Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason - Martin Amis | PBS

On Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason, airing Friday, July 28 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), writers Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis show how the imagination of the creative mind can help cross the boundaries between faith and reason and to see the best and worst of human possibilities. In a recent piece for The New Yorker, Martin Amis imagines the last days of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the suicide bombers on 9/11. Bill Moyers explores how these two confessed agnostics come to grips with a world immersed in belief.

For more of the interviews, and a chance to share what *you* find important on matters of Faith & Reason, visit the program's website (www.pbs.org/moyers) and watch the broadcasts on PBS.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• PBS
• moyers
• faith
• reason
• religion
• spirituality
• martin
• amis
• margaret
• atwood

[revjimbob]

I can't see anything to criticise. What did he say that is wrong?

[storagehead]

If Amis wonders where Atta was between 9/8 and 9/10, he was at a house off Scott Dyer Rd. Cape Elizabeth, Maine. Atta was involved with the attack, but did not actually fly Flight 11.

[Lone432345]

You mean theres not an anti theist in here bitching and whiny amazing.

[fctchk]

@AlKadath Scott Atran, in order to gain and survive access to the people he interviews and claims expertise on- islamic terrorists- pretends Islam has nothing to do with it.

Has he read the Quran?

8:12: “Instill terror in the hearts of the unbelievers. Strike off their heads and cut off fingers and toes”

4:89: Take not unbelievers as friends until they fly in Allah's way; but if they turn back, seize them, kill them wherever you find them

9:5: Fight and kill the disbelievers.

[vikramkrishnan]

@1thousandways No, you are embarrassing yourself. Try taking a course in elementary Logic before you open your mouth

[1thousandways]

@vikramkrishnan ... ok, look, you clearly don't understand what the word linear means and I'm not sure you fully understand the word spurious either. You are embarrasing yourself.

[vikramkrishnan]

@1thousandways The point of the link demonstrated above was to demonstrate the spurious and linear link of your argument. Hence it is both spurious and linear.

[1thousandways]

@vikramkrishnan That's a completely different comparison; what you've done is come up with a (very spurious) chronologically linear link between Charlemagne and Hitler. What I'm saying is that Islamic fundamentalism is the nemesis to the culture of the West - ie a different type of comparison. You can blame, or pardon, who you like - that is not the point.

[1thousandways]

@vikramkrishnan With respect I don't think Islamic fundamentalism is as great a threat as the third reich.

[AlKadath]

@1thousandways So true, as Scott Atran (about the only commentator on terrorism worth listening to) puts it, "never have so few struck fear into the hearts of so many".

[vikramkrishnan]

@1thousandways Well applying your idiotic logic and see where we get:

Holocaust -> Hitler -> Versailles -> French Revanchism -> Bismark -> 1848 revolution -> French Revolution -> Louis XVI -> Louis XIV -> ... -> Charlemagne.

Ergo, lets pardon Hitler because it was Charlemagne who was responsible for the Holocaust.

[vikramkrishnan]

@1thousandways And in the 1930s too many people had too many other things to worry about than the remote chance that Herr Hitler and his forces would kill them