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CCSC Combats "Study Day"

Armin Rosen spent the past couple nights seeing what The Tribe is up to.

Jewish philosophical smack dooooooown!

It's about time the philosophical salon made a comeback: on Tuesday night, a couple dozen List College students gathered in the Mathilde Shechter music room for some laid back Judaically-focused philosophical disputation. The night's topic was the so-called "New Atheism"--the aggressive attack on religion led by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others.

JTS philosophy professor Leonard Levin began by arguing that the "new atheists" do not realize how little science and religion actually disprove one another. While science explains the particulars of the physical universe in ways that religion can't, religion provides the underlying meaning and guidance that science lacks. "Until recently," Levin said, "religious experience is all of human experience." Religion is personally and communally centering, and strives to, and occasionally succeeds in, addressing important, fundamental truths.

Dr. Austin Darcy from the atheist Center for Inquiry spoke partly in defense of the "new atheists"--while he disagreed with their assertion that "religion poisons everything," he said that Hitchens and his ilk are removing religion from its pedestal and giving it the unsparing intellectual analysis it deserves. He deployed a Kantian proof that the logical basis for theism runs similar to justifications for atheism: Kant argued that man believes in a God that will order an unordered world, but since the world is assumed to be unordered, Kant's postulate of practical reason proves that theism is little more than elaborate rationalizing.

The night's arguments were pretty standard, but never trite: Levin, for instance, rebutted the claim that Theists irrationally uphold a solipsistic view of the universe by quoting a 3rd century Talmudic rabbi's shockingly accurate estimation of the number of stars. Of course we've heard this all before: that theism is scientifically and morally untenable, and that religion is more than just blind belief in something we can't hope to see or interact with. And the arguments had their usual weaknesses: Levin's concession that secular philosophy could provide the same kind of objective morals as religion means that religion is preferable for utilitarian, rather than qualitative reasons--if religion is superior simply because more people can understand Exodus than Locke's First Treatise on Government, how superior is it, really?


If you run to College Walk right now, you might still be able to get in on the Sugar Cube Sukkahs from Hillel. You can glue your own miniature sukkah together or just eat the sugar cubes. Or eat the glue with the sugar cubes, I suppose. That's something to consider.

Rabbi Yonah Blum commands it!



Subscribers to the listserv of the Columbia Student Solidarity Network (a liberal umbrella group rejuvenated in the wake of this February's Ashcroft visit) were treated yesterday to two oddly contrasting invitations. One, forwarded by College Dems president Mike Nadler, exhorts readers to sign a pro-Israel petition that Hillel will send to Kofi Annan. Another promotes an "emergency forum" this Saturday to address Israel's "barbaric campaign of destruction against the Palestinian and Lebanese people," endorsed by (among others) the International Socialist Organization.

Bwog holds out the sincere hope that at least some of these people are friends with each other.

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