The mail
On atheism: readers take up the challenge
Ron Netsky’s interview with author and atheist Sam Harris
hit a nerve with many readers. Here’s a representative selection from your
comments.
It’s refreshing to see rational thought regarding religion
in City. Too bad it doesn’t happen more often.
The “Rapture Right” likes to describe liberals
with words like “secular progressives,” “Godless,” and
“anti-Christian.” That’s ironic, considering that most liberals
consider it a virtue to vigorously respect all religious faiths. But it
shouldn’t be surprising; the vast majority of liberals (in this country, at
least) are some flavor of Christian. They’ve already accepted religious irrationality
as a guiding principle on which to structure their lives. So it shouldn’t
surprise anyone that most liberals bend over backwards to “respect”
religion; they suffer from it themselves.
I do, however, disagree with Sam Harris on one point. He
says there is no value in liberals continuing to harp on the false predicates
for the war in Iraq.
While he’s right that we have to deal with the current reality of Iraq
as a center for terrorism, it is also crucial that we understand how we got
here. It’s both a matter of holding people accountable for their actions and a
matter of learning from past mistakes.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to
repeat it.” Remember those words while you read this week’s Cost of War
column, and then tell me we shouldn’t “harp” on the lies, agendas,
and generic stupidity that got us here.
John Passaniti, Elmwood Avenue, Brighton
Thank you and congratulations for your courageous interview
with Sam Harris. It’s astounding how much deference is given to the 2000-year-old
derivative myths that predominate modern-day Christianity and Islam. Our
culture needs to give serious public consideration to alternatives based on
rational thinking.
Reasonable people, though drawn naturally to religious
fantasy, can “break the spell” (see Daniel Dennett’s new book), and
move forward from the 19th-century backwoods philosophy which seems to
monopolize current American discourse. The marketing based news media
organizations, like Fox and others, have exacerbated the problem, but thanks to
solid journalism like yours, there’s a chance to make progress.
Jonathan Hunt, Newtown, Pennsylvania
Ron Netsky’s interview with Sam Harris comes across as a
total fluff piece. Harris accurately describes some of the problems involving fundamentalist
religious conviction, or what Andrew Sullivan might describe as a religion free
from doubt. But he fails to find fault with his own prescriptions for these
problems, which are fueled by his own fundamentalist beliefs.
He states, perhaps accurately, that people should not
believe that for which they have no reasonable evidence. The issue with belief
or disbelief in a god or gods is that usually, by their definition, they can
neither be proven nor disproven. Simply because there is no evidence for a
given proposition does not, ipso facto, make that proposition false. Thus
Harris is making the same mistake he criticizes others for: believing that
there is no god, despite the fact that there is no reasonable evidence to
support that belief.
He is right to criticize fundamentalist doctrines concerning
private life when they enter the public or political sphere, but his
categorical dismissal of one form of absolutism for another makes him a
singularly unpersuasive voice presenting singularly unreasonable solutions to
very real and deep problems.
It would have been nice to see his feet held to the coals in
slightly stronger terms.
Zachary Smith, Rochester
I am the last person to argue with Sam Harris about the
dangers and negative impact of organized religion for a post-Enlightenment,
post-Scientific Revolution world. But religion is one thing. God (transcendent
reality) is quite another.
Mr. Harris and fellow atheistic, rigid scientific
materialists can be guilty of the same dubious logic and closed-mindedness that
they condemn in the blindly religious. To say that God does not exist because
all of the major religions suffer from serious problems is no different than a
Creationist rejecting evolution because of gaps in the fossil record. For an
atheist to proclaim that there is no God because there is no scientific
evidence is no different from people in a pre-Einstein world insisting that
there are no subatomic particles because we haven’t seen them yet.
I am not familiar with a religion that I believe is even
close to having everything right in terms of its conception of the Divine or
the ultimate nature of reality. But I can’t quite wrap myself around the
arrogance of someone like Mr. Harris, who must believe that great spiritual
teachers, poets, artists, composers, and people of remarkable altrusism
throughout history have been delusional. Either the likes of William Blake,
Rumi, Bach, the Baal Shem Tov, Jesus of Nazareth, Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha),
Mohandas Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King Jr., and Albert Einstein
himself have been out to lunch or “there is something else going on.”
