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Interview with John Figdor

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 11:43 am
by LanDroid
When students come to John Figdor, the humanist chaplain at Stanford, they’re often comfortable with their atheism. Big questions about God aren’t necessarily on their minds. Big questions about ethics are. “I began to notice that students were less interested in debating the question of whether God exists than in discussing what to do and how to live,” Figdor writes in “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart,” a new book that he co-authored with Lex Bayer.

...To encourage that reflection, they’ve offered $10,000 in prizes to people who come up with their own sets of beliefs. Depending on your theological stance, the contest tag line — “Crowd Sourcing the Ten Commandments for the 21st Century” — will either give you great hope for our open-source ethical future, or encourage you to build a bunker in your backyard.

Over the phone, John Figdor spoke with Salon about religious law, crowdsourced dogma and the experience of sharing an office with two rabbis.

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/07/humanis ... otherwise/
Disclaimer: I'm not reading this book, just thought you'd be interested...

Re: Interview with John Figdor

Posted: Sun Dec 07, 2014 10:42 pm
by DWill
Thanks for posting that, LanDroid. Now I'm curious as to which of these two guys did most of the writing. We know who put up the prize money.

It's a valid point the interviewer brought up about religions being better at making people do the good thing. The problem, if we can call it that, faced by humanism or atheism is lack of organization. Figdor gave some examples of humanists coalescing into action groups. But I bet he'd admit there's a long way to go. I still am not sure whether humanism will have the right degree of binding power to act more institutionally. If humanism doesn't turn out to be this kind of glue, that is not necessarily a bad thing. To paraphrase Jonathan Haidt, religion both binds and blinds.