On the debate with Chris Hedges last week.
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Truthdig
Sam Harris Strikes Back
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070529_sam_harris_fights_back/
Posted on May 29, 2007
By Sam Harris
Editor¹s Note: The following is Sam Harris¹ response to Chris Hedges¹
essay, ³I Don¹t Believe in Atheists.² Last week the two Truthdig
contributors battled one another over the issues of religion and
politics during a live debate in Los Angeles. While they both agree on
the dangers posed by religious fundamentalism in America, their views on
religion in general differ greatly, as you will soon read.
I am hopeful that the editors at Truthdig will eventually post the
unedited video/audio of my debate with Chris Hedges to the website. Once
these files are available, readers will be able to judge for themselves
which of us made more sense on the subject of religion. I would,
however, like to offer a few remarks in the meantime.
As I mentioned briefly during the live event, Hedges misrepresented my
views on several topics in his opening remarks. Rather than do a little
fact-checking after the debate, he chose to make these distortions
indelible in his essay, ³I Don¹t Believe in Atheists.² I have long had
an article on my website entitled ³Response to Controversy² which
addresses many of the spurious points Hedges raises, and I have made a
few additions since we met at Royce Hall. The article can be found here.
Beyond putting out these small fires, I would like to briefly address
the main claims that Hedges makes in his essay:
Real religion has nothing to do with superstition, irrational beliefs,
or tribalism. God is not an anthropomorphic deity; He is just ³the name
we give to our belief that life has meaning.²
It should be immediately clear to all readers that Hedges is simply
dodging the fact that millions (probably billions) of people practice
religion in the naïve, anthropomorphic, and superstitious forms he would
rather not defend. By saying that faith is really something other than
the irrational belief in magic books, virgin births, the power of
prayer, etc., Hedges ignores how pervasive the problem of religious
irrationality is. As many readers will recognize, this is one of the
sins of religious ³moderation² that I discuss in ³The End of Faith²‹and
I really could not have hoped to find a more lumbering, bellicose, and
sanctimonious perpetrator of this obscurantism than Chris Hedges.
According to recent polls, 53 percent of Americans think that the
universe is less than 10,000 years old and 59 percent believe that Jesus
will one day return to Earth wielding magic powers‹and yet, religious
moderates like Hedges invariably accuse me of ³caricaturing²
Christianity whenever I criticize these beliefs. Hedges appears to be
playing a highly disingenuous game of hide-the-ball with the articles of
faith, and it is a game that keeps the world safe for religious lunacy;
it also prevents a truly rational approach to spirituality from emerging
in our discourse.
Monotheism has been historically indispensable in laying the ground for
individualism and the modern concept of human rights.
While this point is surely debatable (and probably false), even if true,
it would not (even slightly) suggest that the biblical God exists. Nor
would the historical usefulness of monotheism suggest that monotheism is
a benign force in the 21st century. In my opening remarks in our debate,
I addressed the notion that religion is (or has been) useful. Nothing
that Hedges said subsequently (or wrote in his essay) indicates he
understood what I was talking about.
There is a difference between the irrational and the non-rational‹and
the latter is the basis of our spirituality.
I have no problem acknowledging that there is a distinction between
rational thought and other features of our subjectivity that are
³non-rational.² The taste of chocolate is non-rational (without being
irrational), as is almost every other sensory or emotional experience.
We can, however, rationally discuss what we know about chocolate‹its
chemical composition, where it comes from, how we cultivate it, etc.‹and
we might one day fully elucidate the underlying neurology of taste. The
same rational mode of discourse could, in principle, accommodate our
³spiritual² experiences and our ethical intuitions as well. One of the
greatest impediments to our making progress on this front, however, is
the fact that people like Hedges continue to demand that a special
strain of irrationality called ³religion² remain sheltered from
criticism.
Finally, many of the comments posted in response to Hedges¹ essay have
used the fine art of selective quotation to make me appear to hold
positions which I do not hold. Hedges, in part, is responsible for this,
having led by example. I advise readers who might be alarmed by these
quotations to read my books or the articles on my website. Here is an
example of such selective quotation, so that readers can appreciate how
the trick is done. A reader going by the name of ³Tentaculata² has
posted the following passage from ³The End of Faith² (p. 194):
What is the difference between pursuing a course of action where we
run the risk of inadvertently subjecting some innocent men to torture,
and pursuing one in which we will inadvertently kill far greater numbers
of men, women, and children? Rather, it seems obvious that the
misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than
collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at
Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were
caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers. Torture need not
even impose a significant risk of death or permanent injury; while the
collaterally damaged are, almost by definition, crippled or killed. The
ethical divide that seems to be opening up here suggests that those who
are willing to drop bombs might want to abduct the nearest and dearest
of suspected terrorists - their wives, mothers, and daughters - and
torture them as well, assuming anything profitable to our side might
come of it.
Readers are thereby encouraged to believe that I support the torture of
the innocent relatives of suspected terrorists. But the very next
sentence in my book reads: ³Admittedly, this would be a ghastly result
to have reached by logical argument, and we will want to find some way
of escaping it.² And the endnote to this sentence reads: ³It seems to me
that we can stop this inquisitorial slide by recourse to the Œperfect
weapon¹ argument presented in chapter 4. There is a difference, after
all, between intending to inflict suffering on an innocent person and
inflicting it by accident. To include a suspected terrorist¹s family
among the instruments of torture would be a flagrant violation of this
principle.²
While I stand by everything I have written in ³The End of Faith,² and I
encourage readers to consult my ³Response to Controversy² article on my
website, I cannot be expected to parry every malicious sampling of my
text. It is unfortunate that Truthdig has become a forum for attacks of
this sort.
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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070529_sam_harris_fights_back/
--
John #1782
"We should always be disposed to believe that which appears to us to be
white is really black, if the hierarchy of the church so decides."
- Saint Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) Founder of the Jesuit Order.
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