GOD'S ENEMIES ARE MORE HONEST THAN HIS FRIENDS by Sam Harris. On Faith: A Washington Post/Newsweek Website, December 2006
THIS WEEK'S QUESTION:
Atheism is enjoying a certain vogue right now. Why do you think that is? Can there be a productive conversation between believers and atheists, and if so over what kinds of issues?
SAM HARRIS' ANSWER:
For better or worse, I am partly responsible for the recent emergence of “atheism” as a topic of conversation. This is somewhat ironic, as I do not like the term and rarely use it. I did not, for instance, refer to myself as an “atheist” when I wrote The End of Faith — and yet this book is my most substantial contribution to the discourse of atheism.
As I pointed out in my subsequent book, Letter to a Christian Nation, we do not have a term for a person who rejects astrology, nor do we need one. If legions of astrologers sought to bend our public policy to their pseudo-science, we wouldn’t need to dub ourselves “non-astrologers” to put them in their place. Words like “reason,” “evidence,” and “commonsense” would suffice. So it should be with religion.
Still, one can only spend so much time quibbling over words, and there are far more consequential matters for believers and nonbelievers to discuss. Despite my misgivings about answering to the name “atheist,” I consider the stigma now associated with the term to be entirely unwarranted. This stigma is, of course, the continuous product of the inane and unctuous declarations that still pass for argument among the faithful. One need look no further than the responses to this week’s question to find some mesmerizing examples.
As to whether atheists and believers can have “a productive conversation,” I am quite sure that the answer is “yes.” But I am uncertain whether this conversation can bear fruit quickly enough to keep civilization from becoming fully engorged by Iron Age stupidity and horror. Our capacity for self-destruction is now spreading with 21st century efficiency, and yet our beliefs about how we should pass our days and nights on this earth still spring from ancient literature.
This marriage of modern technology and preliterate superstition is a bad one, for reasons that I should not have to specify, much less argue for—and yet, arguing for them has taken up most of my time since September 11th, 2001, the day that nineteen pious men showed our pious nation just how beneficial religious certainty can be.
As someone who has spent the last few years publicly criticizing religion, I have become quite familiar with how people of faith rise to the defense of God. As it turns out, there aren’t a hundred ways of doing this. There appear to be just three:
[1] Either a person argues that a specific religion is true, or
[2] He argues that religion is useful, or
[3] He simply attacks atheism as intolerant, elitist, irrational, or otherwise worthy of contempt. Any conversation between atheists and believers is liable to fall into one or more of these ruts, or lurch back and forth between them:
1. Religion is true: There are two problems with arguing that any one of the world’s religions is true. First, as Bertrand Russell pointed out a century ago, the major religions make incompatible claims about God and about what human beings must believe in order to escape the fires of hell. Given the sheer diversity of these claims, every believer should expect damnation on mere, probabilistic grounds.
The second problem with arguing for the truth of religion is that the evidence for the most common religious doctrines is terrible or nonexistent—and this subsumes all claims about the existence of a personal God, the divine origin of certain books, the virgin birth of certain people, the veracity of ancient miracles, etc.
For thousands of years, religion has been a haven for dogmatism and false certainty, and it remains so. There is not a person on this earth who has sufficient reason to be certain that Jesus rose from the dead or that Muhammad spoke to the angel Gabriel in his cave. And yet, billions of people profess such certainty. This is embarrassing. It is also dangerous—and we should stop making apologies for it.
2. Religion is useful: The argument that religion is useful is also problematic—and many of its problems are enunciated daily by bomb-blasts. Can anyone seriously argue that it is a good thing that millions of Muslims currently believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom? Is it really so useful that many Jews imagine that the Creator of the universe gave them a patch of desert on the Mediterranean? How psychologically beneficial has Christianity’s anxiety about sex been these last seventy generations?
The worst problem with arguing for religion’s usefulness, however, is that it is utterly irrelevant to the question at hand: the fact that a belief might be useful is no argument that it is true. While there are many ways to illustrate this, here is how I recently made the point in an online debate:
The fact that certain religious beliefs might be useful in no way suggests their legitimacy. I can guarantee, for instance, that the following religion, invented by me in the last ten seconds, would be extraordinarily useful. It is called “Scientismo.” Here is its creed: Be kind to others; do not lie, steal, or murder; and oblige your children to master mathematics and science to the best of their abilities or 17 demons will torture you with hot tongs for eternity after death. If I could spread this faith to billions, I have little doubt that we would live in a better world than we do at present. Would this suggest that the 17 demons of Scientismo exist? Useful delusions are not the same thing as true beliefs.
