Sam Harris: Why we should ditch religion

[Bandito]

Philosopher: Why we should ditch religion


(CNN) -- For the world to tackle truly important problems, people have to stop looking to religion to guide their moral compasses, the philosopher Sam Harris told CNN.
"We should be talking about real problems, like nuclear proliferation and genocide and poverty and the crisis in education," Harris said in a recent interview at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com/) in Long Beach, California. TED is a nonprofit group dedicated to "ideas worth spreading."
"These are issues which tremendous swings in human well-being depend on. And it's not at the center of our moral concern."
Religion causes people to fixate on issues of less moral importance, said Harris, a well-known secularist, philosopher and neuroscientist who is the author of the books "The End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian Nation."
"Religion has convinced us that there's something else entirely other than concerns about suffering. There's concerns about what God wants, there's concerns about what's going to happen in the afterlife," he said.
"And, therefore, we talk about things like gay marriage as if it's the greatest problem of the 21st century. We even have a liberal president who ostensibly is against gay marriage because his faith tells him it's an abomination.
"It's completely insane."
Watch Harris' talk at the TED Conference (http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html)
Harris also said people should not be afraid to declare that certain acts are right and others are wrong. A person who would spill battery acid on a girl for trying to learn to read, for instance, he said, is objectively wrong by scientific standards.
"It's not our job to not judge it and say, 'Well, to each his own. Everyone has to work out their own strategy for human fulfillment.' That's just not true," he said.
"There's people who are wrong about human fulfillment."
Harris placed no faith in the idea that Muslims and Christians will be able to put their differences aside and cooperate on global issues.
"There's no way to reconcile Islam with Christianity," he said. "This difference of opinion admits of compromise as much as a coin toss does."


Video inside:http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/25/ted.sam.harris/index.html?hpt=P1

[Demogorgon]

It is a bit of a stretch to call him a philosopher. At any rate if you look at his political views he is a stark lesson in the dangers of anti-theism. In other words it would not be a good idea to listen to him too closely.

[RadioRaheem84]

Agreed. Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are anti-theists that use their philosophical gymnastics to support the war on terror.

They're really shoddy at philosophy too. My sophomore philosophy course ripped apart Hitchens and Harris assertions, so you can safely say that their philosophical outlook is sophomoric.

Read Dennett, some Dawkins, if you want good stuff. Parenti though is coming out with a killer book I hear, minus all the New Pop Anti-theist crap that defines Hitchens and Harris.

[Barry Lyndon]

Sam Harris has advocated, in his book 'The End of Faith', that the US should carry out a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. He is a foaming at the mouth racist imperialist who uses his 'atheism' as a cover for his neo-fascist views. Fuck him.

[mikelepore]

Some of you people are expecting too much. Just because his understanding hasn't grown to the point where he would be against imperialism or something, that doesn't mean that he's not performing a useful service in his criticism of religion. Can't a person who has learned one good lesson make a contribution to enlightenment by teaching that one good lesson to others, even if he's an idiot about other subjects?

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

I don't think their atheism is an attempt to justify the war. They believe that religion in the Arab world is a serious problem. It's either a force beyond stopping or, simply put, a threat in itself.

The latter presumes Islam is worse than other religious. Given the historical context, we can see that other faiths have behaved similar under the same historical conditions. As for the Arab world being "beyond saving," I think that if there is more of a case for saying that about Christian American than Islam, though both are quite problematic at the moment.

Keep in mind that many atheists are less sympathetic to standard notions of morality. If society will be worse off from not bombing Arabic nations, you can support that without being a racist. I don't think it's true, myself.

If the education system was leftist, I would advocate forcing education on other nations. However, forcing American values has unsurprisingly produced bad results. Probably because American values are nothing to be proud of either.

[R_P_A_S]

Some of you people are expecting too much. Just because his understanding hasn't grown to the point where he would be against imperialism or something, that doesn't mean that he's not performing a useful service in his criticism of religion. Can't a person who has learned one good lesson make a contribution to enlightenment by teaching that one good lesson to others, even if he's an idiot about other subjects?

nope apparently he has to be a die hard commie for some people to learn a thing of two on subjects he's very well versed on.

[tradeunionsupporter]

Agreed

[Philzer]

Why we should ditch religion?

simply:

To become a human.


http://www.revleft.com/vb/communism-and-religion-t73036/index7.html


please note:

Democracy is nothing else than the modern religion of the modern class society today!


