Atheist bigwig Sam Harris: “If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.”
This has never occurred to Sam Harris
In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
Posted on November 18, 2012, in are these guys 12 years old?, atheism minus, misogyny, narcissism, rape and tagged atheism, misogyny, rape, sam harris. Bookmark the permalink. 504 Comments.
wow, I’m speechless. Just fucking speechless
it’s almost as though privileged, thoughtless intellectuals don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t affect them directly.
Hmm.
Why did he even think it was necessary to say this?
He is an asshole. But I’m sure he feels soooooo oppressed as a white male atheist. We just don’t know his pain.
I really wish dudes would stop talking about rape (unless they’re a survivor). They’re not helping.
Grrraaaaah. Must… not… hit self in head with brick…
I am not a violent person, but I hope Sam Harris, while walking barefoot, steps on a bunch of Legos, and then while trying to get away runs into a dark room where the floor is littered with thumbtacks, and once he finally gets outside he gets stung by a wasp.
Too much? I am kind of a crankypants right now. But tomorrow I am going to Disneyland with my favorite 6-year old, so I think that will cheer me up.
I’m so mad right now that I’m going to go make myself a second cup of hot cocoa to make me happy again. Seriously though, Sam Harris is a douche. The douchiest of douches. He is Captain McDoucheson of the SS Douchecanoe, powered fully by douchenozzle douchethrusters. He sails the sea of douche in search of people to be a douche to.
So right after this was posted, someone told me the date the interview took place. :-/ Old interview is old.
Still, I hadn’t heard of it all these years, and I’ve been into the atheism movement since high school. It gives me another reason to hate Sam Harris other than his blind spots to certain woo and his own ego.
@cloudiah
Yay Disneyland! I was there last weekend. It should be in full Christmas mode by now.
If I could get rid of something that is unlikely to affect me personally, or something that effects me personally, I’m going to go with the former. Way to take one for the team fuckneck.
It’s like one has a page marked “Sam Harris, Scumbag” and hits Refresh every so often.
Gah.
That’s it. Just ‘gah’.
I hope a large pack of Labradors eats spicy chili and shits all over his house.
@ cloudiah
Definitely not too much. I was rooting for several wasps myself.
And a white-tailed spider bite. Not fatal but serious pain.
Hound dogs make better plops.
I would like to amend my curse to include several wasps, Hippodameia’s labradors-with-chili-runs suggestion, and a white-tailed spider bite. Perhaps not all at once, but spread out over the course of a month. And maybe at the very end he could trip and fall into a pit full of porcupines. (NOTE: No porcupines would be harmed during the fulfillment of this curse.)
I hope Sam Harris gets squirrels in his attic, can’t find them and they keep him from sleeping well for a month.
I hope Sam Harris makes a pot of coffee only to discover that it’s decaf and he doesn’t have any regular coffee in the house.
I hope Sam Harris gets an itchy rash on his butt and when he goes to the doctor for it, they tell him that there’s nothing wrong with him.
Have fun at Disneyland, cloudiah!
I move for him to get shut in a closet for hours, and then at the end realize that it wasn’t locked.
Sorry y’all but I’m gonna go with the cruelest option so far stated:
I hope that in time, it dawns on Sam Harris just how badly he represented himself and his cause, and how futile his actions were. I hope he comes to realize that those who criticized him were right, and his efforts to uplift the things he believes in damaged the cause more than religion ever could have.
I hope Sam Harris comes to understand — deeply, comprehensively, and irrevocably — what his impact on the world really was.
Squirrels in the attic? That’s just cruel!
–the guy who lives in an attic
I’m no fan of Sam Harris anyway, but this is beyond ridiculous. Being atheist myself, and if I had to choose only one, I would gladly get rid of rape. I’m no fan of religion, but I’d rather see rape go away first. Between Sam and The Absolute Asshole, I mean, Amazing Atheist (in his own mind), they’re not doing much for the rest of us everyday atheists. We don’t all look up to these douche-buckets. :(
Hmmm, if I could get rid of something that is real, tangible, measurable, and harms countless people daily and does absolutely no good for anyone, anywhere OR something I consider to be a delusion, but doesn’t always lead to harm… Gosh, what a dilemma. For a douchebag.
Inurashii wins, of course.
But I hope he gets attacked by a hamster and then at the emergency room they laugh at him.
I heard him give a talk on PBS years ago and his argument was reasoned and so I bought his book. His argument was not reasoned in the book. That was the point when I realized he is yet another con man. There sure are a surfeit of those d00dz.
inurashii’s curse should be the ultimate curse, of course, but can the other curses be the minor curses that Harris has to live through before he comes to that stark realization?
I hope that Sam Harris’ house gets visited by an increasingly long line of Jehovas Witnesses. A curse tailored to specifically annoy him.