3. Atheism is bad: Rather than argue for the truth of their religious beliefs, or produce evidence that religion is useful, apologists for God often attack atheism as though it were another religion. We are told that atheism is dogmatic, intolerant, irrational, etc. This homily has the virtue of being easy to remember and reproduce—and it now reverberates ceaselessly within the echo-chamber of American religious discourse.
It relies, however, on a many false ideas about atheism. On Christmas eve of this year, I published an essay in the Los Angeles Times entitled “10 Myths – and 10 Truths – about Atheism” in which I attempted to set the record straight. I won’t repeat these points here. Those interested can find this article on my website:
www.samharris.org
Posted by Sam Harris on December 29, 2006 8:40 PM
SELECTED COMMENTS (242 by Noon January 1, 2007)
[1] scooternyc: Mr. Harris once again gets right to the points and makes them well. I can't be for certain that he would be supporting the idea of disbanding the state of Israel, which does concern me. If that were the case, none of us has the deed to any nation in which we live, should they be disbanded, as well.
While we endorse the idea of freedom of speech and person's right to have his/her religion, we should end the religiosity that is attempting to hijack this nation through government. Dangerous, indeed.
Posted December 29, 2006, 12:00 AM Jason Bradfield.
Atheism is hardly in vogue. If more of us "atheists" are daring to make our views known, it is because of the sickening takeover of modern political discourse by so-called "Christians", not to mention the atrocities perpetrated by other religious fanatics. I am really sick of having some dialogue about "God" interjected into all of my daily affairs, whether it is reading it on currency or trying to keep my children from being brainwashed about "It" in school as they recite the pledge of allegiance. I can only hope that my children's generation will learn more science, and develop the healthy delusion that life can be lived quite happily and morally without the ball-and-chain of an absurd religious fanatacism pervading all aspects of daily life.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:08 AM Joel Wheeler.
Sam, Your eloquence once again supports why it is that you have become a member of the 'holy atheist trinity'. Even more so than what I've read from Dawkins or Dennett, you seem to break things down to an understandable level for even the least educated amoung us. It is this gift of words that you possess, which makes stale the centuries old arguments against religion seem fresh and new. If only there was some way to tap into that eloquence and pass it on to others who would happily be part of the conversation.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:10 AM Watercooler Genius.
I find that my Catholic friends don't even believe their own Church Doctrine. They just don't want to leave the club that their friends and family are in. They tell me that they view Church as a club - similar to a Fraternity. You join, and take the good with the bad.
Not exactly an argument that wins my respect and admiration. Especially when the bad they accept is so repugnant to reason.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:11 AM satanhimself.
I hope that Sam will grow more comfortable with the word "atheist," as I did, when I realized the simplicity and honesty of the word---"without belief in gods." Nothing more, nothing less. An atheist could still hold beliefs in other concepts, like multiple universes or (a word I really detest) "spirituality"....as long as no supreme beings are involved.
While I wouldn't call Sam (or I) an anti-theist (we can't really be against something that we are fairly certain doesn't exist), if we label ourselves as anti-religionists, the argument could be made that we are anti-American by our perceived opposition to the Free Exercise Clause. I do wonder, if the Founding Fathers could be brought back to life, and witnessed the 9/11 events and were educated about the nuclear proliferation in this world, would they have second thoughts about the Free Exercise Clause?
Posted December 29, 2006 12:12 AM Incredulous.
Sam, you rock. Maybe a bit more intense than necessary but I routinely buy your books and send them to friends and colleagues. It's a message that needs to be articulated and very few have the courage to do so.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:35 AM kaattie.
Daniel: "If there is a single issue religious people and atheists must discuss, it is the problem of evil."
Read Ernest Becker, "Escape from Evil". Go on, read it! Don't be afraid to expose yourself to new ideas - even though this book was published in 1975!
His seminal work which won a Pulitzer, "The Denial of Death", also addresses the need humans have to find solace in an imaginary immortality which is the essential root of all religious belief.
I don't see any hope for our species or the planet without abandonment of religion, let alone any kind of productive or logical discourse with religious fanatics.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:35 AM Doug.
Sam. We're there for you.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:37 AM amba.
After watching you engage various “religionists” in discourse for the last two years, I have concluded that the reason they are so willing to contort logic to any end in protecting their position (see comment above) is the same reason paranoid schizophrenics deny the real world in favor of their own delusional constructs.
