Since the last post reminded me of the book, I dug it out for some comment. For those that are interested, the author has a Web Page. http://www.samharris.org/index.php/samharris/about/
My title for the book would be “the end of tolerance”, because that is really what it is a about. Some quotes:
Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.” (The assertion being that it is too dangerous to have religion and WMD on the planet at the same time … although apparently Communism and Nazism were relatively harmless by comparison -- no need to wipe those out).
One of the central themes of this book, however, is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma; they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned the right to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very idea of religious tolerance – born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God – is one of the principle forces driving us towards the abyss.
While religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are.
The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.
Religious unreason should acquire an even greater stigma in our discourse, given that it remains among the principle causes of armed conflict in our world.
I could go on, and on, and … well, you get the picture. Let’s just say that he doesn’t like religion, and thinks his ideas are a lot better. He doesn’t like to get very direct about his “final solution”, although one doesn’t have to read between his lines very much to realize that he sees religious faith as a “clear an present danger”. One could easily argue that killing the faithful would be justified for those enlightened by the FACTS given the severity of their “madness”, but of course he doesn’t want to say that directly.
He does say; “People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in the halls of power.” He makes it clear that we need to learn to discriminate against those of faith. That thought is of course not particularly new. It goes back to throwing Christians to the lions in Rome Germany USSR
The man has a PHD from Stanford that he is pretty proud of, yet he seems to have missed some of the more basic aspects of history. Godlessness has certainly been tried before, very frequently in fact. Strangely, when “freed” from the “shackles” of faith, men seem to beat a rather rapid path to mass killing of those that they don’t enjoy for some reason or another. Religious faith, color of skin, potential to be a threat, using more resources than thought to be returned by their “value”, questioning the superiority of those in power, or quite commonly just for that little “thrill” that those who have thrown off all concerns of potential future judgment by some “higher power” seem to find "enticing'.
After all, once one starts down the path of breaking as many of those backward mythological commandments as they can, that admonition to “not kill” always seems to hit the Saddam, Pol Pot, Hitler and Stalin types as being way too restrictive. For some reason, once that little line has been crossed, it seems a thirst that is very hard to slake even when the numbers of victims rise into the millions.
I’m sure that a PHD from Stanford has a perfect explanation as to why this really isn’t a concern, or maybe even some idea of “what unusual thing happened to those fine atheist men”, but it is enough to make us poor foolish Christian types wonder if there might not be such a thing as “evil”, or even a “force of evil” out there in the world . Somehow he fails to touch on such an explanation in the book.
Other than not tolerating religious thought, his other key message (not always stated directly) is that all religion is equal, and pretty much equally bad. For some reason, there is no reason to differentiate between religions and consider if some have more merit than others. It is a bit strange really since he is of the opinion that religion is just a “made up idea” … which of course so is everything else in his book, including the words, punctuation, and all the ideas that he presents as “better”. If there is no God, than EVERTHING that is the stuff of thought is "made up" ... language, love, beauty, compassion -- pure imagination.
If some ideas turn out to be “religion” might that make all ideas just too dangerous to mess around with? Couldn’t virtually any old idea suddenly become “dangerous”? What if some folks thought there was a spacecraft behind a comet and committed suicide to get a ride? (it happened, Heaven’s gate cult).
How about if some folks decided that we were created by space aliens? (see Raelians, they were in the news for trying to clone humans a couple years ago). Maybe these groups are too small. How about a whole country that worships their leader as God? They meet that rationality of worshiping something that exists, so we should focus on the danger of religion, and not on such rational people? As quoted from a North Korean site:
Some people worship God or money or great men or heroes. But our worship of great Marshal Kim Jong Il is quite different from that of religion, material or any individual. It is an absolute reverence and worship for the savior of the fate of the nation and humankind and the only extraordinary leader.
One can easily see how we should blanch in fear at the thought of Lutheran ladies in Lake Woebegon attending Sunday services, but be exceedingly thankful that the rational folks in N Korea have not only seek to acquire nuclear weapons, but have managed to leave the myths of the past behind and worship their leader, Kim Jong Il. Nobody can possibly be worried about THAT, right? Better hunt down the Church Basement Ladies before they do something dangerous.
Harris falls into the same pit as Druyan. He has immense faith in his ideas and his religion of atheism. Ultimate and eternal faith in fact. He fails to see that the problem is with man, not with God, nor even ideas about God. There are many ideas manifestly created by man that are dangerous in the extreme, and for which millions have died for. Harris is unconcerned about these.
From reading the book, it is clear that he is quite concerned about the idea that religion might set limits on human pleasure. One such quote: “Anyone who believes that God is watching us from beyond the stars will feel that punishing peaceful men and women for their private pleasure is perfectly reasonable.”
While the generalization is of course absurd, it shows that he finds religion to be restrictive, and potentially, if such people are in charge of a country, such restrictions could be imposed on him. If there is no God, then there is no reason that Sam or Ann could not be “god”. In the liberal utopia each person is god, but for some reason there always seems to be a disagreement over which one is the “top god”, and then the killing begins.
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