Harris, Sam
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Wikipedia-Article "Sam Harris"
- For other people named Sam Harris, see Sam Harris (disambiguation)
Sam Harris is an American author and neuroscientist.
His book The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.[1]
He appears in the 2005 documentary film The God Who Wasn't There.
He writes for Free Inquiry magazine, and is a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post and Truthdig.
A belief is a lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life.
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Early life
Sam Harris was raised on the West Coast of America, by a Quaker father and Jewish mother, but in a largely secular environment. In an informal discussion at the University Synagogue in Irvine California, Harris described some of his early experiences:
My mother gave me a choice at the age of ten: "Sam, do you want to go to Sunday school like your friends?", and I said no—and that basically sealed my fate as far as being Bar Mitzvah-ed was concerned. But I have been interested in religion from my teenage years and got very into Buddhism and Hindu meditation—at a certain point made many trips to India, Nepal—and spent probably two years on silent meditation retreats, where you just meditate—you do nothing but meditate for twelve, eighteen hours a day. So the concerns of the faithful and seekers of spiritual experience are really well known to me—not so much in a Jewish context, but at various points I was a dogmatic Buddhist, and a dogmatic Hindu—believing in all manner of nonsense really from my point of view now.
It would appear that all this meditation interrupted his studies to some extent, but he eventually graduated in philosophy from Stanford University in 2000. Although Harris still attaches considerable importance to some of the insights of Eastern religion, he is in all other respects a radical atheist.
World-view
Harris's basic theme, which he sets out in his book The End of Faith, is that unless we all wish to be blown sky-high, we had better start confronting head-on the irrationality which lies at the heart of religion—and not just in the Muslim world, but in our own backyard too.
Conversational intolerance
Harris freely admits that he is advocating a form of intolerance, but not, as he says, the kind of intolerance that gave us the Gulag. Rather he is arguing for a conversational intolerance, one in which we simply require in our everyday discourse that people's convictions really scale with the available evidence. He feels we should be able to demand intellectual honesty right across the board, and that the prevailing taboos and political correctness which prevent us from openly criticising religion, therefore need to dissolve.
Harris observes moreover, that these are the rules which apply to every other field of discourse. We are never admonished simply to respect someone's views on, say, physics or history. Instead, we both demand reasons and expect evidence. Anyone who fails to back up their views in this way, is quickly marginalized from the conversation on those topics. Conversely, even a religious fundamentalist acts like a rational scientist when it comes to everyday decision making.
Clearly a partition has been erected, both in the mind of the believer and in society at large, with respect to the treatment of religion as against other domains. Following the events of September 11, Harris feels we can no longer afford to maintain this partition, as it should be abundantly clear by now that religion, far from being merely a private matter, has the potential to ruin our world.
Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.
Religious America
The current state of affairs in contemporary religious America is something which Sam Harris feels should be a matter for profound national embarrassment.
He notes that some forty-four percent of Americans, according to polls, believe that Jesus will probably return within the next fifty years. This is roughly the same number who think that creationism should be taught in schools, to the complete exclusion of Darwinian evolution; or that God has literally promised the land of Israel to the modern-day Jews, in his role as an omniscient real-estate broker.
These beliefs cannot exist in isolation; rather, he feels, they should terrify us all, as they are entirely maladaptive to planning for a sustainable future for the planet. For by the light of biblical prophecy, general Armageddon is regarded as a necessary precursor to the Second Coming, or the Rapture as some call it. Harris considers it no exaggeration to say that a significant proportion of the American population would see a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East, say, as a happy portent of the imminent arrival of Jesus.
What troubles Harris, is that these are the same people who both elect and are elected as presidents and congressmen. Religion permeates American politics to such an extent that it would be futile to consider running for office without professing some sort of faith. When George W. Bush invokes God in his conversation (as he frequently does with respect to both domestic and foreign affairs), Harris asks us to consider how we might feel if the President were to invoke Zeus or Apollo in the same manner.
Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.
Islam
All of which lunacy on the home front, he argues, is preventing us from squaring up to the greatest present threat to civilisation, namely that from the Muslim world.
The general response to terrorist atrocities such as 9/11, has been to pronounce Islam a "religion of peace", while simultaneously declaring a "war on terror". Harris sees the first sentiment as completely false, and the second as quite meaningless.
Instead, he says, we should plainly acknowledge that we are in fact at war with Islam, which far from being a religion of peace, preaches a doctrine of religious and political subjugation. The Koran and the hadith are just packed full with unambiguous incitements to kill infidels, which noble acts are then duly rewarded by an eternity of celestial delights.