To admit their delusion would be so damaging to their core image of the external world and their relationship to it, they fear they would break down in the face of the admission and lose power over their own world. I have seen many people who I would otherwise consider intelligent and thoughtful, twist reason into a pretzel in defense of the most ridiculous claims. I have seen you quote biblical passages and stories that would make most modern people cringe in another context, and yet these same people will insist either that the stories are allegorical or layered in some way that only believers understand.
You have once again hit the nail on the head with your descriptions of the three types of answers all believers fall back on in the face of reality. I am beginning to think that all we can do is try to advance the notion that spirituality should be a private matter instead of hoping to make dent in the problem with intelligent discourse. I would ask you, in all of the many talks and lectures you have participated in over the last few years, have you seen anyone from the religious community actually come to realize the truth or danger inherent in continuing to base important sociological or governmental decisions on Iron Age mythology?
Posted December 29, 2006 12:49 AM Jake Grey.
Once again Mr. Harris, thank you for teaching us to better look at reality. I couldn't have done it without you. A lot of us couldn't.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:51 AM Morton H. Wolfe.
To Sam's points I add the following.
Regarding whether or not there is enough time left for dialogue between believers and non-believers to be effective --- In parts of the world such as the Near East/Mideast and Africa, violent men guided by their readings of the Koran, and by the teachings of imams on how the Koran should be interpreted, are persecuting, injuring, and slaughtering tens of thousands of men, women, and children. Islamic pseudo-intellectuals are generating more and more recruits for their announced plan to create a worldwide Islamic theocratic state. Organizations based on the teachings they find in Islam have vowed to wipe Israel and Jews in general off the earth, and to produce sufficient weapons to attack the U.S. In the U.S. itself, self-professed "Christians" are demanding adherence to their values. In many states of the U.S. there is a litmus test for candidates for public office: how closely they follow "Christian values."
It has become impossible for anyone to be President of the U.S. who is not identified as a practicing Christian. Judges cannot be nominated for some of the higher courts unless they profess to be Christians. The latest judges to take seats on the U.S. Supreme Court are avowed Christians. Medical and scientific progress is being impeded by the nonsensical attitudes of Christians toward abortion, homosexuals, and stem cell research. All of this is producing a crisis of mammoth propotions that does not leave time for dialogue to be effective, if it ever could be in the face of the refusal of the followers of organized religions to accept the beliefs of others and to accept scientific facts and evidence that the scriptures by which they purport to live are fiction.
The dangers to humanity from the beliefs and acts of the followers of organized religion are now critical - especially in view of what will happen if they acquire the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction for use to wipe out whole populations in the belief that they will be rewarded in "paradise" even more bountifully than for merely making bombs of themselves to kill and maim "infidels" in much smaller numbers. The present situation does not lend itself for resolution by dialogue. It calls for an all-out attack on organized religion.
As to the debate about the existence of "GOD" --- As shown on this "On Faith" website, it is impossible to have a rational debate with the believers in and followers of organized religion on the existence or non-existence of "God." They will not accept the evidence that "God" is nothing more than the English-language translation of a term that the early Catholics substituted in Greek and Latin for the Hebrew name "Yahweh," the ancient Hebrews' version of the omnipotent male deity who creates everything: a story emanating from the beliefs of primitive, supersititious people in many parts of the world thousands of years before there was any such person as a Jew or a Christian. Without the willingness of the self-professed adherents to organized religions to accept that fundamental fact, no rational debate is possible. They simply become furious and erupt into invective.
As to the "Usefullness of Religion" --- More than the factor Sam discusses is the reliance on the charitable works of churches and religion-based organizations: feeding the poor, establishing orphanages for abandoned children, counseling for troubled marriage couples, etc. Certainly all of those acts are humanitarian.
The problem with them is that they enable oligarchies controlled by an aristocracy of wealth to keep enriching the privileged at the expense of everyone else instead of creating a movement to equalize distribution of wealth (the demand of the original "Christian" sect, if the New Testament is to be believed). As William Levada said when he was the Archbishop of San Francisco: "the food line is our failure." Every day several thousand men and a much lesser number of women appear in block-long lines on the street, waiting for their turn at free food in the church cafeterias. But what the leaders of those churches ought to be doing instead is marching these people into restaurants to be seated among the opulent, demanding that they be served free, and defying the city government to have its police arrest the thousands of participants, all in the same sort of sit-ins that brought about civil rights for "Negroes" (as they were called then).
