He continues to speak a bit of truth about Islam: "With few exceptions, the only public figures who have the courage to speak honestly about the threat that Islam now poses to European society seem to be fascists. This does not bode well for the future of civilization". He seems to have Islam pegged pretty well for what it is, he is at best a thousand years late with his understanding of Christianity. In his materialist mind, all non-scientifically proveable ideas are equivalently useless, so holocaust denying suicidal terrorists in planes are really no different from Mother Theresa. "Mother Teresa is a perfect example of the way in which a good person, moved to help others, can have her moral intuitions deranged by religious faith".
He goes on to quote Christopher Hitchens:
" Mother Theresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction".There we see the flower of the superior "innate morality" that comes to the surface once the shackles of religion are thrown off. So abortion is the only known cure for poverty? Certainly an atheist with no ultimate standards can come up with something better than just killing the unborn? Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and so many before have led the way. To the atheist, there is NO "gift" ... of any sort. Only meaningless randomness. What would the reason be to stop the killing at only the UNborn? None.
"Atheism is not a philosophy; it is no even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. ... Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs."No new arguments are presented- Since Harris is made of material and lives in a material system, he has chosen to ignore any prospect for the non-material (or even the as yet undiscovered material) This leaves him with no consciousness, love, beauty, kindness or countless other abstractions. If one can't produce a scientific proof to justify it, it simply doesn't exist to the faithless.
"Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity-birth, marriage, death-without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is."
But Sam, what theorem would create "profundity"? Aren't even those emotions just provably electro-chemical chimera? Why waste the time on new rituals? Why even mark individual birth and death? Marriage? Isn't that PURELY some old religious relic that has nothing to do with the "natural order"? Doesn't every bit of science that we have point to "natural man" living in a state where the "fittest" would acquire as many women as they desired? Isn't that "naturally best"? I'd expect a solid atheist to be making those "reasonable noises" before even giving any sort of a nod to someone creating something like "profound transitions"? Profound how? By some "random selection" or potentially by the "selection of the fittest idea"? Hmmm ... but what would signify fittest? Might?
"The fundamental problem with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies.". If we remove the "lies" and insert "incomplete information", we pretty much have human existence. Naturally, Sam is very impressed by what our modern sciences can do, and they are certainly very convenient. Jets, electricity, computers, modern medicine -- all are very nice. One is left with that nasty little fact though, "if we are so smart, how come we die"? Sam is convinced that "maturity" means that it is just "accepted", but one doesn't need to be much of an armchair psychologist to know that denial and repression are a lot easier for the human psyche than the supposed "mature acceptance" that Sam thinks is going to be so easy with the right "profound rituals". If those "profound rituals" are going to show up, one would have thought a brilliant atheist would have just rolled those puppies out by now.
"Everyone who has eyes to see that if the God of Abraham exists, He is an utter psychopath-and the God of nature is too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eles to the realities of the world".Sam likes to complain that "Christians" write him nasty notes or say bad things about him. I can see where that would be painful for him, he obviously holds them in high regard. It reminds me a lot of many on the left who deplore the "loss of civility" in our society with the advent of things like talk radio and Fox news. Sam's basic solution seems quite the same -- if the opposition can be completely and utterly destroyed, then we can all be "civil". Why would one really stop so short of nirvana as to only wipe out "poverty" by killing the unborn?
Certainly guys like Sam can make the world "safe" through "rational means". Once one gets by the foolishness of "ultimate authority", the kind of "pragmatic group morals" that "make sense" can give us a world that is OBJECTIVELY better! There may have been "flaws" in the versions of some of the previous geniouses that faced "reality as it is" such as Satin, Hitler, etc ... but, there will always be new opportunities. Guys like Sam are ready and waiting to lead the way!
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