The problem with religions is their tendency to mistake an
aspect of the Divine for Divine Reality itself. Just because the religions of
the world haven’t gotten it right yet doesn’t prove that they aren’t on to
something.
Bill Glasner, Modock Road, Victor
Though Sam Harris has an intellectual revulsion for God, his
real beef seems to be with religious groups that are eager to force others to
think as they do, often through violent tactics. But all-embracing and tolerant
religions are also no good, he informs us, for they fail to “call a spade a
spade.” They refuse to condemn their belligerent religious cousins.
This fall, Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide have been distributing
a tract which chronicles the history of injury perpetrated in the name of God.
It does call a spade a spade, and yet words are the group’s only weapons. They
do not seek to force their views on others through political means, and they
don’t fly airplanes into buildings. So I start to imagine that, just maybe,
they have found a niche that even Mr. Harris would be able to stomach.
But probably not.
Tom Hartlieb, Erie Station Road, Rush (Hartlieb is a member of
Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
In the first paragraph of his interview, Sam Harris gives
away the game:
“If you want to understand the human mind, you have to know
something about the brain. There is no question that religion emerges from
deeply ingrained cognitive traits: a desire to understand our circumstance, a
desire to predict the future and to have our belief order our experience in a
way that is useful and confers emotional, behavioral, and ultimately adaptive
advantages for the species.”
What Mr. Harris touts as a definitive understanding of
religion (vide “no question”), Tibetan Buddhists would regard as “deceptive (or
apparent) reality.” Deceptive reality — all that can be revealed by science
— is not the entire story. And clinging to deceptive reality (as Mr. Harris
does) as all that can be known is delusion — the source of suffering.
Buddha claimed that his teaching elucidated a “Middle
Way” between the extremes of eternalism (we are
eternal souls not subject to cause and effect) and nihilism (we are blobs of
protoplasm mindlessly mutating.) Importantly, the Middle
Way is not a belief system but a path that must be
walked. The testimony and experience of many great minds in diverse cultures
has been that the Middle Way
leads to Wisdom and thereby to peace, happiness, and the beneficial
transformation of individuals, societies, and civilizations.
In one of Leo Tolstoy’s stories, he tells the tale of Ivan
Illych. Illych is a retired high court judge who had lived a successful life,
but towards the end is suddenly confronted by a troubling thought: “What if my
conscious life were not the real thing?”
Without rejecting science, Buddhists share this sentiment.
Mr. Harris does not. Which system — the Buddhist or Mr. Harris’s — has
produced more benefit?
Frank Howard, Knolltop Drive, Brighton
“You should only be able to believe things because you
have reason to believe that they’re true. Usefulness and truth are quite
distinct.”
“Real moral concerns have to be focused on questions of
the suffering of conscious beings. The moment you focus on suffering, you see
that many of the moral concerns religious people press have nothing to do with
morality.”
“There are deeper principles of human psychology and
our potential to transform our experience that we have to talk about
rationally, in the spirit of science. If it’s done in that spirit, there will
be disagreements but always with respect to evidence and argument. The
conversation remains open.”
“This is really where my criticism is focused; this
solidarity born of religious ideology is intrinsically divisive and causing
conflict that would not otherwise occur.”
“When you look back on our recent history of racism, it
seems impossible that we could be racist in quite that way again, given popular
culture. I think religion is up for the same transformation as racism. I also
think nationalism is going to have to go in pretty short order.”
AMEN!
Solomon Blaylock, Argyle Street, Rochester
Ron Netsky should have played a
little hardball. What fault does Harris find in Judaism, which teaches goodness
and charity? What fault does he find in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the only
perfect man to ever walk the earth? Would the world be a peaceful paradise if
everyone strove to live by the teachings of Jesus? Clearly, the problems of the
world are not due to religion but to its adherents who go astray.
An example is the doctrine of Preemptive Strike decreed by
our rules in Washington, who
pretend to be Christian. The new mainstay of American foreign policy says, “Do
unto others before they do unto you,” the exact opposite of what our Lord Jesus
pronounced.
