your own security;
Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.
Note: Pat Robertson’s controversial remarks contained one basic historical fact, and it was wrong. He asserted that the Haitians brought disaster upon themselves when they broke free from “Napoleon III.” Robertson got the wrong guy here. It wasn’t Napoleon Lite (1808–1873). It was Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) who coopted the French Revolution 50 years earlier and tried to impose his will on Haiti. But, whatever…
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