Via Alternet, an interview with a guy who hates religion. Not just faiths that are not Christianity, or faiths that are not his own, or fundamentalist faiths of one stripe or another, or theocracy. No, religion is just plain bad for you–the high-fructose corn syrup of the human psyche. Although it apparently has given rise to some handy stress-reduction techniques:
Sam Harris is not your grandfather’s atheist. The award-winning writer practices Zen meditation and believes in the value of mystical experiences. But he’s adamant in his belief that religion does more harm than good in the world, and has sparked controversy by suggesting that when it comes to faith-based violence, religious moderates are part of the problem, not the solution.
Heh. Yeah, not one of those kind, gentle, live-and-let-live atheists. This one really does think religious people are stupid.
On the subject of religious belief, we relax standards of reasonableness and evidence that we rely on in every other area of our lives. We relax so totally that people believe the most ludicrous propositions, and are willing to organize their lives around them. Propositions like “Jesus is going to come back in the next fifty years and rectify every problem that human beings create”–or, in the Muslim world, “death in the right circumstances leads directly to Paradise.” These beliefs are not very contaminated with good evidence.
Given that mysticism is about receiving events on a transcendent level that allows them to remain uncontaminated by evidence–and doing so in order that those events might guide or enlighten you in some way–I’m not really sure how mystical experiences can be separated from religion. But then, I am neither religious nor particularly mystical, so I might be missing something.
I’m also a little surprised by his implication that literalism is characteristic of religion. From what I’ve read, Biblical literalism is a minority point of view. It is not characteristic of Christians to reject evolution on the grounds that it contradicts a literalist interpretation of Genesis. Analysis of religious texts as metaphors seems pretty widespread.
And what’s this “we” he’s using here? Most people are religious. Laws that protect freedom of religion allow faith without state interference. That doesn’t mean that different religious beliefs cannot be interrogated by private citizens; his home country has freedom of speech laws, too. They also haven’t prevented enormous amounts of intrafaith debate and discussion.
Right. Those are not as consequential. But this whole style of believing and talking about beliefs leaves us powerless to overcome our differences from one another. We have Christians against Muslims against Jews, and no matter how liberal your theology, merely identifying yourself as a Christian or a Jew lends tacit validity to this status quo. People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.
Well, setting aside for a moment that he morally identifies with one subset of humanity–atheists–rather than with the other nine-tenths or so, how is this not true of other beliefs? He hasn’t proposed the abolition of nations, because we cannot be reasonable while infected with national identity. He doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with cultural heritage apart from religion. Neither one of those has a peaceable history. Hell, atheism in the name of a larger group identity doesn’t have a peaceable history.
Anyway, he goes on to excoriate two religions in particular. I understand that the interviewer must have been especially interested in his opinion of them, but it’s interesting that other faiths–say, the ones that think proselytizing is kinda gauche, or the ones that teach pacifism and really mean it–don’t merit comment.
We [Christians; odd use of the first-person plural here, no?] now cherry-pick the good parts. That’s easier to do with the Bible because the Bible is such a big book and it’s so self-contradictory; you can use parts of it to repudiate other parts of it. Unfortunately, the Qur’an is a much shorter and more unified message.
(snipped for juxtaposing purposes)
Cherry-picking is a good thing and it’s to be hoped that Muslims will eventually cherry-pick as well. But the Qur’an, virtually on every page, is a manifesto for religious intolerance. I invite readers of your website who haven’t read the Qur’an to simply read the book. Take out a highlighter and highlight those lines that counsel the believer to despise infidels, and you will find a book that is just covered with highlighter.
Oh, well, now I’m scared! Unified or not, the people who consider it a sacred text don’t seem to have unanimously derived a message from it. Nor does the Bible seem immune to hegemonic interpretation.
This is actually very interesting. He compares Christianity and Islam. When he’s plugging atheism, they’re the same record in a different sleeve. When he’s talking about Islam, Christianity is much more evolved. Look at the bit about cherry-picking. Christianity has developed to the point that plenty of Christians are virtual atheists. Fundamentalism exists within Christianity–and, during a different argument, is proof that Christianity is inherently negative–but it’s one strain among several:
One of the things that is overlooked by many Christians is that there is a wrathful Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus comes out and condemns whole towns to fates worse than Sodom and Gomorrah for not liking his preaching. You can find Jesus in some very foul moods.
Look at the theology of the “Left Behind” series of novels and all the religious extremists in our culture who describe a Jesus coming back with a sword and punishing those who haven’t lived in his name.
