Day three of the GAC remained as interesting as the first two.
A highlight among the talks was a presentation on death in atheistic perspective.
Sam Harris acknowledged that Christianity did have comforting things to say about suffering and death but that it was all wrong.
His alternate was to suggest a focus on the 'now' moment as allowing relief from painful memory thoughts of the past and painful anticipatory thoughts of the future. To help with this he taught a meditative technique to help suspend thought about past and present and escape into mind consciousness in the present.
This is quite remarkable. The remainder of the conference stressed evidence based thinking and yet the proposed response to death was to escape from thought!
Lunchtime saw a noisy protest by a group of Islamists whose banners proclaimed the fires of hell for Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She was one of the key speakers and has renounced Islam for atheism with the result of living in witness protection etc programmes. That put Islam on the table at an afternoon forum where the likes of Richard Dawkins conceded that Islam is a greater threat to science and rationality than Christianity and also that he and others had failed to stand with Salmon Rushdie.
And so the conference ends. Three days of rich stimulation that confirmed my Christian theism. I will say more about the conference and my response in later and more reflective posts.
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