Hinduism embraces almost anything insight with its manifold arms (many Hindus, for instance, consider Jesus an avatar of Vishnu).

?! This one came out of nowhere. There I was, innocently reading about Islam, Judaism, and Christianity…and this gets thrown in. Was this just to remind me that there are more than three religions in the world? (good thing he reminded me, I’m liable to forget) Or was this simply…I want to call it racism, but I guess it’s religionism. Poor little Hinduism just picks up gods left & right, don’t they? aww, they’re so cute, look at all their widdle arms!!!

*retch*

The basic lesson to be drawn form all this was summed up nicely by Will Durant: “Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.”

Even *ahem* atheistic certainty?

[the burning alive of heretics] is beheld by persons of all ages and both sexes with transports of joy and satisfaction.

again, me quoting Harris quoting Swain, this time.

Humanity seems to have an endless fascination with death, destruction, dismemberment…and other horrible “d” words. Witness the Indy 500 which, many who watch it have told me, is only worth it for the fabulous wipeouts, horrible crashes people rarely walk away from. My husband often says, “it’s like a trainwreck” to imply that, as horrible as he knows it is, he simply cannot take his eyes from it. Witness the frequent bottlenecks on the LA freeways. Witness the circuses. Witness MXC…

the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence—that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants—he becomes capable of anything

This ties into what Jonathan & I were discussing above: is all faith this bad? Does belief that, if I get on a train today, it will notbe smoke-bombed by extremists really put me on a par with people who commit atrocities in their god’s name? Is there truly no place for any faith in anything?

a trivial reading will be good enough for our present purposes.

good thing he stopped me at “trivial”, else I might well have attempted to determine what the author might have actually meant by his words. Does anyone else find this distressingly insulting to both the cited and Harris’ readers?

A sure way to win an argument with these unhappy people [caught in the plague] would have been with penicillin, delivered not from a land where other “cultural perspectives” hold sway, but from higher up on the slopes ofthe real.

I think civilization is in the eye of the beholder. I Harris seems to think that we are the epitome of civilization and that converting all peoples to atheism will make us even better. I would advise that, at all times, we can be assured that we are not the epitome of civilization (no matter the century we live in).

This is a quote that he took a lot of flack for in letters he recieved after the book was published. In his afterward, he tried to be more specific about what “faith” he is talking about — specifically, he meant religious faith which is grounded in non-empirical evidence. However, in terms of worldviews, everyone, even the atheist, has to have faith in things they believe but can’t prove with any empirical evidence whatsoever.

Most of us would agree that the big bang theory is plausable given enough understanding of physics, but how do we believe that something exploded from nothing when we’ve never seen such a thing ever happen? I’m not trying to drag up a tired controversy, but simply stating that in our understanding of the universe and the world we find ourselves in, we all will at some point fill in the gaps with guesses that can’t be proven. Much of our understanding is based on faith. The atheists’s existance of “nothing” that exploded into matter is just as scientifically observable or understood by observing similar phenomona as the existance of God is.

I could be off on this, but it seems to me that when using empirical evidence to back up our world views, the deist and the atheist are on a level playing field – specifically in terms of our universe’s origins.

faith [...defined] as “an act of knowledge that has a low degree of evidence.”

Evidence for whom? I believe things all the time that are only substantiated by one source. I call this holy book a dictionary. In fact, it is so sacred to me that I have a version that I need not physically hold: it’s a widget. So deep is my culture’s faith in this book that it was assumed by the programmers of my computer that I was the sort of person who believed in the things this book said. In fact, I just used it to find out what a “ponzi scheme” is (pg. 63). Not only did it tell me what it was, it told me that it is properly capitalized, since it was named after Mr. Ponzi. I have never heard this term before and I’m not certain it makes complete sense in the manner Harris just used it, but I have faith that this holy book of mine is correct. Now, I like to think of myself as a rational person and therefore, must have what I consider to be plenty of evidence to stop looking for meanings for this unknown phrase. I have, however, only one source. Does this count as a “low degree”? If not, why not?

(yes, Harris was quoting, but his general tone seems to imply that he believes this)

The Bible, it seems certain, was the work of sand-strewn men and women who thought the earth was flat and for whom a wheelbarrow would have been a breathtaking example of emerging technology.

Really? Even as Moses (see: Exodus, the second book of the Bible) lead his people out of slavery in Egypt? Anyone here remember what the Egyptians did with slaves? Anyone here not sleep through 5th Grade history? They built the fucking pyramids. I think the writers of the Bible, sand-strewn though they certainly were (women, though?), were slightly more cosmopolitan than Harris gives them credit for.

Response #1

“The problem with scripture, however, is that many of its possible interpretations (including most of the literal ones) can be used to justify atrocities in defense of the faith.”

So… are we saying that if someone writes a book that could be misinterpreted, than we have to throw the book out? If there is anything in Sam Harris’ book that can be misinterpreted, should we throw it out too?

Chapter 1 (Reason in Exile) p.48

“Rather than just congratulate ourselves for the state of our civilization, we should consider how, in the fullness of time, we will seem hopelessly backward, and work to lay a foundation for such refinements in the present.“

Some atheist guy could “interpret” this to start reaching the ideal world a little quicker by religious discrimination laws, imprisonment, or death if he got in power… But there’s never been anyone like that in history, right?

We can only hope that the forces of secularism and rationality will keep the missiles in their silos fow a while yet…

Hello! Remember the Cold War?