Head to Head with Hemant Mehta

[rug]

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 Brierley’s podcast Unbelieveable! You can stream the podcast from Justin’s website or you can download it from iTunes. This is probably my favorite media thing I’ve 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. It’s easier to realize when you’re not being clear when you have a sparring partner.

We cover a lot of ground and I’m much too lazy to transcribe or summarize, so I’m 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 Hemant’s 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 didn’t 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]

1. Really interesting and a nice companion piece to the religion/science taking each

other seriously article.

[rug]

2. She's the blogger who converted from atheism to Catholicism a couple of months ago.

I'm glad she's still blogging.

[Jim__]

3. "To say that people ought to be treated equally, ... none of that stuff requires justification."

I don't think it's that simple. I don't think it's as simple as:

Hemant: What’s the reason other than that some religious person told them otherwise or they interpreted some holy book as being right so they’re just following that step?

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.

[rug]

4. It's a good dialogue, from honest people.