"Dennett on how religion offers an excuse to stop thinking"

[Saman]

_http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLpZnv8Vp-E&feature=youtube_gdata_player

I got an email today suggesting to me to check out the link above - this is after I shared with them a recent SOTT article in regards to Iran etc,. So I checked it out and I thought it was interesting and worth sharing here. I don't really know much about Mr. Dennett but my first impression of him is that he has a very sharp and logical mind, or so I think. The video is six minutes and thirty seconds long and I think it describes how religion, that is how the word and concept is commonly interpreted by the majority of people, stops people from thinking for their own. I think what Dennet is saying is nothing new to the readers of the forum here but maybe at least this video can visually and audibly help you with someone who is trying to convert you with their good intentions to their own righteous faith, whatever that may be.

 

[Laura]

Interesting guy:

Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut.[4] When he was 5, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash.[5] His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.[4]

 

[durabone]

Now let's close the loop. What is this Dennett's relationship to Preston Dennett, author of many books on aliens and remote viewing?

_www.nightsearch.net/docs/pdennettbio.doc

edit: disabled link

 

[Laura]

Now let's close the loop. What is this Dennett's relationship to Preston Dennett, author of many books on aliens and remote viewing?

_www.nightsearch.net/docs/pdennettbio.doc

edit: disabled link

I don't think that closes any circles. Preston Dennett may be a distant cousin, but he is not part of Daniel Dennett's immediate family. From Dennett's autobiography:

My mother and father were both the children of doctors, and both had chosen the humanities. My mother, an English major at Carleton College in Minnesota, went on for a Masters in English from the University of Minnesota, before deciding that she simply had to get out of Minnesota and see the world. Never having been out the Midwest, and bereft of any foreign languages, she took a job teaching English at the American Community School in Beirut. There she met my father, Daniel C. Dennett Jr, working on his PhD in Islamic history at Harvard while teaching at the American University of Beirut. His father, the first Daniel C. Dennett, was a classic small town general practitioner in Winchester, Massachusetts, the suburb of Boston where I spent most of my childhood. So yes, I am Daniel C. Dennett III; but since childhood I've disliked the Roman numerals, and so I chose to court confusion among librarians (how can DCD Jr be the father of DCD?) instead of acquiescing in my qualifier.

My father's academic career got off to a fine start, with an oft-reprinted essay, 'Pirenne and Muhammed', which I was thrilled to find on the syllabus of a history course I took as an undergraduate. His first job was at Clark University. When World War II came along, he put his intimate knowledge of the Middle East to use as a secret agent in the OSS, stationed in Beirut. He was killed on a mission, in an airplane crash in Ethiopia in 1947, when I was five. So my mother and two sisters and I moved from Beirut to Winchester, where I grew up in the shadow of everybody's memories of a quite legendary father.

 

[mada85]

Very interesting video. Thanks for the link, Raintree.

. . . we have to stop honouring people for stopping thinking.

Amen to that

 

[Richs]

Very interesting video. Thanks for the link, Raintree.

. . . we have to stop honouring people for stopping thinking.

Amen to that

I'll bet Mr. Dennett would feel right at home here!

 

[henry]

I doubt Mr Dennett would be at home here. His approach to consciousness is to explain it away as the manifestation of many smaller systems working together. From what I have read of his work, he has no interest in spiritual things. He appears to be a Dawkins-type materialist.

 

[Richs]

I doubt Mr Dennett would be at home here. His approach to consciousness is to explain it away as the manifestation of many smaller systems working together. From what I have read of his work, he has no interest in spiritual things. He appears to be a Dawkins-type materialist.

My assumption was based on the short clip in this thread and as I had never even heard of him before and knew nothing about him. Thanks for the info about his lack of spiritual interest and wholesale materialism.