Tuesday, November 11, 2008




Sirius Radio announcer Michaelangelo Signorile talked with a Mormon woman who voted Yes on Prop 8 in California and the podcast of the discussion is one of the most rational and calm discussions you can hear where a religious person is confronted with the absurdity and flaws of their beliefs without the argument going off the rails. Signorile does a really good job. The link is below.

While you focus on the technicalities of this argument and the legal precedents and the double standards set by the Mormon Church, I am brought back to Christopher Hitchens’ book, “God IS Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” because I really think what is emphasized with this discussion is, issues aside, actually the great inability religious people who behave like this woman show in connecting with the world because they ultimately fear it.

The thing is, what stands in the way of her rational understanding of this issue is that she deals with her fear of death through religion. These are two separate issues. Any time she gets to a place in the discussion where he makes more sense, it's frightening for her because if that's true then what else is true too? That she won't go to heaven? It's very ... Read Moredifficult for religious people to go into that territory because their fear of death seeps in before rationality can take hold. Signorile did a really good job of talking her through it. He got closer than most people get. [source] <====Listen to the argument here.

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