Enlightenment 2.0

I finally finished watching all of the beyond belief 2 enlightenment 2.0 video presentations. Wow, there is some really good stuff here. The egos of the presenters are unexaggeratably (I know this is not a word, leave me alone...) immense. There is so much disagreement, and I just love how Sam Harris clarifies everything at the end so succinctly. The man really is the best speaker in the house. After listening to the semi-effette pluralistic goody-two shoesness of people like Jonathan Haidt and David Sloan Wilson, two atheists doing their best to redefine then defend religion, Sam comes out with some zingers that had me laughing out of my chair. He states that Jonathan Haidt, though fully condemning North Korea for it's oppression, will no doubt find a clever way to hold the Islamic societies to different standards. Sam assures us that whatever way Jonathan comes up with doing this, it will be a "masterpiece of political correctness", LOL. Exactly. Secondly, David Sloan Wilson characterizes Sam's writings, builds a strawman and beats the stuffing out of it. Harris stands at the podium and says that Wilson told him privately during the conference that he had never actually read Sam's writing, and quips about how he wish he had been mic'd for the conversation.

I finished watching the conference with this very fascinating Daniel Dennett interview. I hope they do this conference every year and make it available to watch. There are some really fascinating presentations here. This is the best thing I have ever found on the internet of it's kind.