Must watch. Very rare debate these days.
Hamza Tzortzis and Pervez Hoodbhoy on Religion & Rationality- A Discussion @ LUMS - YouTube
Will provide my comments later.
Re: Religion vs Rationality: A debate between Perves Hoodbhoy & Hamza Tzortzis
Such debates are good in one sense but bad in another sense.
Good because more and more people start thinking about things but bad because once a people go away with wrong sense about scriptures they become less and less interested in scriptures.
In my view such debates will be fruitful if people debating were familiar with scriptures directly. It is because proper understanding of scriptures is fundamental.
No doubt that existence of God cannot be disproven and on the other hand could be proven through rational arguments but that is not the point. Why not? Because if God exists yet it matters not for humanity unless there is positive proof that can be proven that God has something to do with creation and mankind and that mankind could be aware of it.
So one needs not only rational proof that God exist but also scriptural proof that existence of God matters for mankind. This is the most difficult part that both atheists and theists need to concentrate on.
Unless there is such a scripture that could be attributed to God, God does not matter for creation and particularly for human beings. This is why all muslims and nonmuslims must try their best to learn the quran properly. After knowing the quran properly people will come to see how they should read there own scriptures to be in line with rationality. You cannot be rational or reasonable to a point and then shift to irrationality and unreasonableness.
This is what proves all religions and their mullahs false and brings out real truth about scriptures themselves. So people need to stop following their mullahs blindly and start studying their scriptures in light of reason and in light of realities of real world. The quran is the only book that fulfils this criterion but other books also support it to a highest degree. That is because all scriptures are social basis for humanity not religious basis for make belief dogmas and rituals. All scriptures are about proper management of human population and and provided resources so that humanity could live in unity and harmony so that it could have peaceful, progressive and prosperous existence.
However rulers and money lenders employed mullahs and organised religions and ritualism to take people away from scriptures so that they could have their way with world and that is why the world is the way it is.
Hamzah has good rational basis for starting his argument but has no clue about the quran as to how it is supposed to be used to prove his point. He then follows mullahs way of arguments and breaks connection between his beginning argument and the ending or conclusion. Likewise hoodbhoy knows what he is talking about when it come to physics but has no clue as to how to look at the quran.
So this debate is actually won by hoodbhoy because hamzah failed to prove his point fully by not being able to use the quran properly. However once he does that he will become unbeatable. He is let down by mullahs bad translations of the quranic message and the way they teach people the use of the quran. If mullahs could use the quran properly there could not be any division amongst muslims and world would have been muslim by now ie all people would have been living as brotherhood of mankind on basis of the quran as their program, constitution and law. Till people realise who pharaohs are, who hamaans are, who qaroons are, who samirees are and who are people who suck up to them in the world today they cannot have any clue what the quran is and is all about and what the rest of scriptures are all about.
http://www.jangforum.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=q49fqk4jktgcutk3tfcg1t6fv3&topic=5206.0
Re: Religion vs Rationality: A debate between Perves Hoodbhoy & Hamza Tzortzis
Religion VERSUS Rationality?
It implies that religion is opposite of rationality.
Is it?