Scrolling back up to that first paragraph about the “wrathful Jesus:” maybe I’m reading this wrong, but this sounds like a really off-kilter conception of the relationship between interpretation of sacred texts and religious adherence. Words in religious texts are not like toxic mold lurking in the basement. They don’t contaminate religions without the full cooperation of their adherents. If a whole bunch of Christians–Timothy LaHaye excepted, obviously–think that Jesus was definitely not wrathful, that is, do not believe in a wrathful Jesus, then their belief system does not contain a wrathful Jesus. If they believe in a cuddly Jesus, their faith will revolve around a cuddly Jesus. Sam Harris seems to think that to “overlook” part of a religious text is to submit to its dicta rather than discard them.
You can try to be a mystic, like Meister Eckhart in the Christian tradition, without believing Jesus was born of a virgin. You can realize the value of community and compassion and love of your neighbor without ever presupposing anything on insufficient evidence.
There are many ironies here. The [sacred texts] themselves are very poor guides to morality. The only way you find goodness in good books is because you recognize it. They’re based on your own ethical intuitions. In the New Testament, Jesus is talking about the Golden Rule–a great, wise, compassionate distillation of ethics. You’re doing that based on your intuition.
Hopefully, also, you recognize that stoning someone to death for not being a virgin on her wedding night, or beating your child with a rod, as it recommends in Proverbs, and which millions of Christians do in our country, that’s not a good thing. You know that based on your own intuitions and the evolving human conversation about what is ethical and most conducive to human happiness.
Which religion is apparently totally immune to, except that it’s not particularly difficult to evaluate religious texts based on intuition and the “evolving human conversation,” and even to do so while remaining religious in every sense but the self-serving Harris one. Eckhart believed in God as a unifying presence, albeit in a very mystical way. What was the evidence for that?
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I’m not a huge fan of Sam Harris, but I do have to defend him in a couple regards.
First, it’s perfectly possible and reasonable for an atheist to have what’s commonly described as a “mystical” experience and interpret it in a secular fashion and find value in it. The secular understanding of such things tends to consider them as simply experiences of naturally-produced mental states which are not part of the everyday run of life. An atheist might pursue mystical experience because she’s trying to gain greater control over her emotions and thought processes, as part of a more general process of training mental and physical awareness and capacity (like yoga), or simply because it’s a way to have pleasant and interesting things happen in her head without taking drugs. I’ve had a few experiences I suspect match what people usually think of as mystical without feeling any need to get religion — it was just pleasant and mildly hallucinatory and left me feeling refreshed. Since I know people’s brains can do all kindsa crazy stuff, I didn’t see a need to grasp for supernatural explanations.
Second, while I don’t share Mr. Harris’ hostility toward “moderate” religion, I do understand his frustration with it. I try to maintain the attitude that as long as religious people aren’t forcing their views on anybody else, I don’t care what kind of crazy shit they get up to. But, well, there are a number of factors that make it very difficult to maintain this level of tolerance and patience all the time. To be honest, I have to admit that one of those factors is that even some moderate religious beliefs just seem (from a secular perspective) to be so dumb that it’s often a challenge to maintain respect for people who would be willing to believe something like that.
But more to the point, I also think Mr. Harris is right that the moderate religious people do (probably unintentionally) provide a certain amount of cover for the loonies just by existing. “Nice” religious people will still consider serious logical criticism of religious beliefs or religiously-based politics to be extremely offensive and taboo, which makes rational discussion of certain issues very difficult. Consider, for example, how deeply the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is bound up with people’s irrational, religiously-based beliefs about whose god promised what chunk of crappy scrubby desert to whom, and how hard it is to criticize those beliefs (in the US, at least) without running up against charges of antisemitism. And consider further all the fundie Christians in the US claiming religious discrimination when their religiously-derived bigotry isn’t sanctioned by law, not to mention the complicated “sanctity of life” theory that the Catholic church pushes to try to take away women’s reproductive choices. The aura of holiness around religious arguments (and, in this country, the tedious Christian persecution complex) provides them a ridiculous degree of protection from open debate and criticism. After all, how can you say bad things about the religion followed by Mother Theresa and Pope John Paul the already-sainted second? For those of us who think that those people where at best nice but deluded, having to fight their ghosts all the time just gets old after a while. It’s as bad as the, “If you don’t suppport the Iraq war it must be because you hate our soldiers,” crap.