I hope Mormons break into Sam’s house and force him to wear the magic underwear, after the Jehovah’s Witnesses visit him.
I hope as more atheists come out of the atheist closet, establishment figures become more and irrelevant, before eventually fading away to nothing more than a historical joke.
If I had a choice between doing away with rape or religion, I wouldn’t even think once, let alone twice. “Rape” would come out of my mouth too fucking fast to let me think. And I wouldn’t regret it. I’d rather live in a world free of rape than in a world free of religion.
I hope he finds a Chick tract under his windshield wipers every day.
AND I hope that he goes Trick-or-Treating and gets nothing but Chick tracts.
Also… Harris’s “Letter to a Christian Nation” simply sucks. “The God Delusion” was better, and I’m not even a fan of that.
Meh. Considering how dangerous he thinks religion is to the human race, color me unsurprised. Seriously, once you paint something an an ultimate evil of course you are going to get rid of it before anything else.
Invective aside, I’m with clairedammit: Why the fuck did he decide that this false dichotomy even needed to be propped up?
One of the things that us poly people get every once in a while is some genius being like, “If you had a gun to your head and had to choose to dump Partner A or Partner B, which one would you choose?”
and it’s like, wtf, do you ask this question of people who have multiple children? What is wrong with you?
Even if you think that religion is ghastly, you are not going to find yourself suddenly faced with the choice of which of the world’s personally perceived ills you get to cure. These questions are pointless and onanistic, serving only to let some blowhard stroke his engorged, turgid ego and pretend that he’s making a statement.
He’s always been the most asinine of the Four Horsemen, and in a quartet featuring the supremely overrated Hitchens and post-’80s Dawkins that’s saying a lot.
Anyway, now none of you have to read him.
As a theist and a survivor I find this particilarly upsetting. Great dude, you’d vanish the thing which helped save my life when I was depressed but not the thing which contributed to me wanting to die in the first place? Get the fuck off my planet.
I hope he gets life in prison and his cell mate is a friendly evangelist
I’d like to repeat the bit from Katz’s hamster bite curse: everyone laughs at him.
Sam Harris is a shallow POS, and as much of an embarrassment to atheists as Pat Robertson must be to most Christians out there. Hitchens and Dawkins were/are somewhat better, but both were/are pretty obvious and unashamed misogynists
And pompous with it – at least, Dawkins and Hitchens; I don’t know enough about Harris to say.
I must say the look on Dawkins’s face when Andrew Denton (Oz interviewer) asked him “What’s your star sign?” at the end of an interview was priceless.
Hitchens is also a jackass conservative.
Yeah, Harris doesn’t seem to think torture’s so terrible. Charming fellow.
I was already annoyed with Sam Harris for his book on free will. I mean, there are lots of philosophers out there who discusses the issue, and everyone agrees these days that the term “free will” is ambiguous. Different philosophical schools use it differently, and there is much evidence that lay people also use it differently. Some people use it to mean something like the ability to think through various alternatives and then choose the one you really find best and act on it, in which case we obviously have free will at least sometimes. Others use it in a fancier way. Basically, if you’re gonna discuss whether we have free will or not, you have to pick a definition, argue why this particular definition is interesting/worth caring about, and then present your case as to whether we have THIS kind of free will or not.
Sam Harris defines “free will” as meaning you have the god-like power of omniscience regarding your own psyche and the ability to create your own mental life out of nothing. He then proudly declares that this power does not exist (duh, really?). He says over and over again that all regular people BELIEVES that they have this impossible god-like power (no, there’s no evidence whatsoever that they do), throws in some neuroscientifical findings (don’t know why, since you don’t need neuroscience to know that we don’t have omniscience and the ability to create ourselves out of nothing), and finally manages to completely misrepresent what various philosophical schools have to say about the subject.
So, I already disliked the man. And now this. Oh well.
One the list of douchey things Harris has said this isn’t even at the top of the list. I’m not sure what goes at the top, coming just short of advocating genocide in the middle east or thinking torture is a good thing.
Even things I agree with him on in the abstract (like free will is an illusion) he manages to screw up spectacularly. You don’t even need to argue the broad Cartesian dualism form of free will (a caricatured version of it is what he was using for a definition) and that he does is just lazy. Neuroscience already has a lot to say about how we aren’t in conscious control of all our decisions (brain scans showing a decision made before we have rationalized it to ourselves) and of course that we are the product of our life experiences which set us up for making the decisions we do (conscious or not).
Only the most hardcore New Age types believe in that definition of free will. WTF does Harris think he’s on about? He basically wrote an entire book attacking a strawman.
Also, I hope that he gets stuck between two very aggressive evangelists on every flight that he ever takes for the rest of his life, and that all the flight attendants refuse to move him because they remember this quote.
