Daniel Dennett and Robert Thurman Talk About Religion, Reincarnation, and Consciousness

I just finished reading a dialogue between Daniel Dennett and Robert Thurman. They've discussed Daniel Dennett's latest book, Breaking the Spell. I'm glad to see them agree when it comes to the topic of religion. Here's a relevant quote.

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Dennett: "...The title of my book concerns two spells: one of them is the veil of polite ignorance of religion."

Thurman: "The taboo to talk about it, right."

Dennett: "That's the spell I want to break. And I do break it. I *want* to break it. But as for the question of whether I want to break the spell of religion altogether, I am completely agnostic on that. I have not decided how I feel about that. I don't know enough. I do not know what we would replace religion with."

Thurman: "Well, we have evidence that in the Soviet Union and in China, when they tried to replace religion they deified the leaders of the society, and they became really destructive."

Dennett: "That was not, it seems, a good policy."

Thurman: "That was a really bad idea."

Dennett: "Any more than prohibition, we learned. The war on drugs is another bad idea."

Thurman: "What about religion itself? You seem to use 'religion' as if it was coterminous ???? with belief in a creator God. I appreciated you leaving Buddhism out of the picture entirely, which some people think of as a religion, although but I don't. As I told you, I think of it as one third religion. Certainly Buddhism does not believe in a creator God, neither does Confucianism or Daoism. Some other traditions too believe in multiplicities of gods and things like that. But that's an old-fashioned definition of religion. Religion defined as the belief in God was Tyler's definition."

Dennett: "My definition is a social system that postulates supernatural agents whose approval is to be sought."

Thurman: "They don't have to be a creator?"

Dennett: "No."

Thurman: "John Dewey, for example, wished to take the good elements of religion away from religion and make them possible as an education for people. He had a plan like that because he came from a fundamentalist background. He saw that religion was having good effects on some people in some cases. He was not, obviously, living under the current Republican administration. But the thought about the dangers of the institution, and how to take that out of that. But you are not really proposing that, are you?"

Dennett: "No. In fact, I don't know whether some version of that would be a good idea or not. I don't think that Dewey had studied religion enough to know, and I haven't studied it enough to know. What I do think is important that we do right now, is educate each other a lot more. I've been fascinated by the reaction to one of my, it seems to me, quite uncontroversial suggestions, namely that we should have a curriculum on world religions in the public schools and for home schooling, with *facts* on world religions, and that parents can teach their kids whatever they want as long as they also teach this this. This has been called totalitarian by one reviewer."

Thurman: "Really? That there's a curriculum on world religions so that students in schools learn about each other's religion? Just the factual things about them? Totalitarian?"

Dennett: "Totalitarian, yes."

Thurman: "Well, you can be happy that you don't have to worry about such a reviewer. About ten years ago, here at Columbia, when this business was going on in Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, I came up with this. I was quite exercised, because I happened to know someone from the politics of that area. It was about the possibility of creating a Religion Studies program in Sarajevo University. They didn't have such a thing. In communist countries the study of the world religions would be done by scholars in the Atheism Department. So, they would study the different kins of opiates of the people. They learned the textures????? and scriptures and so forth, but there was no concept of a Department of Religious Studies. That's really an American thing. There are very few European universities that have that. In Eastern Europe, once the communist lid was taken off, these religions have rearisen in the very fundamentalist form, unaffected by the last eighty years of communist rule. That's why the Protocols of Zion are recirculated in Poland and Russia. These backward things would have no chance if religion was more in dialogue with modernity. It has not been, because it has been underground. I was shocked that some people who are trying to ameliorate the conflicts and violence in those cultures still think that religion is whithering away, so they don't think that there should be Religion Departments. And then those scholars don't know what to do: they go to Literature Departments; they have no place to mobilizethe people in the streets of Sarajevo – in one block of Sarajevo you will have a synagogue, a mosque, a catholic church and an orthodox church, or maybe even several of them in one block – who have lived there for decades without killing each other. When the Jews were thrown out of Spain in 1429, they went to Sarajevo under the Aramens?????, and they were much more tolerantly looked after. And yet, they never learned about each others faiths. Therefore demagogues could exploit them to demonize each other and we saw what happened in Yugoslavia."

Dennett: "Indeed."

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But then the real fun begins when Dennett and Thurman started talking about consciousness and reincarnation. You have to read the whole thing to be entertained by it. Here's a quote:

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Thurman: "There's a Buddhist terminological ???? principle that I like to take a moment to explain to you, and that is that all teachings or theories about relative reality are only relative." ... "Therefore, they're only valid or invalid in a certain context. All teachings about ultimate reality are actually completely useless *except* the absolute negation that there is no capturable ultimate reality, like a refutation of the idea of an absolute God that creates the world, or any absolute, actually, that's relevant to the world. In a way, it's a very simple thing: an absolute can't be relative, so therefore it's irrelevant to the relative. Only that theory has definitive status in Buddhist philosophy. This basically opens all theorizing about relativity to being relational and useful in this context or that. The theory of involuntary rebirth – which it is better called than reincarnation, at least for ordinary people – is considered very important in a general ethical level, not in a deep metaphysical level."

Dennett: "They got to be."... "Now, I confess I simply can't fathom most of what you just said."

Thurman: "That's good!"

Dennett: "I expect that there's a great deal in what you say, but it's the last bit I want to ask you about. Why should a *moral* point of view hinge at all on this idea of rebirth? Why not the life that we lead right now? Aren't we lucky to be alive? I certainly feel very fortunate to be here."

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Here's my take on their discussion. I don't dig Dennett using the label "brights" (I'm on Sam Harris side on this one), but I do agree with Dennett that I don't need a concept of reincarnation to be moral.

As for consciousness, I resonate more with Thurman's Buddhist view but I don't think he did a good job of refuting Dennett in this dialogue. Dennett is a reductionist when it comes to explaining consciousness. Not even Thurman can persuade him, especially since Dennett doesn't do yoga like Thurman does. So there'd be no meeting of the minds here. And it's better to just leave it at that. Anyway, I'm not worried about Dennett since I don't think he'd be crashing planes on buildings or even run for office. In the meantime, I care more about Dennett's thesis on religion because it is more politically relevant and philosophically sound.

Thanks to Jim (aka holotrope) for the heads up!