And, let’s not forget all the people who just casually, easily equate religion with morality and lack of religion with lack of morality. (Not that I even like the word morality, but I’ll leave that aside for now.) Sure, there’ve been some bad things done in the name of social philosophies which were incidentally atheistic, but religion in general, and Christian religion in particular, have uncountably more atrocities to answer for, many of which were committed directly in the name of religion instead of simply in the name of a larger social theory which also happened to be religious. My point here is not to claim that atheism is therefore intrinsically better than religion because there’s a lower atrocity count — that’s simply a ridiculous argument given atheism’s shorter tenure as a significant force in the world, and it’s otherwise debatable as well. I don’t think Mr. Harris was really attempting that claim either. The actual point is that this comparison suggests that religion is no guarantor of morality, despite its claims to the contrary, and that this knocks one of the major pillars out from under many arguments in favor of religion. (The usual atheist framing of this is that, since religion is a pile of lies, and the atrocity list shows that it doesn’t have any clear social benefit, we might be better off if we stopped saddling ourselves with this useless burden of falsehood.) And, anyway, as an atheist, one tends to get sick of people casually equating one’s philosophy with immorality all the time, and everybody seems to think that it’s perfectly fine to do it. It kinda sucks to be an infinitesimal minority, y’know?
The bottom line here is that I think there are plenty of good reasons for us atheists to be kinda frustrated and pissy about religion, regardless of how “moderate” it is. It’s very hard to live and let live when you’re trying to live with people who seem sometimes to like your mutual enemies better than they like you. (“Hey, at least the fundies have morals, they’re just bad morals!”) It seems like there’s been a lot of heat in the left blogosphere of late with the moderate religious telling us atheists to shut our noisy heathen mouths, and it makes us kinda grumpy. So that’s kinda where I think Sam Harris is coming from.
All that said, though, yeah, he’s still kind of a dick.
I respectully disagree, piny. Perhaps I am the one misreading you here, but plenty of people do take the more violent passages of the Bible to heart. And I believe that many of those who “overlook” the concept of a wrathful Jesus do so out of acquiescense rather than rejection of the concept.
There are people who murdered doctors because they performed abortions. There are people who hide away in Utah and force themselves upon teenage girls.
And then there are the people who show up to soldiers’ funerals and wave those awful signs. I recently read an article in TIME about how bikers organized honor guards for the soldiers’ families in order to shield them from the verbal (and visual) harassment.
Um, bikers? Forgive me for my tone here, but where the heck is the moral outrage from moderate Christians? I realize that the people I have pointed out are radical Christians, and do not represent mainstream Christianity, but why is there so little response from the mainstream? Shouldn’t there be dozens of priests there, along with their congregations, shouting down the people who would make a perverse mockery out of their religion?
What would cuddly Jesus do? :(
Religion is not the issue here. The issue is dogma, and this dude seems to be a proponent of an ideology no less prescriptive than any other (such ideology) I’ve encountered.
Personally, I wish that he had spoken for the abolition of nations and national identities. What about sexual or political identities… class identities? That would, as piny points out here, be much more consistent and honest of him. It would also put him squarely in my camp. When I have had encounters with proponents of religion, science, demographics, or any of the ideomythlogical implements of empire, I’ve been resentful, too.
I don’t want to be colonized by any of them. I don’t want to be an American, a libertarian, a scientist, an atheist, a gay man, or a moderate Christian. Where these labels have affected my experience, they have done so negatively. I don’t feel like they originate in me; rather, I feel like they occupy my mental space like an invading force.
But I’m not interested in imposing my sense of things on other folks–especially demographical swarths of imaginary people–and not just because I’m a relativist postmodern fuck. I can’t do it because I realize now that I have a moral obligation to dissociate myself from empires of thought. This guy doesn’t seem to share that sense of things, so I have to doubt (for myself) the spirit of his take on things.
Regarding whether or not all the religions “[leave] us powerless to overcome our differences from one another,” I’ll make up my mind only after I meet all of “us.” Until then, I’m just gonna revel in the ambiguity and do my best to encounter each person as s/he is, “religious” or otherwise.
He’s not completely alone in this point of view. I disagree: I think people who hold this view are confusing religious belief with lack of secularism. Lots of religious people are secular, and I think it’s a lack of secularism that is bad for society, as it leads to legislation of religious values.
–IP
On the whole, I find that atheism itself is not generally a “live and let live” sort of proposition. Those who can abide it over many years tend to become cynical and stagnant in their own learning. To me, it’s just as bad philosophically as fundamentalism.
