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.
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.