Salt * Wet * Fish

Recently there was a news about Ted Haggard, the leader of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals, a vocal opponent of same-sex marriage, who was accused of paying for sex with a man in monthly trysts over the past three years. Now why I am not surprised?

Okay, to be fair he was only accused, so the verdict is still out there at the moment.

On the same subject, someone posted a very interesting 2 parter video on the topic “The root of all evil - the god delusion & the virus of faith“. Its about the rise of fundamentalism within the Abrahamic religions and how they incites violence, hatred and irrational thinking (despite scientific evidence).

One interesting quote comparing how one would have claim that god exists because science cannot disprove it. True, science cannot disprove a lot of things. This is akin to saying that if you believe that a teapot revolves around our sun, science cannot disprove it because it too small to notice. But based on scientific evidences, its quite rational to concluded that it is not possible. However, people will still belief that a teapot evolves around the sun, simply because this has been repeated for the past, maybe 3,000 years.

Ted Haggard was featured as part of the interview below. Its interesting that when I watched part of the service of his organisation, it reminds me of a similar organisation in Singapore which have vodcast their services in their website. Its disconcerting to know also the Ted Haggard have a direct line to George Bush and they talk a lot about you-know-what together.

Although the video talks mostly about the violence and hatred from within the fundamentalist Abrahamic religions. I must say that I have seen similar streak of fundamentalism with Buddhism also, especially from with the Mahayana traditions, which includes Zen and Tibetan Buddhism. However, one difference is that almost never had those fundamentalist streak encouraged killing of people. In spite of that, I feel that injecting people with fear, hatred and doubt throughout their lives is as good as killing them personally.

I should like to point out that I don’t necessary agree on the way in which Dr. Richard Dawkins conducted his interview. He seems to have made up his mind at the point of interview, using biased words like “forced”, “irrational”, etc. Something that, I guess, any sociological interviewer would cringe at. Also he seems overly confident on what science know now. Not forgetting that science itself have made many assumptions in the past that were over turned by new facts. Of course, the difference is the science do use rigorous and repeatable techniques to uncover a fact.

Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ8_bIji7gQ

Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4xIi-TwY-Y

Finally, some readers may notice that I spelled “god” with a small g instead of upper case.