I don’t really know many lifelong hardline atheists. But the ones I’ve met tend to be extremely unpleasant, nasty, petty individuals.
Right, just as merely identifying yourself as male or female lends tacit validity to the patriarchy. This sounds exactly like the Heart argument to me, only it’s about religion instead of transsexualism and gender identity issues. Or am I way off here?
Anyway: Gross oversimplification, thy name is Sam Harris.
Only if you ‘believe’ those ideas of right and wrong exist a priori. Elsewise, they are the product of either religious training or a grounding in secular humanism. Whistling past a graveyard?
I’m afraid he’s just as flawed in his thinking as the rabid fundamentalists are.
In fact he is making the same mistake – he thinks he’s “found the right answer”. Most of us make that error when we are fifteen or so and the universe slaps us around for it. (I remember a friend of mine’s mother having a sign on the fridge that read “Anyone who thinks they have all the answers can move out now, while they still do”)
The absolute notion of atheism (an outright disbelief in the notion of a God being) is simply the polar opposite of blind faith in a God – and equally shallow.
Science, or most liberal arts disciplines actually, are “atheistic” in the classical latin sense of the word – they do not imply a god as a fundamental assumption in their inquiries. It’s a subtle distinction, that I think is often overlooked.
Hm. “Hardline atheist” sounds a little like “gender feminist.” Does that just mean someone who definitely does not believe in God? Or is there some special quality to hardline atheism that goes above and beyond regular atheism?
I’m an atheist. My mother is an atheist. My dad, AFAIK, is an atheist. I have never believed in a higher power nor felt any need to resolve the absence of same.
I never said that there weren’t people who took the violent passages of the Bible to heart. My point was that the people who ignored them did so because they didn’t think Christianity should contain violence. Harris seems to be saying that a negative message can permeate a religion even when the believers disagree with it or refuse to admit it to their faith; I think that makes no sense.
Freeman:
Making sweeping generalizations about Atheism, especially as (I assume from your writing) a non Atheist is just as silly as what this article is doing. First off, can we please clear up that Atheism is *not* a religion. It is not something accepted on faith: it is the rational rejection of faith. What do you mean by “Atheism is not a live and let live sort of proposition”? Rejecting faith doesn’t, on the whole, make you less tolerant of people of faith. From my experience living in the Scotland, I can tell you that an Atheist identified Glaswegian is far less likely to kill a Protestant/Catholic Glaswegian than a Catholic/Protestant identified Glaswegian is.
As for being “as bad philosophically as fundamentalism”, explain logically how using your reason to reject revealed religion is as bad is literally accepting as fact a book written thousands of years ago and repeatedly translated?
“Those who can abide it over many years become cynical and stagnant in their own learning”? In this statement you’re basically claiming that Atheists wake up one day, decide God doesn’t exist, and then slowly become horrible, cynical people and stop growing as individuals because of their lack of God? Since when do you have to be religious to learn and grow as a person? Since when does philosophy have to be religious? This statement doesn’t even make sense.
Oh good, just what I need first thing in the morning.
Attitudes like Sam Harris’s and Richard Dawkins’s are unfortunately more common than they ought to be among atheists, and that really pisses me off. People who think like this don’t seem to have had the benefit of knowing many religious people, so they talk as if all religious people are literalists, irrational, etc. They don’t understand how religion actually operates. Like piny said,
That’s not the only “off-kilter conception”, of course. He complains about religiosity in American politics without acknowledging that in many other countries, it’s not an issue. (Over here, Stephen Harper saying things like “God bless Canada” is really an unfamiliar phenomenon; his predecessor Stockwell Day took a lot of flak for, among other things, being overly religious.) Some people just seem eager to believe the worst.
Thanks, man. I’m an atheist, if you didn’t know. Judge not…
Using a mystical state of mind, as it were, is a little different from having those experiences in a spiritual way. It seems like Harris is talking about the latter. His example, Eckhart, was spiritual, just in a way that Harris wants to define as a-religious.
On refresh, oh yay!
How many religious people actually do have “blind faith”? Even the most insular fundamentalist Christians feel that they have (and ought to have) very good reasons to believe in God, even if other people think the reasons aren’t very convincing.
As another bitter atheist chiming in, I have to ask: from the Danish cartoon riots, to the Da Vinci code uproar, to the dirty looks I got while reading Harris’ book on the subway; you’ve got eternity in paradise waiting, why so cranky?
