Beyond Belief (Session 6)

This session started out with a woman named Susan talking about her views of the tactics that science uses against religion. Susan believes that those who just strike out at religion are going about things the wrong way. She believes that religious thinkers need to be persuaded and argued against by facts rather than wishful thinking. She also believes that religion has no direct connection to ethics. This leads to a debate on morality in an empirical sense. There was a good point brought up about how even though torture did not work out, would it be considered moral if it indeed allowed people to learn things they could never learn otherwise? This is just the age old debate of “do the ends justify the means?” Susan argues that self-interest and moral-interest often intertwine, but they are not completely dependent on each other.

There was another speaker who talked about how in a sense, all religious traditions are essentially narrative story telling. The stories link together cosmology and morality. In a sense, he believes that the mixing of the two has turned those religious stories into myth over time. People use religion to promote morality and in that ways it can flourish in a society where there are no clear rules on morality. In general, the speaker believes that society does not need religion, if society learns to come together as a community and develop morals.