calm and cool sam harris

Calm and Cool Sam Harris

I love hearing Sam Harris debate. He's always very calm, slowly

advancing on his opponents like the Terminator to surgically

eviscerate them in a nice and friendly way. He never gets angry,

unlike that Jesus chap who cursed a fig tree.

There is a great debate with Sam Harris available now at Truthdig.

Although the moderator clearly takes the side of Sam's foe, Chris

Hedges, in my entirely biased opinion I think Sam consistently beat

Chris throughout the debate, while Chris went barking up trees Sam

never climbed. Here's the text from one of my favorite bits, Sam's

closing statement:

It seems to me we could have been having this conversation 500

years ago. Life was difficult 500 years ago, there was a lot of

despair, crops failed, and disease spread, people suffered just

instantaneous and catastrophic changes in their fortune. And the

cause of all this was well understood 500 years ago. It was

witchcraft. And happily the church had produced some very energetic

men who had the gumption to deal with this problem. So every year,

some hundreds and sometimes thousands of women were burned alive

for casting spells on their neighbors.

Now imagine what it would be like to be among the five or ten

percent of people at most, who recognized that the very belief in

magic, the very belief in witchcraft, the very belief in good

witches or bad witches was a malignant fantasy. The white witches

who were helping people with medicinal herbs and practicing

midwifery, they were on no firmer ground than the black witches who

were casting the evil eye. The whole belief system was at fault.

Imagine the kind of criticism you are going to get: "No no, your

problem is just with fundamentalist witchcraft. The reality is that

witchcraft is far more nuanced than that. There's no conflict

between science and witchcraft. Science deals with physical law and

physical causality, but witchcraft deals with potent spells and the

internal connections between things."

This idea that somehow we shouldn't call into question these

patently bad ideas for fear of offending people, for fear of

glossing over their despair, for fear of not criticising other

problems in the world. I would never argue that religion is the

only problem in the world, or the only source of human conflict,

but it is a source, and we are mightily attached to it, emotionally

attached to it. And we are loath to criticize it even when it is

declaring its ugliest intentions and its ugliest certainties. The

problem with the Bible is however you pick and choose, whether

you're a literalist or a selective literalist, the problem is there

is just a mountain of divisive nonsense in there. And that's where

people get ideas about homosexuality being an abomination, and why

our country in the 21st century debates gay marriage as though it

were the great moral issue of our time. This is coming from

religion. And it seems to me that

it's time we had an honest conversation about it.