There’s a bit of shooting fish in a barrel to this, but it’s delicious anyway: Deepak Chopra Gets Owned.
Thanks for the link to Steve Hayward of NoLeftTurns, who refers to Chopra as “one of those self-levitating frauds so common in our age.” In another Youtube offering, Richard Dawkins takes on Chopra with amusing results (the conversation starts about two minutes, thirty seconds in).
Speaking of Dawkins, Christian apologists love taking on the New Atheists, I assume because they make sense and can be argued with. But if the apologists’ calling is to expose error and protect people from the seductions of their age, they ought to be addressing pseudo-mystical windbags like Chopra nearly as often.
July 30th, 2010 | 2:49 pm
I think the appeal of debating the “New Atheists” has more to do with the bellicose rhetoric of these fellows, and, frankly, their frequent lack of intellectual rigor than anything else (and perhaps, the fact that the New Atheist is becoming the only atheist around).
I also think that the Church and plenty of Catholic apologists do indeed try to address/re-dress this sort of fuzzy nonsense of the Chopra crowd (see Reike, etc).
July 30th, 2010 | 3:11 pm
I’m sorry but please someone bring me up to date. I had thought Deepak was a rapper.
I don’t understand the conversation. The guy in the red shirt ask Deepak to affirm that he believes that ‘all belief is a cover up for insecurity. And then when the reply is in the affirmative everyone laughs. I’m not in on the joke.
Is it meant to be a self referral, as in, the belief that a belief is based on insecurity is itself a belief?
Help me our, I’m scratching my head.
July 30th, 2010 | 3:54 pm
Yes, that’s the joke, Pastor. It’s not very funny and it’s mostly snarky. What it does do is show that Deepak Chopra isn’t exactly the most elegant of thinkers.
Chopra was fairly famous in the 80s and, to some degree, in the early 90s as he “converted” from being an endocrinologist to a self-help guru and proponent of new-age spirituality. He’s been pretty prolific, though he’s also fallen off the face of the map quite a bit (probably having to do with the growing antagonism in re religion in general and the aging of those grand friends of the new-age, the boomers).
July 30th, 2010 | 3:54 pm
Last October I was fortunate to be able to attend the debate at Caltech where Chopra got his BS called down by Michael Shermer and Sam Harris. You can watch parts of that up on YouTube here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1zqEDX7-PI
Has Chopra been able to provide evidence for his positions? Not so far.
July 30th, 2010 | 3:56 pm
Pastor Spomer: Right. And so DC’s belief that all belief is a cover-up for insecurity is itself a cover-up for (DC’s) insecurity.
July 30th, 2010 | 5:03 pm
PS: If you’ve got time, I’d be grateful for your recommendations of apologetic books dealing with Chopra-ist writers. Everything that comes across my desk deals with the new atheists or other of the traditional subjects.
I don’t think the question was snarky at all. He was a serious point quickly and elegantly. It’s not snarky just because it’s easy.
July 31st, 2010 | 12:51 am
I think many apologists do not focus so much on Chopra is that he is hard to really take seriously. The only people that take Chopra serious are those who are already thinking like Chopra. On the other hand, the New Atheists (which are really not anything new, just repackaged and ironically more evangelistic) are actually having an impact on the intellectual respect of Christianity.
Also, it seems funny to me that the New Atheists talk more about God than a lot of Christians do. Maybe they are truely the God obsessed ones.
July 31st, 2010 | 12:58 am
@David Mills
Here are some resources on Deepak from an apologist standpoint:
Here’s a debate:
http://learntoreason.wordpress.com/2007/11/04/debate-between-greg-koukl-and-deepak-chopra-is-there-only-one-correct-religion/
Here’s some comments by Ravi Zacharias:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMwkjv-_iDk
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