Sam Harris is the now famous author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
", which delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in the modern world. More recently, Harris released a follow-up entitled "Letter to a Christian Nation
", that attempts to answer the thousands of question raised by Christians in response to his first book.
Here you will see Sam Harris briefly discussing the link between religion and violence.
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October 5th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
he’s good. About time someone with a little fame said it :)
on a side note, gasmonso, slow down a bit, it’s getting harder and harder to say something meaningfull on the posts. Two/Three a day, you must have a lot of spare time.
October 5th, 2006 at 3:03 pm
Hahaha, I know Acari. I have tended to post a little on the slow side to allow people time to discuss. However, there is so much to report on that it’s difficult to restrain myself.
I am trying to determine a better way to report on more while still retaining some sort of intimacy.
If anyone has ideas please use the contact page and let me know :)
gasmonso
October 5th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Thanks for sharing this, gasmonso. I was unaware of Sam Harris until now. I’ll have to go buy his books now.
On the side note, I’m torn. I like more articles but I do miss the in depth discussions that followed some of them. We do still have some in depth conversations, but less frequently now because the new news creates new postings that push replies within discussion off of the recent post list.
Perhaps this problem could be reduced is you kept all responses until they reach a certain age instead of keeping the X most recent ones.
October 5th, 2006 at 3:36 pm
Interesting thoughts Sidfaiwu. Would I could do is maintain a list of active posts. That way people could see very easily what posts are happening.
Currently I show the recent comments, but I could have another display of active posts.
gasmonso
October 5th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Well i’d say it’s “Easier said then done” http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=196404&cid=16091759
Yeah, it’s freaky when people follow you around online, I swear it’s pure coincidense. I’m a long time lurker on /..
anyway back on track.
I would love to know if his books are as good this little interview, or if it’s simply spewing crap all over the USA. Unfortunatly the local library doesn’t have it (again) so it means yet another trip to the book store.
October 5th, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Having just come out of a discussion of some born again moslem seeing this was quite a relief!
How much time do these religious bastards need to see that we don’t want to be saved and that they can’t be racist just because god is with them!
born-again-moslem: simply because i believe and you’re an atheist i’m a hundred times better than you!
(Torah) I chose you to be a special race
(Bible) You are the slat of the sea, you are the light of the world
(Quran) You are the best people that were brought unto the world
(Hitler) The Aryan race is determined to be the leading race on earth
sorry for the bad translation, my arabic isn’t as good as my english
(i hope this doesn’t invoke godwin’s law)
Does anybody see the anology? And those people are allowed to walk freely through the streets!
i’m so pissed off right now! not at the fact that people are still racist, but at the thought that i have ignorant nazis running through the streets and riding the same buses i do!
Mohammed, please come back, your fellow worshippers are ignorant nazis, you need to get some brain into their heads!
October 5th, 2006 at 9:17 pm
ah my fault, i think i tossed a dozen or so that have yet to be put up ^^;
October 5th, 2006 at 9:26 pm
45% of people think Jesus will be coming back in the next 50 years? Interesting, especially since Christians have thought Jesus was “coming back soon” for the past, oh, couple thousand years?
Also, something I noticed as a student of politics: the countries mentioned as being the most aethiestic also happen to be for the most part (I don’t know about Iceland) socialist. I wonder, would the removal of worship of God lead to worship of the state instead? I’m not trying to debate the points of communism v. democracy here, but I know that the government plays a much bigger role there than in the US, for example. So, I wonder if the greater role of states is a result of the loss of a religious power, or an effect of greater human self-consciousness(ie, more confidence in man on earth, so to speak)?
October 6th, 2006 at 12:37 am
Snurp,
Perhaps it has to do with the poor finally being freed of the promise that their reward is in death. If one doesn’t believe in the afterlife they are more inclined to do all they can to make their life better. Participating in the political process by the poor would certainly result in a more socialist-natured state. Once the gap between rich and poor is made smaller everything should fall into place; lower crime rates, greater equality, etc.
Of course an anarcho-capitalist would wholly disagree. They’d affirm the idea that the people are simply worshipping the state. The state is much more worthy of worship than god at least. The state exists (though again, the an-cap would disagree).
It would be an interesting thesis though to track the development of one of the more atheistic states. What was the series of developments that led to their current success? Hmmm.
October 6th, 2006 at 8:27 am
“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.”
-Karl Marx, the father of socialism
Socialism and anti-religious sentiment have gone hand and hand since the idea was invented.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:46 am
sidfaiwu,
You can get some insight into whether or not you’d like Sam Harris on his website (http://www.samharris.org). He’s got lots of essays/articles he’s written and interviews he’s given posted.
