A Year Later....
As I look for interesting articles or media on which to blog, I run across a lot of different stuff. Oftentimes I'll bookmark something I've found, knowing that I want to use it, but that for whatever reason, I don't have the time or energy or interest to at the moment.
So it is with this video that I bookmarked a year and a half ago. Sam Harris talking about why religion is counterproductive. So, here's a quick way of dealing with this video.
The first 20 seconds or so sets up the premise for why he's attacking religion in this particular video. He's terrified of a nuclear act of terrorism or war, terrified by the frightening statistics he alludes to that there could be a 50-50 chance of this happening in the next ten years. I'll grant him that - this is a terrifying thought. I don't think any rational human being wants this. Harris is concerned about how much of our collective consciousness is focused on things *other* than preventing this possibility. As an aside, I think it's funny that Harris is irritated that we don't pay attention to this huge danger of potential nuclear craziness, but spends only the first 20 seconds or so of this three minute & 40 second video talking about it.
In other words, he proceeds to do exactly what he decries in others - focus his time and energy in this talk on religion, rather than on the matters that he claims to be terrified about. Curious, except that I'm sure Harris believes that a great deal of the risk of nuclear terrorism is bound up with the idea that the perpetrators of such an atrocity will be religious folks. I'll fill in that link that Harris doesn't explicitly state, but it's the only link that makes sense for why he's attacking religion rather than spending his time talking about ways we could avoid the sort of disaster he is terrified of.
At the 35 second mark or so he reasserts that we need to be talking about real problems, and he lists off several of them like "nuclear proliferation, genocide, poverty and the crisis in education". Yes, these are valid problems. I think we'd all agree that these are very real problems that demand our attention. However he laments that these things are "not at the center of our moral concern."
I'm not sure what he means by that assertion. I think there are a great many people of both the religious and non-religious persuasion who spend a great deal of their time grappling with these issues in very substantive ways. My wife and I support an organization that supports poverty-stricken communities in long-term relationships to improve living conditions. Just last week my congregation had a guest preacher with another organization dedicated to alleviating suffering in 17 different countries. There are many people of all beliefs who strive for peace and who seek improvements in education not just here in the United States but around the world.
So I'm assuming that his assertion is based on the fact that issues like gay marriage have taken center stage in a variety of ways in recent years. But I would distinguish between what the media chooses to make a big deal out of, and what people are working on day in and day out regardless of the media coverage. The media isn't interested in focusing on the plight of the suffering - that isn't going to generate ratings. Focusing on a disagreement over the nature of marriage? That's going to get everyone's attention and so it's often front and center in terms of media coverage.
At about the 50 second mark he asserts that our discussion of morality are "uncoupled" from "real issues". Again, I'm fairly certain that our understandings of morality are directly concerned with "human and animal suffering". I'm also fairly certain that because he disagrees with the moral stance of many religious people on some of these issues (such as gay marriage), he's seeking a way to delegitimize their concerns on these issues. Mr. Harris has been given almost four minutes of air time through CNN's web site to talk, and he's talking not about the things that he professes concern him the most, but rather about things that he thinks keep others from focusing on the important things. He is using his opportunity to do exactly what he criticizes others for doing, and that seems rather disingenuous.
Religious morality is not "uncoupled" from real suffering. Note the massive outpourings of support that happen - from private individuals and organizations - in the wake of tragedy. Billions of dollars poured into relief efforts around the world, and these dollars on top of the billions of dollars already going towards ongoing relief efforts in places that aren't 'fortunate' enough to have the press focus on their suffering for a few hours or days. It is religious belief that urges the vast majority of people to give to the needy - whether to relieve the suffering of the Japanese people after the horrendous events earlier this year, or putting a buck or two in the hands of a panhandler on a street corner. I suspect that Mr. Harris views religious folks as "uncoupled" because they are unwilling to blithely cede core values that they believe affect human and animal suffering a great deal. They are unwilling to affirm certain secularist ideas for the sake of dealing with other ideas. Morality is comprehensive and affects all aspects of human life. It is Mr. Harris' own understanding of morality that is driving him to give this talk. He feels it's valuable and important even though others might say that he's guilty of being just as distracted and distracting as the theists he opposes.
Around the one minute mark he alleges that religion distracts people from real moral issues and problems by focusing their attention elsewhere - on what happens after death and on what God wants. This is part and parcel of most religions, true. But I'd argue that it is precisely these concerns that direct morality. What God wants is not somehow disassociated from the best way for us to live. Biblical Christians would assert rather that what God wants is what we most need to focus on as a means of relieving human suffering, whether our own or others'. Solid Biblical preaching and teaching affirms that there is more than this present life, but should never teach this in a manner that encourages people to disconnect from life here and now and just hold out for eternity. While there are some who may preach that message, it is not the predominant theme of the Bible. Far more attention in the Bible is paid to how to live our lives here and now, rather than on directing our attention elsewhere.
Around the 1:20 mark he brings gay marriage into the open. He attacks the president - a "liberal" - for his adherence to his faith's teaching against homosexuality. He sums up his opinion on this with "It's insane."
The alternative, I presume, would be to not argue against gay marriage. That would be "sane". On what basis? On Mr. Harris' understanding of morality. But on what does Mr. Harris' - or anyone else's - morality rest? On what he claims to "know". And he asserts that religion "convinces people that they should pretend to know things they don't know, and it gives them bad answers to the most important questions".