Any type of dogma, regardless if it is secular or religious, tends to rot the mind by keeping it closed to new experiences.
As a libertarian Atheist who meditates and tries to follow Zen philosophy, I know to contiue evolving as a human I must be open minded, and live and let live, unlike Harris, who throws up walls between himself and the religious world.
And I think Harris is an asshole for thinking he can peel himself away to pure bullshit through enough Zen meditation. All he’ll find is an arrogant bastard at the core of his being, without God to turn to for help.
Freeman -
I am wondering the reason you’ve only encountered unpleasant atheists is because, frankly, most of us don’t talk much about being atheists, because it’s such a touchy subject, and those that do – like their religious counterparts – tend to have much stronger and unforgiving attitudes about everyone who doesn’t share their beliefs. My immediate family, and almost all of my friends (ranging in age from 20s to 70s), are atheists, mostly life-long, and pretty much completely the opposite of the sort you say you’ve encountered. I think the cynics among us are weary of politics, more than religion though it doesn’t help that these days, a lot of the problems in politics come from the fundamental religious people.
Zuh?
Um, what A Pang said, for one thing. For another, zuh? I see no reason to believe in a higher power of any kind. I have encountered no evidence that leads me to believe that one exists, and several phenomena that seem to contradict the idea. There’s nothing “blind” about that; it’s the conclusion I came to after looking real hard at the world around me. While I must, on a pure abstract level, entertain the possibility–just as I must entertain the possibility that we are actually living in the Matrix–in every other sense I firmly believe that there is no God.
That does not mean that I don’t respect differing opinions on the subject, or that I assume that those people did not also think long and hard on the matter.
Guys like this are why I tend to always follow up “I’m an atheist” with “but …” when someone inquires.
It’s true, Piny, fervently believing in a pink unicorn on the dark side of Triton that controls everybody’s thoughts except mine is the same as fervently not believing in it.
I just don’t talk about it, and don’t usually have to. For some reason, “queer” and “transsexual” seem to make “religion” a null set in the minds of most other people.
And when I do, I tend to forget the context that this guy provides–just as, I’m sure, many moderate religious people don’t see why they should explicitly reject other kinds of religion.
… though some days that proposition has tempting explanatory power.
to be honest, i’m just sick to death of all the eliminationist rhetorics going around these days.
You know, life would be soooo much better, if we just didn’t have those pesky (insert racial, ethnic, religious, or other group here) around. They’ve inflitrated the government, they’re a bad influence on kids, and they’re trying to take over the world!
I’m sorry, but my demand that people learn to live in a pluralistic society has got about no time for a joker like Sam Harris.
I always wanted to be responsible for starting a cult.
*shrug* I’m not a huge fan of spirituality, really, as I think it’s kinda mushy and sappy, but it’s still more of an attitude towards life than a religious belief. It’s just an attitude that is commonly associated with religion, because seeing objects and people and events as imbued with some significance beyond the everyday is necessary for the maintenance of religious beliefs. But I don’t see why going around imbuing things with undue significance necessarily requires the postulation of supernatural entities or the generation of dogmas and religious texts or the presence of a community of like-minded fellows or any of the other things that make up a religion. So spirituality can perfectly well be a-religious, i think.
That said, I tend to suspect that most of the people who go for “spirituality” when they become atheist are former religious people still grasping to maintain the things they liked about being religious. Which I can sympathize with, having been in that position myself, but I don’t think it’s really good in the long run. I suspect that attitudes like “spirituality” are probably ultimately just more useless baggage that we would be better off without. So I think atheist sprituality is still counterproductive (not to mention lame) even though it’s not a logical contradiction.
How come the invisable, do-nothing, isn’t real diety is always pink? Maybe it’s nothing…but really, what the fuck is up with that?
It means atheism is gay.
It’s because pink is a girly color and everybody knows girly things are silly and trivial.
The pluralism should include atheists like Sam Harris, methinks.
This is a joke, right? You’re anti-pluralist, if this is the way you’re defining the word; we can’t have a thread on Islam on this blog without you coming to rant about the incipient fundamentalist Muslim takeover of the Netherlands and all of Europe. Harris’s atheism isn’t incompatible with pluralism. His belief that religion is incompatible with pluralism is.
It doesn’t even have to be about Islam; witness the recent raising of the Muslim Scourge in the Europe-does-sex-ed-better thread.
I stand corrected. Maybe we should just focus on cats and playlists (but no MIA, of course).