If the organized religions were engaged in the social revolution that is so critically needed on behalf of the poor, instead of arranging for scraps to be thrown to them, then maybe they could boast of their usefulness. As is, the methods they follow accomplish little more than enabling the 35,000 (U.S. Dept. of Commerce figure) or 50,000 (U.N. figure) poverty-stricken persons in the U.S. to survive. Meanwhile, the churches themselves grow rich on contributions from the wealthy who believe the churches are maintaining the kind of social order that the rich have always wanted. I rest my case.
Posted December 29, 2006 12:51 AM John Raines.
Belief takes many forms and faiths. Belief in the value of knowledge, belief in the value of friends, belief in the value of compassion. These beliefs are all beneficial. If someone's faith is beneficial, in that it gives meaning to life, then there is no need to abandon it even if that faith might well be false. It might be true that life has no meaning other than what we seek to give it, but that knowledge might actually be harmful to some who need to believe that life has an inherent purpose and goal. Faith, in itself, may well be a survival mechanism brought about by the natural selection process of evolution.
Deity based religions are probably false as there does seem to be a logical inconsistency amongst the various attributes usually assigned to a deity. However, if these faiths do give real meaning to the lives of their adherents, they're beneficial; at least to their adherents, if not to others. And, of course, there are many faiths that are not deity based also. Faith in something: art, music, science, religion, whatever, seems to be an essential necessity for continued survival.
Posted December 29, 2006 1:06 AM Matt.
Why do 90% of the Christians I know fail to live by the words of god dispensed in their respective churches? To keep up appearances, to keep a spouse happy, or maybe as a just in case...like...hey I'll go to church, just in case there really is a hell.
What I've gleaned from historical accounts is simple. Christianity was a way for men to gain power and maintain power....not only in morality but in government as well. It provided some structure and meaning to a largely poor and illiterate contingent. For all those that willingly adopted the Christian faith...how many adopted it with a sword against their throat?
My christian friends talk about many good things from religion. Friendship, brotherhood, charity, compassion, a strong moral compass. Oddly enough I have all of those things without faith. I am somehow able to have all of those things without being subjected to any guilt about how to live that way.
I happen to enjoy it when my neighbors wife does yardwork in her bikini. Sometimes I think impure thoughts. There was a time that I would deserve death just for saying that. Nowadays maybe that's only a slap on the wrist for a Christian..... are the 10 commandments only for show?
My actions are my responsibility. I have no excuses when I commit a wrong and I have no crutch to fall back on to make me feel better about myself. Religion generally proves itself to be a hyprocrisy.
Posted on December 29, 2006 6:57 PM by Philip Tripp:
Sam's article certainly has stirred up the choir. The problem is that while we all have different perspectives on this issue, most of us who are responding are non-believers. We are in effect, preaching to the choir. Figuratively speaking, Bruce Burleson is a lamb who stepped into the den of lions. He certainly has retained his views in the face of much feedback. I wouldn't expect him to be different than any believer, regardless of their faith.
With so much fervor, energy and thought spent denouncing religion on this site, how about if some of us lambs go into the religious lion's den? There must me a huge number of web sites, where the choir is very religious, that we could go into and make some kind of assertion that God does not exist. Using a similar assertion that Bruce Burleson made, I think we could stir up the water just like Bruce has. If each of us follows up the responses with some of the wisdom imparted by Harris, Dawkings, Dennet et,al to bolster our arguments, I can't think of a better way to utilize the anti-religious passion on this site.
If anyone agrees with me and could publish a list of sites, I would be happy to throw myself to the lions. I used to do this regularly over thirty years ago, long before the internet. I use to attend meetings sponsored by various churches in my area. The meetings were usually held in someone's home and they welcomed fellowship with new faces. That was my way of getting in the door.
What I experienced, many years ago, is quite different than what Bruce experienced today. While many of the attendees at those meetings spoke with great concern about my beliefs, a small minority were outright hostile and on several occasions I felt that my personal safety was in great jeopardy by attending the meeting.
One observation of mine when reading the comments on Sam's site, is that most comments are rational and name calling and threats are rarely if ever used.
I think if you venture into the lions's den you will be shocked at some of the attitudes towards your prescence on the site and may even be threatened with violence. Religious dogma does not welcome opposing views. It is a closed club and only open to members.
On another note, I really think that Tim Rykert nailed it on his comment on December 29th at 4:59pm in which he began with "This debate is in desparate need of clarity." Right on Tim!
The same for Kaatie, Stan Yoder, Burton Wolfe, Duckphup et,al. My hat is off to all of you.
Posted December 29, 2006 7:32 PM
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