--- In [email protected], TurquoiseB <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > http://www.tinyurl.com/yvkdc3 > > > > Important to read the earlier part of the exchange > > to get a proper perspective on Harris's response. > > He's just as much of a fanatic as the fundamentalists > > he rants about. Sullivan made excellent points that > > Harris doesn't know how to respond to, and it's sent > > him into a frustrated rage. > > Kinda like Jim Flanegin lately, only coherent. :-)
That quip aside, I just thought I'd mention that Andrew Sullivan's short response to Harris' rant (and yes, that's what it is) kinda nails the issue as far as I'm concerned: Give me today to address his many good (and bad) points. But something strikes me reading the many emails you have sent. They fall into two categories: one batch lamenting his contradictions, intolerance and dogmatism; the other insisting that he has cleaned my clock in the argument. There are few emails taking a middle position, which suggests we are talking past each other. I'm going to try and amend that in my next post. It may be, however, that the very nature of the subject renders consensus or even clarity impossible. Those with faith and those without it actually read the dialogue differently. I think we can do better than that - and I hope to clarify more in my next installment. The "middle-way" readers have it right, IMO. What is going on is two people -- who see the world completely differently, wearing two completely different states of attention, each bringing to the table completely different sets of assumptions -- trying to have a discussion and failing miserably. *Both*, IMO, are so attached to their assumptions that they cannot possibly challenge them. Instead, they argue for the assumptions' correctness, using the most persuasive arguments they can come up with, trying to "win," to convince the other of their position's correctness. And they're both surprised and confounded when the other person is *not* persuaded by these arguments, which seem to them self-evident, beyond refute. I think it's a situation we're familiar with here on Fairfield Life. :-) People get into arguments about stuff they cannot possibly know the "truth" of, only what they tend to believe about it. And because we're dealing with matters of faith or the lack thereof, each of the parties in one of these debates brings certain assumptions to the debate table, in the form of the arguments they use, but more import- antly in the form of their current state of attention. That state of attention, and the assumptions about life that one *has* to make about life when "wearing" that state of attention (because that is the very nature of that state of attention) color everything that the person sees -- in their own arguments and in the other person's. Their state of attention acts as a "filter," a way of parsing the words that they speak and that the other person speaks. And the result is often *just* like the exchange so far between Harris and Sullivan -- two people talking *past* each other, each blabbering on and on, thinking they're "winning" the argument but both losing badly, because at the end of the exchange both are in exactly the same state of attention they started in.