And that there’s a small child behind him who keeps kicking his seat so that he can’t sleep.
@Noadi: The point is, you still have to pick a definition of free will, since it’s not the case that “events in our brain caused the decision and action” or “we’re the products of our life experiences” disproves every popular definition used by various philosophical schools. It was the case hundreds of years ago that many scientists AND philosophers, despite not having brain scan devices, were completely convinced that the psyche is basically some kind of mechanism where a certain input gives a certain output. Some people has seen this as proof that we can’t be free, because they think freedom’s gotta be freedom from causation. Others have thought this is compatible with freedom, because they think the word only makes sense as “freedom from compulsion”, but causation isn’t compulsion. And if the term “free will” is gonna mean anything, it’s gotta be the will being free from INNER compulsion like neurosis – but once again, causation isn’t compulsion.
But the point is, it’s not like brain scans have revealed something completely unexpected about ourselves. A large part of philosophy has been convinced for ages that this is most likely the way we function: Something causes decisions and actions, they don’t just appear. And then they’ve argued from there; can we still be free? Can we have free will?
Both camps have been certain that they have the general public on their side, but only recently have philosophers actually started to investigate what the general public thinks of the matter. And it seems like opinions differ a lot, and are often easily swayed this way or that by how the question is phrased.
So you really can’t skip the stage where you define what you mean by free will and say something about why this meaning is the one you’re interested in, before you start digging into empirical evidence one way or another.
@Cassandra: Yes, he makes a strawman of “the general public”, and he also makes strawmen of “libertarians” (philosophical school) and “compatibilists” (other philosophical school). The weird thing is that famous free will philosopher Galen Strawson apparently read the draft… He should have been able to point such stuff out? I guess that either Strawson just skimmed the whole thing, saw that Harris conclusion agrees with his own (since Strawson has argued that we don’t have the kind of free will necessary for desert-entailing moral responsibility), and just gave it back to Harris with an “looks alright”. Or else he actually critisised stuff, but Harris couldn’t be bothered to listen to him since he’s just a philosopher and not a SCIENTIST like Harris.
Um, what? Hitchens wasn’t a conservative, he was a genius, and by far the greatest of the “New Atheists” or whatever you want to call them. Partially because he wasn’t, you know, just an atheist, he was a lot of things. Seriously, talk about dismissiveness. Probably some of the green-eyed monster going on too. I’ve actually found that’s usually the case with the Hitchens haters. The man spent his adult life chronically drunk and was still a far better writer than any of his detractors.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t say anything about disproving all definitions of free will. I said I think free will is an illusion and it’s something I agree with Harris on but the definition he used in his book is incredibly lazy because it’s so overly broad.
I’m sure someone could manage to come up with one that encompasses the way our brain functions but I’m not sure such a definition would have much meaning. How can our will be free when we have no actual control over it? When the way our brain makes decisions is deterministic? Free will implies that we have control over our thought processes and we don’t even if it may appear that we do.
Another curse! May Sam Harris constantly go on what he thinks are hot dates only to discover that his date is actually just trying to recruit him to a cult.
@Noadi: Well, first of all, brain science so far is probabilistic and not deterministic. May turn out eventually that there’s determinism behind the probabilities, but we’re not there yet.
The reason many (if far from all) people think free will definitions that are compatible with causation overall and even deterministic causation are interesting, is that they think “freedom from causation” either doesn’t even make sense, or at least it doesn’t denote anything valuable. Compulsion is a threat to freedom, and therefore it’s interesting to discuss what counts as compulsion and what doesn’t (Al Mele has discussed, for instance, whether freedom-undermining compulsion must be simultaneous with the decision or can proceed it by years), and one might discuss what kind of psychological phenomena counts as compelling rather than causing you to act. But causation in itself just isn’t a problem in some people’s view.
Some people also think control REQUIRES deterministic causation. Controlling an action, to them, means acting on your values and in character, while lack of control would mean doing something contrary to your values or out of character. A person who’s ultimately in control would be someone whose action in every situation is determined by character/values+features of the situation. They simply don’t think that control over your actions imply that you control everything that caused the action in a causal chain stretching backwards in time for infinity.
(Btw, Milgram studies and the like doesn’t prove that control in this sense doesn’t exist, since there’s always a small minority that actually do what they think is right even in these situations. Social psychology might show that it’s RARE though.)
Then there are others who don’t really think free will requires ultimate control – that having an open future is what’s crucial. These are the so-called event-libertarians. Basically they think free will requires that causation is probabilistic rather than deterministic, and so far, this is compatible with actual neuroscience (although we don’t know whether the future might reveal that the brain actually functions in a deterministic manner).