Democracy is the being of Pantheism.


Kind regards

[Glenn Beck]

Sam Harris is a fascist piece of shit.


Some of you people are expecting too much. Just because his understanding hasn't grown to the point where he would be against imperialism or something, that doesn't mean that he's not performing a useful service in his criticism of religion. Can't a person who has learned one good lesson make a contribution to enlightenment by teaching that one good lesson to others, even if he's an idiot about other subjects?

Expecting public intellectuals to not use secularism as a cover for virulent racism and aggressive national chauvinism is expecting too much? For fuck's sake, man.

[Philzer]

Hi!


Sam Harris .... his 'atheism' as a cover for his ....

I am afraid, You confuse atheism with the religion of bourgeois, pantheism.

Communism is materialism.

Karl Marx:


It is not enough not to believe in God.

Its everytime a very interest phenomen that the citizen cannot understand the world in which they lives.("the citizen cannot recognize the truth" Platon says) :D

Kind regards

[Demogorgon]

Some of you people are expecting too much. Just because his understanding hasn't grown to the point where he would be against imperialism or something, that doesn't mean that he's not performing a useful service in his criticism of religion. Can't a person who has learned one good lesson make a contribution to enlightenment by teaching that one good lesson to others, even if he's an idiot about other subjects?
No, because he is using atheism as a direct justification for extremely right wing views. Frankly I would rather he be just another bible thumper as that would stop people interested in atheism from being led down the wrong path.

You may as well say Ayn Rand was making a contribution to enlightenment. She was an atheist too after all.

[Philzer]

Hi!


You may as well say Ayn Rand was making a contribution to enlightenment. She was an atheist too after all.

I think it is a big mistake.

Ayn Rand cannot be a materialist or atheist. She is fighting in her philosophie for laissez-faire capitalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand

-> laissez-faire = Adam Smith "invisible hand" -> pantheism: Spinoza: God=substance=nature

kind regards

[Barry Lyndon]

Further evidence of Harris's endorsement of torture, his offer of an alliance with right-wing Christian evangelicals against Muslims, and the fact that he's not even an atheist(he just wants to replace Christianity/Islam with Eastern Mysticism):

http://www.alternet.org/story/46196/

[heiss93]

Honestly I think that atheists who do not tie atheism to socialism, can often be worse than the out-right religious. Much of the New Atheist movement is tied to sociobiology, and Neo-social darwinism that supports sexism, racism, imperialism etc. Their atheism is more a Nietzchean freedom from slave morality than a liberation from the opiate of the people. They are in the spirit of Ivan Karamazov who said if God is dead all is permitted.

Their brand of pseudo-Darwinism actually serves the same purpose of Christian original sin. Capitalism is biologically ingrained into human nature so any attempts at progress are utopian.

This is not to defend the religious. But we should not assume that anti-theists are on our side nor that theists are our enemy. We should fight religion only when it is directly tied to specific reactionary politics, and join with atheism only when it is tied to progressive politics.

[Barry Lyndon]

This is not to defend the religious. But we should not assume that anti-theists are on our side nor that theists are our enemy. We should fight religion only when it is directly tied to specific reactionary politics, and join with atheism only when it is tied to progressive politics.Even though I am a Marxist and an atheist, I have far more in common with someone along the lines of Reverend Jeremiah Wright or the South American liberation theologians then I have with tools like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. Hell, Karl Rove is an atheist, how progressive does it make him? It all comes down to which side of the class war you are on, and its very clear that there are many religious people who are on the right side.

"Capitalism is the way of the devil and exploitation. If you really want to look at things through the eyes of Jesus Christ–who I think was the first socialist–only socialism can really create a genuine society"-Hugo Chavez

[Philzer]

Hi!


Honestly I think that atheists who do not tie atheism to socialism, can often be worse than the out-right religious...

Communism can only be a scientific created society. Otherwise everything remains like it was. All opportunistic societies, from "Hunter and collector" over slavery, or the modern global wage slavery, called democracy, are products/results of religion (idealistic) ideology and consciousness.

Note: A capitalistic knitted individual can never be an atheist/materialist!

The religion of the capitalism is the pantheism.

Whether individuen this themselves understand or not, nothing acts to the thing!

to understand read Alexander Rüstow: "Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Rüstow


Kind regards