The main concept he is pushing is that religion should be subject to the same evidence based inquirey that all other facits of human discovery are subject to. One of his examples is that if you tell someone that 1+1=3 or that his wife is cheating on them, he requires proof, but if you tell him that eating a cracker every Sunday makes a deity happy, he doesn’t require any sort of investigation into the claims. Harris says that this is dangerous because this lack of reason and rationality causes people to become suicide bombers or ignore rational evidence that their religious beliefs are actually hurting people like Catholics do with African condom usage.
He also suggests that we should scientifically explore religious experiences. He says things like meditation can help people understand stuff better; but he says that people who use prayer need to realize that they could have an experience just as profound by gazing at nature or through other religions- that the experience isn’t in any way related to the dogma of their institutions.
October 6th, 2006 at 9:49 am
Thanks for the info, GlitchCog. I’ll check out the essays.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:40 am
Sidfaiwu,
I’m not so sure about socialism and anti-religious feelings. Although I can’t confirm this, I think that a lot of early Christian societies are seen now as communistic in nature, as the believed in communal use of goods. There were also groups like the Diggers, who believed that the earth belonged to every one. I know for sure that the idea goes back a lot further than Marx, but he is certainly the most responsible for the current concept.
I think Marx’s idea came from looking at older feudal societies, and seeing the obsession with religion then as a way to control the peasants. For him religion may have still been a tool to simply distract people from their state of oppression, only now the capitalists were using it instead of feudal lords. His “revolutionary class consciousness” could not proceed until people cast off this set of ideas justifying their current misery.
But at the same time, communism in Marx’s eyes and modern socialism are not the same thing. Modern socialism keeps the government, and in fact gives it more power in the form of welfare policy. I saw a study not too long ago that said as people became more economically secure, the percent who believed in religion and its tenets went down. It might just be that greater security leaves no pressing need to believe in God (with America being the exception, apparently), leaving the European socialist countries, who have expansive welfare and insurance policies, feeling both more secure and less God-fearing.
October 6th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Hello Snurp,
I, in fact, agree with you. Marx and others consider religion as a tool used by authoritarian governments of all kinds. He believed (incorrectly) that the more socialist a government is, the less authoritarian it is. He also believed that in a non-authoritarian government would not see any advantage in maintaining or promoting religion. Thus, to Marx, more socialism leads to less religion.
I should not have written ‘anti-religious sentiment’ but, perhaps ‘non-religious government’.
October 6th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
This is a little disconcerting to me. I am an Atheist, yet I don’t like socialism. I am a capitalist. But:
No pure system, whether it is capitalist, communist, democratic, socialist, or whatever, can survive. A working system will HAVE to have aspects of all of them to work. It may slant in one direction as ours does toward capitalism. It is just a matter of degrees. I would NOT want to live in a mostly socialist system. Nor would I in a fully capitalist one.
October 8th, 2006 at 3:23 am
Sounds like an interesting book …
But although I’m agnostic and see the vices and severe flaws of religious extremism, as well as the advantages the of separation of religion and state, I’m VERY reluctant to categorize ALL kinds of religious belief as being inherently flawed and the absence of religious faith as being universally better. I would not want to live in a society like the Soviet Union where religion was banned or strongly discouraged even though I myself am not a religious person.
Sam Harris seems to imply that religion is universally a bad thing … but I suppose I’ll have to read his books to get a better idea of where he’s coming from.
For those of you that hate religion and Christian fundamentalism due to bad experiences with religious nutjobs, harsh upbringing, or the Christian political right wing trying to break the separation of church and state, I do sympathize. But I’ve lived in the USA all my life, spent time in California and Texas. I’ve seen Christians believe and act on a wide spectrum of ideals from racism, intolerance, to “end of the world” obsession, to racial harmony, community outreach, selfless charity work and disaster relief. From mindless consumerism and total disregard for the environment to environmental conservationalism. Christian fundamentalists have seemingly been at war with science and yet many of the great scientists, inventors, and philosophers throughout history were Christian.
So I guess I’m trying to say it’s not fair or accurate to say that religion always leads to bad things. Just like people get carried away with religious extremism, people can get carried away with religion phobia as well and unfairly blame all kinds of social ills solely on religion when underlying causes are usually far more complicated. I kinda like this site but do think some people take anti-religious sentiment too far. Whether Sam Harris does or not … I guess I’ll have to read his book.
October 15th, 2006 at 1:09 am
I enjoyed reading John Piper’s thoughts on browsing through Harris’ book; just thought I’d share them:
http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TasteAndSee/ByDate/2006/1839_Meditations_After_a_Monday_at_Barnes_and_Noble/
March 11th, 2007 at 7:59 am
God site. Thanks!