God's dupes by Sam Harris - Moderate believers give cover to religious fanatics -- and are every bit as delusional

Thanks to Andrew Greet for sending this in.

Reposted from the LA Times:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-harris15mar15,0,671840.story?coll=la-home-commentary


Pete Stark, a California Democrat, appears to be the first congressman in U.S. history to acknowledge that he doesn't believe in God. In a country in which 83% of the population thinks that the Bible is the literal or "inspired" word of the creator of the universe, this took political courage.

Of course, one can imagine that Cicero's handlers in the 1st century BC lost some sleep when he likened the traditional accounts of the Greco-Roman gods to the "dreams of madmen" and to the "insane mythology of Egypt."

Mythology is where all gods go to die, and it seems that Stark has secured a place in American history simply by admitting that a fresh grave should be dug for the God of Abraham — the jealous, genocidal, priggish and self-contradictory tyrant of the Bible and the Koran. Stark is the first of our leaders to display a level of intellectual honesty befitting a consul of ancient Rome. Bravo.

The truth is, there is not a person on Earth who has a good reason to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in a cave. And yet billions of people claim to be certain about such things. As a result, Iron Age ideas about everything high and low — sex, cosmology, gender equality, immortal souls, the end of the world, the validity of prophecy, etc. — continue to divide our world and subvert our national discourse. Many of these ideas, by their very nature, hobble science, inflame human conflict and squander scarce resources.

Of course, no religion is monolithic. Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn themselves into bombs; or the Dominionist Christians, who openly call for homosexuals and blasphemers to be put to death.

Outside this sphere of maniacs, one finds millions more who share their views but lack their zeal. Beyond them, one encounters pious multitudes who respect the beliefs of their more deranged brethren but who disagree with them on small points of doctrine — of course the world is going to end in glory and Jesus will appear in the sky like a superhero, but we can't be sure it will happen in our lifetime.

Out further still, one meets religious moderates and liberals of diverse hues — people who remain supportive of the basic scheme that has balkanized our world into Christians, Muslims and Jews, but who are less willing to profess certainty about any article of faith. Is Jesus really the son of God? Will we all meet our grannies again in heaven? Moderates and liberals are none too sure.

Those on this spectrum view the people further toward the center as too rigid, dogmatic and hostile to doubt, and they generally view those outside as corrupted by sin, weak-willed or unchurched.

The problem is that wherever one stands on this continuum, one inadvertently shelters those who are more fanatical than oneself from criticism. Ordinary fundamentalist Christians, by maintaining that the Bible is the perfect word of God, inadvertently support the Dominionists — men and women who, by the millions, are quietly working to turn our country into a totalitarian theocracy reminiscent of John Calvin's Geneva. Christian moderates, by their lingering attachment to the unique divinity of Jesus, protect the faith of fundamentalists from public scorn. Christian liberals — who aren't sure what they believe but just love the experience of going to church occasionally — deny the moderates a proper collision with scientific rationality. And in this way centuries have come and gone without an honest word being spoken about God in our society.

People of all faiths — and none — regularly change their lives for the better, for good and bad reasons. And yet such transformations are regularly put forward as evidence in support of a specific religious creed. President Bush has cited his own sobriety as suggestive of the divinity of Jesus. No doubt Christians do get sober from time to time — but Hindus (polytheists) and atheists do as well. How, therefore, can any thinking person imagine that his experience of sobriety lends credence to the idea that a supreme being is watching over our world and that Jesus is his son?

There is no question that many people do good things in the name of their faith — but there are better reasons to help the poor, feed the hungry and defend the weak than the belief that an Imaginary Friend wants you to do it. Compassion is deeper than religion. As is ecstasy. It is time that we acknowledge that human beings can be profoundly ethical — and even spiritual — without pretending to know things they do not know.

Let us hope that Stark's candor inspires others in our government to admit their doubts about God. Indeed, it is time we broke this spell en masse. Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain — from cosmology to psychology to economics — has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.

Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music.

reposted from: richarddawkins
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris - British edition

Bookmarker cards like this one, advertising Sam's book, will be inserted in future reprintings of The God Delusion.

Foreword by Richard Dawkins

Sam Harris doesn't mess about. He writes directly to his Christian reader as 'you', and he pays 'you' the compliment of taking your beliefs seriously: " . . . if one of us is right, the other is wrong . . . in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other is really going to lose." But you don't (as I can personally understate) have to fit the 'you' profile in order to enjoy this marvellous little book. Every word zings like an elegantly fletched arrow from a taut bowstring and flies in a gracefully swift arc to the target, where it thuds into the bullseye.

If you are part of the target, I dare you to read this book. It will be a salutary test of your faith. Survive Sam Harris's barrage, and you can take on the world with equanimity. But forgive my scepticism: Harris never misses, not with a single sentence, which is why his short book is so disproportionately devastating. If you already share Harris's and my doubts about religious faith and are not part of his target, this book will powerfully arm you to argue against those who are. Or you may be Christian and still not part of the target. This book freely admits that there are Christians who take, as they would see it, a more nuanced view:

. . . liberal and moderate Christians will not always recognize themselves in the 'Christian' I address. They should, however, recognize many of their neighbors—and more than one hundred and fifty million Americans.

And that's the point. It was the menace of those hundred and fifty millions that provoked this book. If your religious beliefs are so vague and nebulous that even well aimed arrows bounce off unnoticed, Harris is not writing for you directly. But you should still care about the emergency that concerns him – and me. Where I, as a scientific educator, am dismayed by the 50 percent of the American population who believe the world is 6000 years old (an error equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is shorter than a cricket pitch), Sam Harris is at least as urgently concerned with other beliefs held by roughly the same 50 percent:

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if London, Sydney, or New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help humanity create a durable future for itself—socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency.

The 'Christian Nation' for whom the book was originally written is, of course, the United States. But it would be complacent folly for us to dismiss it as a purely American problem. The USA, at least, is protected by Jefferson's enlightened wall of separation between church and state. Religion is part of Britain's historic establishment, while at this moment our most pious political leadership since Gladstone is hell bent on supporting 'faith schools'. And not just the traditional Christian schools, be it noticed, for our government, egged on by an heir to the throne who wishes to be known as 'Defender of Faith', is actively sympathetic towards the 'us-too' bleatings of other 'faith communities', eager for state subsidy for the indoctrination of their children. Would it be possible to design a more divisive educational formula? More importantly, the world's only superpower is close to domination by electors who believe the entire universe began after the domestication of the dog, and believe that they will be personally 'raptured' up to heaven within their own lifetime, followed by an Armageddon welcomed as harbinger of the Second Coming. Even from this side of the Atlantic, Sam Harris's phrase, 'moral and intellectual emergency' begins to look like an understatement.

I began by saying that Sam Harris doesn't mess about. One of his points is that none of us can afford to. Letter to a Christian Nation will stir you. Whether it stirs you to defensive or offensive action, it will not leave you unchanged. Read it if it is the last thing you do. And hope that it won't be.

Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris - review

In this week’s eSkeptic Kenneth W. Krause reviews Sam Harris’ book Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006, ISBN 0307265773). Krause lives in Wisconsin, along the Mississippi River. He is a former prosecutor and criminal defense attorney with degrees in law, history, literature, and fine art. Books editor for Secular Nation, Kenneth has recently contributed as well to Free Inquiry, Skeptic, and The Humanist.

reposted from: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-01-24.html
my highlights / edits

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Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation (photograph by Sara Allan)

The End of Faith Revisited: a Good Start

a book review by Kenneth W. Krause

Reason is to morality what design is to construction, and monotheism is a collective intellectual disaster that necessarily implies an international moral emergency. So says Sam Harris in his predictably candid, derisive and hyper-focused Letter to a Christian Nation, as he lectures an audience of agitated religionists who protested similar and, in some instances, identical scolds dispensed through his first book, The End of Faith.

