Sam Harris
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Sam Harris is a neuroscientist, author, proponent of scientific scepticism, Ben Stiller look-alike, and founder of Project Reason, a charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and values in society.[1] He is best known for his books The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. He has been criticized for being intolerant of religious belief, for a virtual hatred of Islam in particular, while showing a positive bias towards eastern religions.[2][3][4] He has also been caught citing notorious peddlers of parapsychology such as Rupert Sheldrake and Dean Radin, he takes a range of alleged paranormal phenomena more seriously than do most scientists.[5]
Harris is a prominent face in the so-called new atheism movement, along with fellow atheists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and the late Christopher Hitchens, the "four horsemen.".
He received a Bachelors of Arts in philosophy from Stanford and earned a Ph.D in neuroscience from UCLA in 2009.[6]
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[edit] Project Reason
Project Reason is described on its website as "..a 501(c)(3) nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. The foundation draws on the talents of prominent and creative thinkers in a wide range of disciplines to encourage critical thinking and erode the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world." Its advisory board includes many well known scientists, sceptics and atheists, including the following:
- Ayaan Hirsi Ali (odd, given her wingnut beliefs and accommodationism of Christians)
- Richard Dawkins
- Christopher Hitchens (until he popped his clogs R.I.P.)
- Bill Maher (Quite a rational man, if one overlooks his denial of germ theory and his anti-vaccination stance)
[edit] The End of Faith
Sam used his book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason to argue that unjustified beliefs, specifically religious beliefs, need to be challenged. He defines a belief as a "lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life."[7]p. 12
He dedicates a section of the book to the problem with Islam.[7]p. 109 He considers Islam to be a special case of religion, due to the amount of text in the Qur'an that would need to be ignored for it to be a truly peaceful religion. He uses the results of a 2002 survey by the Pew Research Center which posed a question to Muslims of whether they felt suicide bombing or other violence against civilian targets could be justified in the defense of Islam, which revealed shockingly high support in many countries.[7][8]p. 125 Elsewhere he sees Islam as violent, anachronistic and opposed to important Western values, notably free speech. Harris accuses Western liberals of being more concerned with political correctness and with avoiding accusations of racism than with defending Western freedom.[9]
Ironically, Sam seems to show greater respect at the end of the book for Eastern religions that he does not show for Western religions. He admits that Asia has had a fair share of "false prophets and charlatan saints," but that Asian cultures have also developed some wondrous insights into consciousness by direct experimentation with meditation.[7]p. 215-217 He also argues that this spirituality or mysticism does not need to be attached to a single dogma and can be experienced and experimented with in a scientific manner.[7]p. 217 This is part of a larger argument he makes in the book: it needs to be acknowledged that spiritual experiences can be experience regardless of religious belief, and they are not evidence of any claims other than the experiences themselves. This (somehow) makes mysticism a rational enterprise that can make claims about experiences and consciousness without attempting to attach them to claims about the universe as a whole.[7]p. 221
[edit] The Moral Landscape
In The Moral Landscape, Harris argues that science can provide a system of morality.[10] He was notably savaged for this, including within the philosophical and atheist communities. Specifically, he was criticized for breaking Hume's law and straw manning ethical and moral philosophies.[11] Harris has responded to these criticisms.[12]
[edit] Neuroscience
Harris has conducted research on the neuroscience of religious belief.[13]
[edit] Let's play "Harris or Malkin?"
Harris' stance on Islam is often indistinguishable from certain batshit ideologues. See if you can tell the difference:
- "The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."[14]
- The "Ground Zero mosque" will be viewed as a "sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice."[15]
- "It is time we admitted that we are not at war with 'terrorism.' We are at war with Islam."[16]
- "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."[17]
[edit] Bibliography
- The End of Faith (2004)
- Letter to a Christian Nation (2006)
- The Moral Landscape (2010)
- Lying (2011)
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ The Project Reason website
- ↑ Harris has repeatedly spoken positively of eastern mysticism, the most striking example of this is found in his book, The End of Faith. Matt Dillahunty, host of The Atheist Experience, suggested that readers could just skip that section of the book, and reviews from the sceptical/atheist community frequently reference his views on meditation and other practices associated with eastern religions. Johann Hari and Meera Nanda commented on this tendency of Harris, see The Sea of Faith and Violence and Trading Faith for Spirituality: The Mystifications of Sam Harris, respectively.
- ↑ Islamophobia and Sam Harris' Tyranny of Reason, Daily Maverick
- ↑ Sam Harris Uncovered, Theodore Sayeed, Mondoweiss
- ↑ Sam Harris: A Man of Faith? The Skeptic's Dictionary newsletter #74
- ↑ About Sam Harris
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 Harris, Sam (2004). The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. W.W. Norton & Company.
- ↑ Considering that these countries are repressive theocracies where these thoughts are tailored, the reaction should be "duh."
- ↑ The Reality of Islam
- ↑ The TED talk based on the book
- ↑ See the reviews by Kwame Anthony Appiah; Scott Atran; Ophelia Benson; Russell Blackford; Robert Todd Carroll; Troy Jollimore; Jackson Lears; Kenan Malik; Thomas Nagel; H. Allen Orr; Massimo Pigliucci; Josh Rosenau
- ↑ Harris's Response to Critics
- ↑ Harris et al. The Neural Correlates of Religious and Non-Religious Belief. PLoS ONE 4(10)
- ↑ It's Real, It's Scary, It's a Cult of Death, Sam Harris, Los Angeles Times
- ↑ What Obama Got Wrong About the Mosque, Sam Harris, The Daily Beast
- ↑ Mired in a Religious War, Sam Harris, Washington Times
- ↑ In Defense of Profiling, Sam Harris, samharris.org blog