What would happen to mankind if the religion of Rationalism
that Mr. Harris preaches held sway? We know what happened to 9 million
Ukrainians when the Soviet Rationalists took over, the 3 million Cambodians at
the hands of the Khmer Rouge Rationalists, and 55 million Chinese landlords at
the hands of the Maoist Rationalists.
A more careful reading of Scripture by Mr. Harris might
reveal that the original scribes of the Bible knew the earth was round. They
referred to “the circle of the earth.” God often uses poetic terms to that only
the sincere and wise understand. Can any atheist point to one item in the Bible
that has been scientifically proven false?
True Christians pray that our Heavenly Father finds some
redeeming quality in His antagonist and that Jim Harris, like Saul, sees the
light on the road to Damascus.
Clarence Carman, Calkins Road, Pittsford
It must be satisfying to be the only person in all of
history who has the real truth about the world. Anyone who wants a
well-reasoned response to Sam Harris’s arguments should read Marilynne
Robinson’s essay in November’s Harper’s magazine. Her points are too much to
summarize here, but a couple of comments seem appropriate.
First, you cannot compare the worst of something to the best
of something else. Have there been religious people and communities that
promoted violence? Have there been otherwise reputable scientists who have
engaged in horrors like eugenics? Yes. It’s worth noting that the nuclear bombs
and chemical weapons that Harris so much fears were created by scientists who,
since he presumes scientists to be atheists, were not motivated by religion.
Harris easily dismisses these arguments as anomalies, yet refuses to accept
religious extremism in the same category.
Second, Harris has apparently made it all this way in
academia without ever learning about literary criticism or the arguments of
post-modernism. He argues that “moderate religionists” are not being
intellectually honest because they do not subscribe to a literal reading of the
text of the Bible. The Bible is not a science textbook and cannot be read as
such. It is full of story, poetry, and apocalyptic, all of which require
understanding how literature works.
Third, the hysterical nature of his arguments, his
inflammatory name-calling, and his hysterical polemics raise a real question
about the supposed rational, common-sense origin of his ideas. The charges
against Islam and its practitioners in your interview, if not racist, are at
least the kind of language that promotes the violence that Harris so much
abhors.
The Rev. Dr. Eugene
Roberts, Brighton Reformed Church, Blossom Road, Rochester
Yawn. How I tire of Sam Harris and his ilk. With tedious
predictability, people like him churn out single-issue books of this nature. He
is obsessed with the idea that all human infamy has religious origins. This
much I know is true: with or without religion, there will always be violence
and irrationality. And faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.
In the worst violence in this century alone, there is no
pattern or single cause: Genocide between the Hutu and Tutsi clans in Rwanda.
The ongoing genocide in the Darfur region, fueled primarily by a government-supported militia.Bosnia’s Sloboda Milosevic. Mao Zedong.
You can find man’s inhumanity to man just about anywhere.
People of all colors are represented among both the slaughterers and the
slaughtered. Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, and atheists butcher one another.
It is the epitome of simplistic reasoning to lay all of the world’s ills at the
doorstep of religion, which is what Harris has done. And by doing so, he has
furthered conflict and divisiveness.
I found the tone of his book, “The End of Faith,” to be as
stridently dogmatic as the religious fundamentalists he decries. If readers
would like to engage in a truly intelligent and scholarly discourse on
fundamentalism, I would recommend Karen Armstrong’s “The Battle for God.”
Lindsay Jonasse, Rosedale Street,
Rochester(Jonasse is
a Master of Divinity student at ColgateRochesterDivinitySchool.)
Sam Harris is quite reasonable and a foil for the
un-educated. Just the fact that he recognized there are throngs of people in
turbans and flowing robes who are a lot more dangerous than Dick Cheney
endeared him, in a manner of speaking, to me. He also avoided, by and large,
the tone of smug condescension towards religious people that is quite common in
the columns of this paper. We are not, apparently, all illiterate yahoos!
But he is wrong! And so is, of course, sympathetic
interviewer Ron Netsky.
Let me take issue
with some of his salient points. The eye-popping stopper came on his answer to
the third question. “Christians think there’s something about the Christian
tradition and the contents of the Bible that puts the God of Abraham on a
completely different footing epistemologically.”