Faith, by some accounts, is conviction to a belief despite facts and reason. When overwhelming majorities accept lesser standards of intellectual integrity, faith becomes institutionalized and potentially dangerous. Faith in omnipotence only exacerbates the problem. Christianity and Islam, especially, because they define in- and out-groups in terms of perpetual rewards and punishments, are inherently dangerous. Monotheists define morality according to no objective standard outside the Bible. Instead, religious affiliation necessarily depends upon the foundational texts that attempt in vain to identify both ethical and non-ethical behavior. Hence, for the faithful, any conceivable act may be defined as moral so long as the relevant god’s text can be interpreted to support it. Humans may piously slaughter other humans in any number, in any imaginable way, simply because their faith allows them to trust in an omnipotent and omni-benevolent creator who desires or all too regularly demands that they do so.

The Christian faithful, Harris contends, have inherited some of the most unethical standards imaginable. Consistent with Proverbs, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Exodus, Mark and Matthew, pious parents are obliged to thrash or kill their disobedient children. The Abrahamic texts insist that followers stone not only the adulterer, but also those who labor on the Sabbath. Although some Christians will argue that New Testament morals have superseded those of the Old, Harris counters that, according to the former, Jesus instructed his followers to remain true to the ancient laws. The Church incinerated heretics for more than 500 years as it cited allegedly validating chapter and verse. Augustine supposed that dissenters should be tortured; Aquinas directed that they be murdered. Both Luther and Calvin encouraged the slaughter of innocent apostates and Jews. In no Christian text was Jesus said to have objected to slavery; in many was the practice condoned.

The first four of the Ten Commandments, Harris observes, had nothing to do with morality. The rest clearly did, but were hardly original. Virtually every culture edified similar principles in its annals, laws, and myths. Regardless, morality predates recorded history and, perhaps, humanity itself. Our closest primate relatives demonstrate some degree of kin altruism and broader social concern. The point, of course, is that religious ethics represent only one phase of our moral evolution, a phase that humanity can and must transcend.

Hopelessly antiquated religions have grown increasingly counterproductive as sources of moral guidance. Christians delight in imagining themselves supremely ethical in their opposition to embryonic stem cell research and abortion. But neither stem cell use nor legal abortions harm anything capable of either experiencing loss or inspiring a reasonable sense of loss in others. Insisting that human “souls” can inhabit the microscopic recesses of a Petri dish is not a moral argument. Rather, it is the imposition of both intellectual and moral primitivism.

Indeed, religious ethics often seem impervious to empathy. Many Christian conservatives oppose vaccination for the human papillomavirus, now the most common sexually transmitted disease in America, largely because they consider HPV an obstacle to premarital sex. The Vatican contests condom use even to thwart the spread of HIV. Christopher Hitchens summarized the crisis well when he pointed out that Mother Teresa “was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.” Teresa might have performed admirable deeds for humanity as an individual, but it should be clear that she brought such goodness despite, rather than because of, her religion. That so much suffering can be directly attributed to religion, Harris concludes, should inform us that honest and thorough criticism of religious faith is both our intellectual and our moral responsibility.

To religious moderates, Harris offers neither sanctuary nor convenient alliance. Temperance and tolerance are not solutions to this deadly predicament. To the contrary, religious liberalism’s demand for respect only lends ostensible though certainly not actual credibility to religious dogma and fanaticism. Moderates simply cannot continue to have it both ways, the author demands. Either human beings created the Bible, or they did not. Either Christ was a man, or he was not. If so, the fundamental and necessary tenets of Christianity are and have always been false. At some point, Harris persists, one side will win and the other will lose.

