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.
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.)
My guess is that he doesn’t know in what contexts most rapes occur. There’s a huge amount of otherwise well-meaning people (both men and women) who haven’t been violated themselves and only think of “stranger jumping from a bush” kind of violent rapes or horror stories of religiously motivated gang rapes as rapes.
It’s a case of “always assume ignorance over malice”, to me at least, and judging by practical experience it’s true. If/when ignorance is proven not to be the excuse, like in the case of lots of MRA’s, then it has to be malice.
Honestly, am I the only one here who feels that the whole name-calling and phantasies about torture are a little bit childish? Somehow, the whole question seems a little bit to complicated to me to just answer “Wah! Rape bad! Everything else better!”.
First of all: We can agree that rape is bad and that removing it from the world completely would have a great, measurable positive influence. X (with X being the number of rapes world-wide today) less rapes means many people could stay happy instead of raped. World would, no doubt about that, become a much better place without rape.
But, many people seem to dismiss the other side too easily: Of course, getting rid of religion would have effects. But what would these effects be? Honestly, we can’t be sure. One way to think about it would be to consider the extremes:
On the one side, getting rid of religion could show us, that the positive effects of religion were greater than (or at least equal to) the negative effects, effectively making this a bad choice.
On the other side, getting rid of religion could make the earth a much better place, removing oppression of woman, religious fights, fanatics and terrorists, etc and bringing us a golden age of science and reason. Remember that religion does not only have negative effects on atheists, but mainly on other religious people – of the same faith or other ones. It could well be that the negative sides of religions are much greater than the positive ones.
Obviously, this is reality, so the result will probably not be any of the extremes, but somewhere between. Just where is as good as anyone’s guess.
So what is the right decision? Honestly? I don’t know. Getting rid of rape would obviously the “secure” choice, the one you can take without having to take any risks. Getting rid of religion, on the other hand, could lead to a much happier world – but it could also not. But starting to insult people and fantasize about torture (funnily as it may be intended) doesn’t seem to be the best answer…
@eline “shame on him” would also work
Think this guy better brush up on just how many rapes occur worldwide, how frequently and why. Yes, religion can be a major instigator of wars and violence. But rape happens for many other reasons as well including cultural practices, politics, population oppression, genocide, racism, abelism and just general opportunity to do so and not get caught.
In short, removing religion only removes a small portion of the justifications people use. And I see how self serving removing his personal stumbling block for not being a believer or not catching STDs is.
Bhuddism is not a religion, but it is a spiritual belief system that helps to guide its practiconers through moral problems. Which is also what other religions strive for as well. And of course he practices a spiritual system that teaches that women are inheritantly unable to achieve higher enlightenment unless they are reborn male. Gee, maybe he can tellus the problem with that thinking and how its any different from all the other major religions?
You’re wrong if you believe that Buddhism has no dark sides and only brings happiness, etc. Not all Buddhists are bored Californians or members of the Simpsons family š For example, the Tibetan version of Buddhism lead to a horrible theocracy, where the biggest part of the population was effectively enslaved, justified by the religion and the lamas.
And of course, don’t forget the no matter how peaceful a religion may be, it still teaches an irrational world view, forcing it’s believers to value some dogmas over a critical mind, which opens up the possibilities for fraud, quacks, etc. For example, if people weren’t brought up to believe that there are supernatural forces at work, people telling them to spend all their money for astrological “counseling” would have a lot more problem.
No, sorry, Buddhism isn’t that perfect example religion some atheists seem to want to make out of it. It’s still irrational, it’s still wrong and it still has it’s dark places.