Religion: honoring the disability

.....OK, enough about YouTube and livers. Celebrated philosopher—and Darwinian atheist—Daniel Dennett can be heard interviewed recently on BBC radio: BBC interview.
.....The conversation includes three authors, including brain expert Raymond Tallis. Dennett enters the conversation 12 and a half minutes in.

.....Even more recently, Dennett participated in a debate about religion (with Robert Winston). To hear that, go to Guardian debate. Dennett’s portion starts at 22:47.
.....Among other things, Dennett says

.....If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol or television or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges—mixed blessings, in fact—has the power to overwhelm our best judgement and cloud our critical faculties, religion doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and to make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
.....Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, is on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century and in "liberated" Afghanistan blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong.
.....You don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense to do massively crazy things. And—this is the worst of it—religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.
.....Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality—think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art—but only religion demands it as a sacred duty. This might not matter if we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick-boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet.
.....The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be. If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being—God—to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made and of which we are now the stewards.

You’ll be glad to know that these conversations are thoughtful and intelligent. It ain’t Fox news.

Today in Health: Liver Transplant

.....In this morning's OC Register (Tom Fuentes stands me up for surgery), which lands with a thump about 5:30 in these parts, Frank Mickadeit reports on a story that some in the SOCCCD family already knew: last Friday, on the National Day of Prayer, Trustee Tom Fuentes received a new liver:

.....A couple of weeks ago, I arranged with Tom Fuentes to reprise our garage-sale experience and attend last weekend's famous all-island rummage sale on Balboa Island. I was getting ready to call him Thursday to finalize our plans when I got an e-mail from his wife, Jolene: Dude had blown me off so he could go get a new liver at UCLA.
.....She wrote: "Well, a miracle happened today, on our National Day of Prayer. We received an unexpected call from UCLA announcing they had a liver for Tom! It seems the liver was designated for two men and the match was not perfect, so they were able to call us and he had a new liver in a matter of hours."
.....Fuentes has been in ICU since the operation, but that's said to be typical, and the liver is functioning.
.....He was diagnosed with liver cancer last year and immediately got himself put on the transplant list. He took chemo treatments, knocked it down a little, but it recently came back more aggressively. The insurance company threatened to stop covering him. Then came the "miracle," as Jolene calls it.
.....I talked to her last night, and she said a sign of Tom's recovery is that he's gone from wanting no visitors to asking for the likes of me. Summoned by the Chairman Emeritus for a bedside audience! I'm going to have to find the appropriately tacky garage sale vase for the flowers.