In this video, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris debate Rabbis David Wolpe and Shavit Artson on the topic of the afterlife. There is much witticism from everyone involved, and the audience seemed to enjoy it. I did too.
You are a process that your body does. It's like your body is a set of bowling pins, and bowling is a process that is done with them. When the bowling is done, where does the bowling go? Nowhere. It just stops. You can't point to the motionless bowling ball and pins and say "That is the match we played yesterday. In fact, that same match is being played forever". It will always be a different game. You can juggle those same bowling pins, and juggling is a different process. In the same way, your atoms will someday be in somebody else's body. But there is no reason to believe the exact same pattern of matter and energy will ever resume.
Everything about your mind can be damaged by damaging the brain. You can cease to recognize faces, you can cease to know the names of animals, but you still know the names of tools. I mean the fragmentation of the way in which our mind is parcellated at the level of the brain is not at all intuitive, and there's a lot known about it. What we're being asked to consider is that you damage one part of the brain, and something about the mind and subjectivity is lost; you damage another and yet more is lost; and yet if you damage the whole thing at death, we can rise off the brain, with all our faculties intact, recognizing Grandma and speaking English.
-Sam Harris
This is not an unfair caricature of religion. It is the common position I face in my day-to-day interactions with, for instance, my current next-door-neighbor who has this sign on his lawn: "ELECT JESUS LORD OF YOUR LIFE".
By contrast, the theologians in this debate turned out to be pretty much on the same side as the atheists. Rabbis Wolpe and Artson's answer to "Is there an afterlife?" is a carefully polite, elaborate, roundabout way to say "no" without admitting they said "no". They believe we are eternal, but they don't attach any definition to what that means, and insist they know nothing about it; and if you try to describe it, they'll always deny that you got it right. I deny the importance of any distinction between their hairsplitting and "there is no afterlife".
"They do not know what they are talking about" in the literal rather than the colloquial sense of that phrase. A trait of sophisticated theological language is that it is not about any identifiable topic. Theologians nuance the dictionary to death until they have said nothing at all.
Rabbi Shavit Artson pointed out that science has a counterpart to my next-door-neighbor's religious ignorance: self-help pop-science books. That is an inaccurate comparison. Science and religion differ in where authenticity and credibility are located. Self-help pop-science books do not establish credibility within the scientific community; credibility is earned by your work in the laboratory and the field; this work must survive a review from peers whose careers stand to gain by finding problems with it. By contrast, the most learned and intelligent theologians are ignored by millions of literalists. In practice, the possession of a direct phone line to God is what faith is about. This is because religion deals with something very direct and personal, and no teaching can ever be a clear winner or loser, because each person has a different God who picks up the phone. Some fields of science, such as theoretical physics, are more sketchy than others, but to say that scientific debate tends to be more objective than religious debate is not a high bar to clear. You can't apply math to religion.
Rabbi Artson said, in the video, that the atheists are saying "professional scientists are authentic representatives of what science is, and self-help pop-science book readers are not; but Matt's ignorant next-door-neighbor is a more authentic representative of religion than Rabbis Artson and Wolpe". Yes. I can't speak for Hitchens and Harris, but you can state it as baldly as that and I will argue that is the case.
From my own upbringing, exposed to a wide variety of Christian traditions, as well as from listening to religious radio stations, I get the consistent sense that bible-believers view a sophisticated religious scholar as an inauthentic poser. Either correct the shortcomings of your heritage, or be authentic to it, but you can't do both. "Reformed" and "authentic" are antonyms in the context of heritage.
From listening to the rabbis in the debate, it is my personal opinion that they would be well-served to ditch the last, tenuous vestige of theatrical window dressing and admit they're secular. That was the solution that worked for me; their mileage may vary. I acknowledge that culture is powerful, and brings social benefits even when it is a pretense. They want to comfort the sick, feed the poor, and counsel the distressed. Our culture will give a clergyman/woman a lot of opportunity to do that, along with financial backing-- but the price is that they must either:
A. tell my aggressively ignorant next-door-neighbor the authentic teachings that he wants to hear; or
B. emit a smokescreen of noncommittal doublespeak to disguise their departure from authentic teachings.
They use B. I do not envy the tightrope they have to walk, to maintain their integrity, while meeting the demands of membership in a heritage identity group.
That is the only way to divide this debate video into two sides. It should have been titled "Authentic Heritage: Problem or Solution?"
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