These are good points. I’m not spiritual, either, really.
I think that while it’s not required that “undue significance” involve those things, there’s a high correlation. Plus, when you argue that you can have spirituality without dogma or enforced conformity, how do you argue that religion is inherently dogmatic and anti-intellectual? (Not that you’re doing that.)
I’m sorry, “jet black” unicorn. Actually, the color changes every five minutes.
I didn’t say anything about Islam.
It’s the Unicorn of a Different Color!
Well, no, not for the past five minutes. On the thread to which I was referring, however:
Plus, when you argue that you can have spirituality without dogma or enforced conformity, how do you argue that religion is inherently dogmatic and anti-intellectual?
Some people assign all the dogmatic, hierarchical, conformist, and anti-intellectual stuff to the word “religion” and the rest to the word “spiritual.”
I’m not sure it’s a particularly useful distinction, because to me it often winds up sounding like “I’ll use the word spiritual to describe all the stuff I like, and the word religious to describe all the stuff I don’t like.” (I have a similar feeling about some of the ways people draw lines between “erotica” and “porn.”) But evidently some people find the distinction more useful than I do.
Piny, I’m a Classical Liberal, my views are not against pluralism if it doesn’t violate certain rules such as rights of inviduals, such as Free Speech and property rights.
Really, I don’t care whether people worsip Yahwe, Allah, Disco Ball or nothing at all — when they start making their beliefs superior to concept of the values I support then I naturally oppose them.
And also, if you want to debate me about Islam then do so at threads where I have discussed Islam, instead of just painting me as some raving Islamophobe outside context.
Attack the arguments, please.
Exactly. That’s what I think Harris is doing, and that’s why I think it doesn’t work in this context. There are religions–widespread, organized, distinct, ancient–that are spirituality by this definition. Plus, even religions with large amounts of dogmatic, hierarchical, conformist, and anti-intellectual sentiment give rise to sects that reject all of those ideas.
Well, no, not for the past five minutes. On the thread to which I was referring, however:
You mean Christianity, obviously. When Western European countries get a Muslim majority, I’m guessing religion will start inserting itself quite much into everything.
Do you want to debate that?
If no, why bring it up?
Forgot the blockquote.
Is there any chance in getting out of perma-moderate (guessing no, but still asking).
Exactly! That’s why it’s ludicrous–and inconsistent–for you to complain about sly civilian’s viewpoint.
Absolutely, but there’s no point attempting to do that with you. To show you what an obnoxious hypocrite you’re being, dude.
Pluralism that excludes certain views (that do not harm others) is no pluralism.
Blah blah blah…
Well, “exactly” for purposes of analyzing your own logic; whether this is accurate is another matter. And it’s not. You’ve never qualified your disdain for Muslims as a broad category. So you do care whether people worship Allah.
Um, no. I care whether they use their belief in Allah to justify violence towards unbelievers, and are generally opposed to Liberal values.
Of course, Muslims who do not do that, or support that, I have nothing against.
Pluralism that rejects anti-pluralist beliefs as incompatible with its own ideas, on the other hand, still qualifies.
But you think that Muslims as a class are generally opposed to Liberal values:
Sly civilian did not reject anti-pluralistic beliefs, he rejected “jokers” like Harris. Sam Harris can only harm pluralistic society if his views contain endorsement to violence which they do not.
Pluralism has room for Sam Harris.
Not what sly said:
He’s arguing that pluralism–the idea that people of various beliefs can get along–is incompatible with the belief that one set of beliefs is inherently wrong or dangerous. Sam Harris is arguing that all religious beliefs are inherently wrong and dangerous. He is therefore anti-pluralistic and intolerant. As someone who would like a pluralistic society, sly is tired of anti-pluralist rhetoric.
So are you having a debate or not?
Make up your mind, and get me out of moderation, as I have shown repeatedly that I do not use ad hominems etc.
I do not think of Muslims as class — they are pretty diverse, but 40% of Muslims support Shari’a (41% do not), and since Shari’a is about as far from Liberal values as you can get, I have to conclude that more Muslims than, say Evangelic-Lutherans (that currently make up about 80% of polulation in Nordic countries) are inclined to insert religion in to politics. And honor killings are still a problem (whether this is culture or religion is debatable).
Percentiles, not class.
I’d say that the distinction between religion and spirituality is that religion explicitly includes a belief in the supernatural while spirituality doesn’t necessarily do so, although it may be combined with such beliefs. Of course, religion usually contains dogma* and all the other things mentioned, but belief in the supernatural is its real distinguishing characteristic, the thing that contrasts it with secular, naturalist worldviews. Sorry I was unclear about that before.