Speaking truth to both religious and secular power, however redundantly, has become Sam Harris’s claim to fame, perhaps even his raison d’être. Although the underlying problem is a bit more complex than the author appears to recognize, his assessment of faith’s threat to human survival is sound. Arguably, much of the developed world seems well on its way to begetting the end of faith, or, more precisely, faith of the licensed, monotheistic variety. In America, of course, the crisis is more severe; a mere letter to a Christian nation will never suffice. But if such letters are read and rejoined by the right Christians, perhaps history might prove them to have been a very good start indeed.

Beyond Belief debate - Science v Religion

Beyond the Believers by Sam Harris

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,525,n,n
my highlights / edits
Thanks to George Hyde for the link.

Reposted originally from:
http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=harris_27_2

Recently, I attended a three-day conference at the Salk Institute, organized by The Science Network. The conference was titled, Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason, and Survival and was conducted as a town-hall meeting before an audience of invited guests. Speakers included Steven Weinberg, Harold Kroto, Richard Dawkins, and many other scientists and philosophers who have been, and remain, energetic opponents of religious unreason. And then there were other esteemed participants and audience members who proved themselves to be eager purveyors of American-style religious bewilderment.

It was a room full of bright, scientifically literate people—molecular biologists, anthropologists, physicists, engineers—and yet, three days were insufficient to force agreement on whether or not there is any conflict between religion and science. While at Salk, I witnessed scientists giving voice to some of the most unctuous religious apologies I have ever heard. It is one thing to be told that the pope is a great champion of reason and that his opposition to embryonic stem cell research has nothing to do with religious dogmatism; it is quite another to be told this by a Stanford physician who sits on the President's Council on Bioethics. Over the course of the meeting, I had the pleasure of hearing that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were examples of secularism run amok, that the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad have nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorism, that people can never be argued out of their beliefs because we live in an irrational world, that science has made no important contributions to our ethical lives, and that it is not the job of scientists "to take away people's hope"—all from atheist scientists, happily trading in the most abject and paralyzing shibboleths of academic political correctness. There were several moments during our panel discussions that brought to mind the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers—people who looked like scientists, had published as scientists, and would soon be returning to their labs nevertheless gave voice to the alien hiss of religious lunacy at the slightest prodding. In case anyone thought that the front lines in our culture wars could be found at the entrance to a megachurch, I am here to report that we still have considerable work to do in a nearby trench.

For all the frustration I felt at this meeting, it seemed like the perfect forum in which to resolve the centuries-old collision between reason and faith. If reputable scientists cannot be made to agree that there are important intellectual and moral differences between knowing something and pretending to know it, we are doomed. Happily, the meeting at Salk will be convened again next fall. Perhaps then it will be possible to rule out the Virgin Birth of Jesus as a valid scientific hypothesis.

While I heard many silly retorts to atheism at this conference, here is a list of those most in need of deflation by freethinkers:

1. Even though I'm an atheist, my friends are atheists, and we all get along fine without pretending to know that one of our books was written by the Creator of the universe, other people really do need religion. It is, therefore, wrong to criticize their faith.

2. People are not really motivated by religion. Religion is used as a rationale for other aims—political, economic, and social. Consequently, the specific content of religious doctrines is beside the point.

3. It is useless to argue against the veracity of religious doctrines, because religious people are not actually making claims about reality. Their claims are metaphorical or otherwise without real content. Hence, there is no conflict between religion and science.

4. Religion will always be with us. The idea that we might rid ourselves of it to any significant degree is quixotic, bordering on delusional. Dawkins and other strident opponents of religious faith are just wasting their time.

I invite readers of FREE INQUIRY to provide short answers to any or all of these fantasies. The winning responses will be published in a future issue of the magazine. Winners in each category will be sent signed copies of both of my books and a cash prize of $100. Each response must be two hundred words or less (longer responses will be disqualified). Correspondence should be sent to: Free Inquiry Contest, P.O. Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226-0664.

Sam Harris is the author of The New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.