It is specifically the metaphysics of martyrdom, or jihad, which Harris sees as the source of greatest peril, for the simple reason that it takes the sting out of death. In geopolitical terms, we want the sting very much in death, he says, as a genuine disinclination to die provides the only reasonable hope of keeping the missiles safely in their silos.
What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?
Moderation
That the world would be an altogether happier place if religious extremism were replaced by religious moderation, is plainly acknowledged by Harris. He then proceeds, counter intuitively, to turn some of his strongest fire upon religious moderates themselves.
The first problem, as he sees it, is that religious moderation gives cover to religious fundamentalism. Under the banner of moderation, respect and tolerance are sacred, from which stance it becomes impossible to mount a credible assault upon extremism. Moderate religion therefore provides the context in which religious fundamentalism of any stripe can never be adequately opposed.
Secondly, as Harris observes, it is absurd to imagine that we can continue to respect everyone's crazy and conflicting religious beliefs equally. Once again, this is not something attempted in any other area of discourse. In fact the very notion that we should be free to believe whatever we please, has to be jettisoned the moment we comprehend that beliefs are simply actions waiting to happen. Beliefs have consequences, potentially catastrophic ones.
And thirdly, moderation is simply bad theology because the extremists are in fact right. God really does want to put homosexuals to death and destroy infidels, if one reads the texts honestly. Harris further notes that religious moderates (and indeed some secularists) appear to be blinded to the fact that the fundamentalists literally believe in all this stuff. Instead, a moderate tends to think that a suicide attack can more readily be attributed to a range of social and economic factors.
To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world—to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish—is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it.
Morality and ethics
Sam Harris considers that the time is long overdue to reclaim morality and ethics for rational secular humanism, where he feels they have always rightly belonged.
He believes that the supposed link between faith and morality is a complete myth, not borne out by current statistical evidence. He notes, for instance, that the highly secular Scandinavian countries are among the most generous in terms of helping the developing world, as well as enjoying higher standards of living themselves by almost any index.
But Harris goes further and posits that, far from being the source of our moral intuition, religion is in fact a travesty of good ethical behaviour, something he attributes to the unfortunate tendency of religion to decouple the concept of morality from issues of human suffering.
He cites as two examples: the impact upon the global AIDS epidemic due to the Catholic prohibition against condom use, and the attempts made by the religious lobby in America to impede funding for embryonic stem-cell research.
Anyone who feels that the interests of a three-day-old blastocyst just might trump those of a child with full-body burns has had his ethical intuitions blinded by religious metaphysics.
Spirituality
Finally, Harris also wishes to recapture spirituality for the domain of human reason and creativity. He draws his inspiration from the practices (but not the beliefs) of Eastern religion, in particular that of meditation.
By paying very close attention to one's moment-to-moment conscious experience, Harris assures us that it is quite possible to make our sense of "self" vanish, while retaining a vivid awareness of the continuum of experience, and thereby reach a hitherto unknown state of personal well-being.
He has received considerable criticism from atheists (normally his friends) for this assertion. For example he has stated, to the bewilderment of some, that he considers it likely that the happiest man on the planet might well have spent the last twenty years living alone in a cave.
But Harris is unapologetic, claiming a necessary connection between personal spiritual development and ethics. It is simply that at no stage is it necessary to resort to myth and superstition as part of the process. Rather, he feels, such things can only hinder us.
Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics together in our thinking about the world. This would be the beginning of a rational approach to our deepest personal concerns. It would also be the end of faith.
Current research
Currently, Sam Harris is completing a doctorate in neuroscience at UCLA. His aim is to understand the neural basis for belief, using the technique of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI. What is the difference, for instance, between believing that Australia is an island, and believing that Australia is a planet? And where on such a scale, would a belief in, say, the virgin birth fit in? Clearly, some beliefs genuinely map onto the state of the world, and others do not.
Fascinating though this is, Harris does not feel we need wait for the outcome of his research, in order to start making progress.
I'm seeking to understand belief itself at the level of the brain, but clearly the way in here is conversation and challenging ideas—challenging ascendant ignorance, and we're not even doing that.
Media appearances
Sam Harris appears in the documentary film The God Who Wasn't There, directed by Brian Flemming. He speaks at various points in the movie, and then in a separate thirteen minute interview with the director.
Other notable TV appearances were: a debate with Hugh Hewitt on the Faith Under Fire show presented by Lee Strobel, and a debate with Ralph Reed on the Scarborough Country show presented by Laura Ingraham. The latter was memorable for an astonishing claim by the presenter, that stem-cell research holds out no hope whatsoever for future medical treatment.
It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.
Books
- Harris, S. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004) ISBN 0743268083
See also
External links