It’s true that people sometimes call themselves simply “spiritual” when what they mean is that they’re religious without specific membership in an organized religion or specific belief in a deity. But I think the term is being used differently when it describes “spiritual” (ie. non-creedal) religion and when it describes “spiritual” atheism**. In the religious case, it is simply used to mean that you’re religious but you don’t subscribe to any particular doctrine or faction. In the atheist case, it generally implies that you want to experience feelings of sacredness and significance within a naturalistic worldview.
I’d say that overall, spiritual really implies not a distinction between “bad” worldviews and “good” worldviews, but instead a distinction between a rejection of symbolism and hidden meanings and the embrace of such things. I eschew spirituality because I like to approach the world directly and bluntly, and because I don’t find myself overawed by the interconnectedness of being, impressed by hidden knowledge, or desirous of self-transcendance. Instead I enjoy studying complex systems, learning things I didn’t know, and improving my intellectual and emotional capacities. It’s the same practice, really, but the emphasis is much different.
– ——
*Dogma is not being used as a curse word here — the Catholic church will itself use the term to refer to the particular teachings that you’re expected to believe to be a Catholic.
**Really, atheism is the wrong word, since strictly speaking, atheist just means lacking belief in a god or gods, and there certainly exist atheist religions, like Buddhism. But usually when people label themselves as atheist these days, what they really mean is that they have a totally secular, naturalistic outlook on the world. Also, further note that using Buddhist practice as a spiritual exercise is not the same thing as being Buddhist. I’m not really sure what categories Sam Harris falls into though.
Fair enough.
I have to say that I, and many other atheists, would also argue that unfalsifiable supernatural beliefs are inherently wrong and dangerous, because believing in ridiculous and unnecessary stuff tends to cause societies to do some pretty irrational things, not to mention generally eroding people’s critical faculties and the tone of discourse. But most of us would also argue that it’s people’s right to believe whatever dumb stuff they want to believe and not to be treated shoddily for it as long as they’re not directly harming other specific individuals in a non-consensual fashion.
Thus, while we might prefer a society which is interested only in naturalist and falsifiable ideas, we recognize that a non-discriminatory public sphere is the only thing that makes sense in a real world filled with real people, and that it safeguards our rights as much as if not even more than those of religious persons. And, really, what more can you reasonably ask from people than a willingness to accept that we’re stuck living with those we don’t like and that we shouldn’t treat them like crap?
It seems to me like it’s pretty important to remember that religion is not just about the people involved. It’s also a set of ideas which should be as open to criticism as any other. We’re not sitting around saying, “gosh, religious people suck”. Instead, we’re saying, “gosh, the ideology that is religion sucks”. It’s absurd and unfair to ask us to not discuss our distaste for religion, or to smear us as intolerant when we do. Nobody’s calling for pogroms or even the reduction of religious civil rights here. We’re just arguing about which ideas or worldviews are best, which is what the whole darn blogosphere is about.
In future, do you think you could maybe make statements like this one as opposed to statements like this one, which doesn’t qualify at all:
Particularly if you want to go off about multiculturalism and cultural relativism when people complain about your general statements?
Sure. My problem with Harris is that he’s arguing a homogeneity of religion that doesn’t seem to exist, and ignoring instances in which it does not seem to negatively affect the critical faculties of faithful people.
I do make use of provocative rhetoric — it seems to be the norm here — but if I can get actual discussion going on with statements like the first one then I will use that.
However, I do not like the fact that you took my comment out of context, as out of context it gives the impression that I think all good things are coming to end because of growing Muslim population, whereas it really refers to sex education based on secular ideas (I do believe there are other problems, but anyway).
It was not a general statement, but a context-specific one.
Well… it doesn’t affect their critical faculties outside of the domain of religious ideas, maybe. But then you sorta get this weird doublethink thing going, which isn’t exactly super-awesome either.
I’ll grant that there are some people who say, for example, “My religion isn’t really about whether Jesus actually lived or died or whether people really go to heaven if they believe in him, it’s about what we can learn from his example and how following that example can make the world a better place.” But it seems like in that case you’re really rendering the supernatural beliefs irrelevant and metaphorical. It’s hard for me to see how you can call that a religion at all, except in the sense that it’s a life philosophy which is loosely derived from ideas that other people treat as a religion.
