Debating God with Christopher Hitchens and Tony Blair
November 30, 2010
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/11/30/f-vp-handler.html#ixzz16pVw1Q1S...for Blair, an open, generous religiosity is a human necessity.
That led him to remind us of the elephant in the great secular hall: Religion will not disappear anytime soon, he pointed out. You can't reason or wish it away.
Sure, he argues, work on it, reform it, open it up. Keep bringing people of different faiths together...
To the argument that religion is based on fear of a nasty afterlife (or bounties for the faithful), Blair answered that the faithful he meets are not swayed by visions of reward or Hell. Their credo is "love, selflessness and sacrifice."...
...the best part of the evening — Hitchens's defence of the idea of awe, of the "numinous," that mysterious power associated with spiritual longing...For him, the idea of transcendent or numinous feeling (he used those exact words) doesn't mean this experience has to translate into belief in a supernatural entity...
YouTube:
http://youtu.be/4JDCHPF8m7g (Part 2)
Alex's comment: Mr Blair, I totally agreed with you. But, as Hitchens aptly responded, the idea of transcendence doesn't have to be translated into supernatural beliefs. The religion you described is called Religious Humanism or Unitarian Universalism (or other humanistic liberal religions), but
not Christianity (including Catholicism). I don't understand why you still stick to Catholicism. Unitarian Universalism (or other humanistic liberal religions such as the Ethical Culture) is an explicit expression of "open, generous religiosity," a sort of "open it up" church that
has been "bringing people of different faiths together." Why you say one thing and stick, on the contrary, to traditional Christianity which, far from being "open and generous," adds superstition and creeds to the
humanistic principles of "love, selflessness and sacrifice" to make a closed, exclusivistic, fairy-tale (Jesus as the resurrected God-incarnate exclusive saviour) form of religion?
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