I used to believe that the important or interesting kind of free will was something in fact impossible. I just had those intuitions. I also thought that this proved that moral judgements about actions can’t be justified. Eventually I changed my view, since I realised that the function of morality is helping us decide what to do. Decision-making capacity, rather than some “fancy” kind of free will, should therefore suffice for being a moral agent. And after working on my dissertation where I argue for this position for several years, my original intuitions began to dwindle.
When it comes to the idea that control require determinism or that the important thing is an open future – I just don’t think that way myself. But one must recognise that ideas about free will, what kind of free will it is that MATTERS, vary a lot.
Sorry for writing such long rants…
Anyway, long story short: Harris makes strawmen of both laypeople and professional philosophers, and that’s not a good way to argue. You’d think that an empirical scientist would be interested in the actual empirics that exist regarding laypeople’s view on free will, instead of just making up some crazy laypeople in his head and argue against THEM.
I remember this quote was used as a discussion starter once; I argued that I’d get rid of rape if only because we’re doing a (much, much) worse job dealing with rape than we are with the harms of religion (although those notoriously include rape too). I realize that atheism is somewhat persecuted in the US (in my country it’s just regarded as being pragmatic), but I’ve met too many atheists who allow their privilege to blind them to the oppression of others and who seriously believe that their persecution is the most important issue. I also don’t have a lot of patience for a man who claims that morals are about human and animal well-being (which I agree with) but then would rather get rid of religion (the good AND bad parts) and ignore a very real and damaging issue that ruins countless lives every year.
I would like the wasp that stings Sam Harris after his Lego-thumbtack ordeal to be a tarantula hawk wasp. Alternately, may he be bitten by any subspecies of Paraponera.
I don’t care if the interview is old. The lack of outrage from that time is telling. Decent people shit a brick when they read something that stupid and insensitive.
Supported wars in the middle East. Supported torture. Out and proud misogynist. Anti-choice (and this is just off the top of my head).
Some bloody genius. You may like the way he writes but that doesn’t make him, you know, correct, not conservative, and not a fucking bigot.
Is this really so offensive?
Saying bad thing A is worse than bad thing B isn’t saying that bad thing B isn’t bad.
You might replace “rape” with “war”, “murder” etc. Essentially it comes down to, do you delete a particular horrible act or the motivator for many horrible acts?
Deleting religion would probably prevent many rapes. Deleting rapes probably wouldn’t prevent religiosity at all.
Can’t we just all work at deleting as many bad things as possible instead of arguing for no reason which is the baddest?
It’s quite possible to be both a genius and a horrible human being.
I mean, I may think that conservative policies are stupid in the long run, but “he’s not a conservative, he’s a genius” is still an idiotic statement. A person can be very clever AND a good writer AND a conservative. I know it’s easy to forget that here because most MRAs can’t write for shit, but really, come on now.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. Although I would argue that a person’s inability to see people who are different from them as fully human might make me more hesitant to dole out the label. Just the implication that he can’t be conservative because Skyrimjob likes what he wrote baffled me.
@ nat
Not you I was sniping at! It was the original statement that implied that since Hitchens was clever and a good writer he couldn’t have been a conservative that had me rolling my eyes.
I feel like I see a lot of those kinds of statements from Skyrimjob actually, that sort of defensiveness about stuff zie likes and unwillingness to admit that people zie likes might have bad as well as good qualities.
Haha, OK. I saw your second post just after I posted my comment. I think I need to eat breakfast and have a cup of tea, this morning is not going well. In fact, it’s going so badly that it’s nearly 2pm. Oops :/
While I’m on the other end of the spectrum, still up at nearly 6 am and too wired to sleep. This camomile tea better start working soon.
I read the comment in context, ie read the whole interview and I get the feeling he didn’t exactly mean it the way it’s interpreted now. He condemns rape on the previous page and considering he compares it to religion in the first place, knowing that religion is the Most Evil Thing in his mind… I don’t think it was meant as a non-condemnation in any way.
But, it isn’t exactly a smart thing to say and he clearly knew this as his words before were “I can be a lot more inflammatory than [to compare religion to rape]“. His argument is a utilitarian one, that by removing religion you’d automatically remove a lot of violence (including rape). I’d be inclined to agree but I don’t think rape is a very good contrast for religion here and it’s used for shock value only. Rape as a subset of violence doesn’t happen mostly in religious context, but vast majority of rapes happens unrelated to religions.
Shame for him. I get what he’s trying to say but his execution fails majorly this time.
Urgh, language mixup there. “Shame for him” means a different thing in English than I intended here. I guess something like “he ought to be ashamed” would be a better translation.
Wow! Yep, Liberals and Atheists can be sexist too.
Even with the kindest possible interpretation it still comes across as “we’ll get to your problems later, ladies, after we’ve dealt with the important stuff”.
(Given his overall attitude I’m guessing that the idea that men might be at risk of rape too has never even occurred to him unless we’re talking about pedophile priests.)