Religion
Related: About this forumHead to Head with Hemant Mehta
Conceding a Point is Not a Slippery Slope
July 23, 2012
By leahlibresco
Last week, I got to do an interview/argument with fellow Patheos blogger and Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta on Justin Brierleys podcast Unbelieveable! You can stream the podcast from Justins website or you can download it from iTunes. This is probably my favorite media thing Ive done so far, since I find it easier to express myself in the context of an argument than I do in the scope of a conventional How do you feel? interview. Its easier to realize when youre not being clear when you have a sparring partner.
We cover a lot of ground and Im much too lazy to transcribe or summarize, so Im just going to give you a teaser by expanding on one part of our discussion. At some point during the show (kicking off around minute thirty), I was asking Hemant if he thought moral claims were more like aesthetic preferences (I prefer Sondheim to Andrew Lloyd Webber) or more like empirical facts about the world (Greenland is out of scale on this map). He pretty much ended up picking the latter, since, in the example we ended up on, he and I agreed that our claim that women and men were of equal moral worth was more correct than the claim of, say, a Taliban leader that women were worth less.
I wanted to go from there to talking about Hemants heuristic for judging that one moral claim was truer than another (Where did his yardstick come from? How does he check that his yardstick is accurate? What is the yardstick measuring? etc). On the way to that discussion, Hemant said something that I didnt really have time to follow up on, but I want to highlight it here.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unequallyyoked/2012/07/head-to-head-with-hemant-mehta.html
You have to pay for the podcast but she gives a decent summary.
cbayer
(146,218 posts)other seriously article.
rug
(82,333 posts)I'm glad she's still blogging.
Jim__
(14,083 posts)I don't think it's that simple. I don't think it's as simple as:
either.
I don't think Muhammad invented the treatment of women out of whole cloth. My understanding is that in some pre-Islamic, Arab societies, women had no rights. Islam may have just been a codification of those conditions. And, it's certainly not true that, by default, people were all treated equally throughout human history.
I hope they continue the conversation. I'd be interested to see where it goes.