Ha, I found it! From Mencken’s draft Constitution of the Free State of Maryland:
The Legislature of the Maryland Free State shall consist of a Legislative Council of fifteen members, to be elected at State-wide elections… No person shall be eligible to election… who is or has ever been a minister of the Gospel, or who has ever been under guardianship as a lunatic, or as a person non compos mentis, or who has ever been convicted, either within the state or elsewhere, of felony or bribery in any election…
sly civilian: How come the invisible, do-nothing, isn’t real deity is always pink?
Why is the mother of the Messiah called “Mary” instead of “Laura”? “Laura” is a pretty name. Why are there ten commandments, instead of thirteen? What’s the big whoop-de-doo about Jerusalem, or the Ganges River, in contrast to Cleveland and the good old Cuyahoga? Tradition, pal, that’s why!
No, it gives the impression that you think of Islam as a monolith, which is the fault of your words, not the fact that I quoted them. I didn’t pull it to highlight the “good things” part at all.
Not necessarily. For my comment to be true, it doesn’t necessarily demand Islam to be monolithic, all it takes is that the majority of Muslims won’t be as inclined to support secular sex education, and thus, with Muslim majority such thing may be lost on governmental scale.
Since I think this is a well-known, accepted fact, I did not bother with diclaimers.
It’s all well and good to say that we should’nt have to do that. But growing up in a town where conservative and often fundamental Christianity are the norm (and in an extended family where the religious choices range from atheism, to naturalism and UU-attendance, to hardline Southern Baptism) saying you’re an atheist is a good way to brand yourself as an evil, immoral, Christian- and America- hater.
It’s the style of believing and talking about beliefs that isn’t true of other beliefs, according to Harris. That is, for most beliefs that aren’t religious beliefs, we find it acceptable and even preferable to ask, at times, for evidence. That is, we want thesort of evidence that lots and lots of people can agree on regardless of upbringing, political stripe, religious inclinations or the like. (I don’t pretend this is unproblematic, and I don’t think Harris, in his book, does either, though he does go over it quickly. It’s not a two thousand page book, after all.)
With religious beliefs, it is often antithetical to look for evidence of this sort. .In my mind (though Harris, to my knowledge, doesn’t say this explicitly), it is just that sort of agreement on what might count as evidence that helps to form ‘humanity as a whole’.
Also, though he doesn’t talk about it in that short interview, Harris (going by his book) doesn’t think religious thinking is the only ’style’ of thinking that has this problem. Particular kinds of political movements (he cites Marxism) have similar problems, in that they are in some way ‘beyond question’ for their adherents. So, while he doesn’t (to my knowledge) advocate for getting rid of nationalism, he might very well think it does follow from his thinking.
I’m not fully supporting Harris’ views, but his outlook is much more involved and nuanced in his book than he could possibly explain in an interview. As another commenter has said, that doesn’t mean he’s not a dick. I did see a video of him giving a speech (I think it was for the booktv channel) where he came off as much less self-serving than he does in the alternet interview. (Although, in a way I suppose his position comes down to something like, “You just can’t argue with those people!”)
He also has a forum for readers of the book (and others) that goes into a lot of this stuff ad nauseum, but it’s pretty interesting:
http://www.samharris.org/forum/
Lots of different opinions there.
Piny, ya took the words out of my mouth. I’m enough of a realist to know that pluralism must make some decisions about the acceptable range that it will encompass. And while Harris is certainly in his legal right to express these opinions, they present a challenge to the long term health of our pluralism, just like a Falwell and the Dominionists do.
As i said, i’m willing to grant a certain amount of paranoia in my read here. But the whole argument gets gendered. Reason is cool, calm, intelligent (read the male valence on that yet?) and Religion is passionate, emotional, and mystic… Without engaging the stereotypes specifically, i think they’re prima facie invalid, i think you can see where pinking religion as part of dismissing it in favor of the almighty power of Intellectual Reason has my patriarchy alarm going off.
Without engaging the stereotypes specifically, i think they’re prima facie invalid, i think you can see where pinking religion as part of dismissing it in favor of the almighty power of Intellectual Reason has my patriarchy alarm going off.
Sly, Sly, Sly. it’s The Invisible Pink Unicorn. Please don’t let these sloppy semi-heretics mislead you about the divinely revealed true nature of the IPU.
I will say that if you think reason isn’t passionate, you’re doing it wrong. Science is ecstatic, too. Of course. Ever read Barbara McClintock?
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