Good Heavens! Mr.
Harris doesn’t think so?
He’s talking about
the gods of Greece and Rome (Poseidon in particular, apparently) and the
God of Judeo-Christianity as though they were on the same level. When did
Poseidon, or any other Greco-Roman god, enjoin me to obey a moral code, rather
than just sacrifice a goat or, better yet, a human being to his altar for his
own glorification?
And then with the next question, he fell into the “why does
God allow this or fail to prevent that” argument. Ever read Primo Levi on Auschwitz?
Natural disasters and
accidents are the results of impersonal mechanical forces. Where we are (under
the roof of a collapsing building) or what we do (Auschwitz) is the result of what we chose in the
exercise of that sublime quality God endowed us with: free will. It is that which makes us in His image, it is that which is witness to his love for
us, and it is that which makes me see God in Mr. Harris: he freely chose to be an atheist. Pity!
As for “moderate”
religious people covering for “fundamentalists,” I ask Mr. Harris not to
patronize me. Inasmuch as I believe in an ethical God, I am a fundamentalist.
Inasmuch as I believe anyone is free to believe in that God or not, I am a
moderate. I do not “cover” for fundamentalists and their extremism, and I
understand perfectly well why some people fly airplanes into buildings.
And
finally, the issue of “usefulness” and “truth.” They are quite distinct; Mr. Harris says. Are
they? Neither is at the base of religion if devoid of a moral content. Allow me
an example. If I knew Mr. Harris to have $10,000 in his pocket, would it not be
“useful” for me to rob him at gunpoint? And would it not also be “true” that my
condition would improve? Wouldn’t that be an all-around improvement in an
“evolutionary” sense? You know, for my evolution, eh?
But then morality
intrudes. Robbing Mr. Harris at gunpoint would be wrong. Where do I get
that notion? From evolution?
I am not against
science! I believe evolution to be a quite reasonable explanation for the way
the world (human, animal, vegetable, and mineral) looks. I also believe that my
moral sense is the gift of a divine agency. Otherwise, and Mr. Harris cannot
escape this conclusion, life would be just an accident and devoid of intrinsic
value. And if the Big Bang is a reasonable explanation for how the cosmos
started — no, I don’t believe it was created some five or six thousand years
ago —it cries out for a divine explanation! Unless Mr. Harris believes
matter created itself.
And it is because I
assign intrinsic value to life that, as a Roman Catholic, I question
indiscriminate stem cell research. It is useful and true that cures
could be found by creating and destroying human embryos, but how would that be
different from the practices of Nazi doctors?
And don’t give me the
utilitarian argument that lots of human embryos are destroyed every day, and
why not put them to good use? Why don’t we put murder victims to good use? In
fact, why don’t we do away with laws that forbid murdering people? After all,
people get murdered every day, anyway!
And don’t give me
that canard about only religion holding that human life starts at
conception, and why do we want to impose that view on others? Pick up any
scientific embryology textbook and it will tell you that human life starts when
the male sperm cell fertilizes the female egg. In that embryo, there is all that a human being will be. We were all embryos once!
Finally, religion and war. This is
where Mr. Harris has me at a disadvantage. Christians killed Muslims in the
name of God, Muslims killed (and are killing) Christians and Jews in the name
of Allah, Jews killed Philistines in the name of Jahweh,
Romans threw Christians to the lions because they wouldn’t burn incense to the
emperor, and Catholics and Protestants killed each other in earnest in the name
of the same God. Pretty depressing! And yet, the religious spirit has given us
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, the soaring high German
of Luther’s translation of the Bible, Gothic cathedrals, and the
Judeo-Christian ethics underlying the Constitution of the United
States.
I think an atheist world would be quite dull, and even more
threatening than the one I live in now. Does Mr. Harris want to throw out, in a
manner of speaking, the baby with the bathwater? And does he think that
atheists have in them the fortitude to defeat the Islamo-fascists?
Because ultimately, it will take strong Christians to keep
the current crop of fanatics in the Fertile
Crescent from imposing burkas and turbans on us.
ItaloSavella, FernwoodPark, Rochester
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This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.