Religious people are asserting to know something they can't know. The implied opposite of this is Mr. Harris. Mr. Harris knows. He knows that religion is not true. He knows that there is no God. He knows that morality can't be a matter of seeking to please God.
How does he know this? In part, because religions do not agree. If religions could be "reconciled" with one another - if they taught roughly the same things - then that would ostensibly be a better situation. But they don't. He rightly demonstrates that they don't be contrasting the beliefs of Islam and Christianity. In doing so, he wants to imply that if they don't all agree, then they must all be wrong. His assumption is that if at least one of them is wrong (as must be the case when two religions say conflicting things), then none of them can be right. If none of them are right, religious people can't be said to know anything with any certainty about moral issues. Mr. Harris seems keen on the idea of compromise. However, I'm sure that as a neurosurgeon, he would not be willing to compromise with a peer whom he believed was making a severe mistake in prognosis or her approach to surgery. You do not compromise on matters of truth, because truth can be known. Mr. Harris' livelihood depends on this assumption about the nature of our world.
Around the three minute mark, he admits that we do agree much more about reality than we disagree. This is by and large true. Human beings share a remarkable level of agreement about the core moral issues - the sanctity of human life. The importance of honesty. The importance of truthfulness. The importance of respecting one another's property. The sanctity of marriage and the family. What we disagree on more often than not is not these underlying moral truths, but rather the application - how we define the terms and language.
Both sides of the gay marriage debate purport to have a unified respect for the institution of marriage - the question is just one of who can enter into it. Both sides of the abortion debate affirm the value of human life, but they differ on what can be defined as human life. So yes, we agree on the fundamentals more often than not. Debate and divisiveness erupt when the definitions of the terms are changed, as they have been in the last 40 years with abortion and (coincidentally?) in the last 40 years or so in terms of the legitimacy of homosexuality.
He then asserts that there are religious sub-groups that have "distorted" ideas about how humanity can flourish. He goes on to use as an example the idea of throwing battery acid into the face of a girl attempting to go to school. This is truly an atrocity. There are certainly always people and communities of people who are given over to extreme acts of violence and who seek to redefine morality to their own purposes and goals. But this is not exclusively a religious problem. Some of our most noted and hated regimes in the 20th century were atheist regimes. China and the former Soviet Union remain brutal examples of man's capacity for cruelty to his fellow man - and that cruelty was often perpetrated against religious people. It is not a religious problem, it is a human problem.
He concludes by asserting that we need to judge such violations as violations when we see them. He rejects the popular understanding of tolerance and political correctness that atrophy our society and our citizens from within - and that's a good thing. We can call abuses abuses - but we need a way to define what an abuse is so that we can know when it has occurred.
"There are people who are wrong about human fulfillment" he concludes with. This is true. He seems very confident that he is not wrong. But he provides absolutely no argument as to why he is, why he should be believed rather than the Bible or Jesus or Mohammed or Buddha. Pointing out that some religious people can be very bad does not disprove all religions. Pointing out that all religions disagree in fundamental areas does not necessitate that none of them are true. Rather, it should drive us to more serious consideration of which one might be true, and why.
And if we're going to ditch religion, we need a moral code based on something else. If Mr. Harris agrees that there are people who are right and who are wrong, it becomes an issue of determining who the right ones are and the wrong ones are. But on what basis? What criteria? And if we're making up the rules by opinion polls, then what happens when public opinion shifts? When there's a change of leadership? Or when an entire culture or geo-political entity disappears?
Really big questions. So big, we probably need to pay a lot of attention to them if we hope to reduce human and animal suffering. If that's Mr. Harris' goal, maybe he needs to change tactics.
Posted by Paul Nelson at 9/1/2011 3:15 PM 
Categories: Citizenship, Theology, Politics, Education, Apologetics, Current Events
Categories: Citizenship, Theology, Politics, Education, Apologetics, Current Events
A question I would like to ask Sam Harris is this. If you were living in 1930's-40's Germany among the political,intellectual and scientific 'elites' what in your grab bag of atheistic beliefs would make you stand against the Nazi's? The 3 above groups all subscribed to Darwinian Evolution which is where they got the idea Jews and others were 'sub-human'. You would have been surrounded by people who believed what they were doing was right. Would he just 'know' inside it was wrong? How? When pretty much everyone around you was saying it was ok.
Atheists often claim they are moral too. They don't need Christianity to tell them right and wrong. Yes, true but don't we most often find that atheists tend to just adopt the moral code of the culture they live in? There are cases of atheists starting their own utopias. We call them China, N. Korea and the former Soviet Union.
Another claim of atheists that amuses me is that the goal of an atheistic society should be what makes the most people happy. Which they claim science can tell us what that is. This was repeated by John Loftus in "The End of Christianity". Now is this a simple majority of people? Or like a super majority say at least 60%. Is it short term or long term? As you brought up in your post who decides? Why you? Why me? Why Sam or Richard or Christopher? What if I like my atheism North Korean style? Who can say that's wrong? No atheist I've talked to or read has even come close to giving a decent answer.
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What's worse, there were quite a few folks in our own intellectual and scientific elites here in America who believed in the same eugenics principles that the Nazi party was applying in Germany. Our folks probably wouldn't have agreed with the eradication of 6 million people, but on smaller scales, the same principles were in place. They remain firmly entrenched in places like Planned Parenthood, who thoughtfully offers 'services' such as abortion to women who could not afford these services otherwise, and don't think that they can afford a child.
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