User:-Mona-/Sam Harris

Sam Harris, noted atheist and Ben Stiller-lookalike, circa 2007

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Samuel Benjamin "Sam" Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, arguably a philosopher, and neuroscientist. He is the co-founder and chief executive of Project Reason, a non-profit organization that promotes science and secularism, and host of the podcast Waking Up with Sam Harris.

Harris is the author of the 2004 book The End of Faith. In 2006, Harris published Letter to a Christian Nation as a response to criticism of The End of Faith. This was followed by The Moral Landscape, published in 2010, in which Harris argues that science can help answer moral problems and can aid the facilitation of human well-being. He subsequently published a long-form essay Lying in 2011, the short book Free Will in 2012, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion in 2014 and Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue in 2015.

Harris is a vocal critic of religion, a proponent of scientific skepticism and one of the "four horsemen" of the New Atheist movement (alongside the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett). He is also an advocate for the separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and the liberty to criticize religion. Some critics argue Harris's writings are profoundly bigoted toward Muslims and extremist vis-a-vis torture and civil liberties. Harris and his supporters, however, reject that he is an "Islamophobe", claiming that such labeling is an attempt to silence criticism.

Harris has written articles for The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek, and the scientific journal Nature, covering a diversity of topics including religion, morality, neuroscience, free will, terrorism, and self-defense. He regularly gives talks around the United States and Great Britain, including a speech at TED. Harris has also made numerous television appearances and appeared in the documentary films The God Who Wasn't There (2005) and The Unbelievers (2013).

Dubious judgment and priorities

Even some of Harris's fans feel his obsession with Muslims has taken him to some pretty bad places.

Debates about Islamic terrorism

Advocating that adherence to religious belief is a powerful indicator of the propensity to commit terrorism, Harris got into a public debate with Scott Atran, a French-American researcher who has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists. Harris warned of religious dogma that called for its followers to practice suicide bombing as martyrdom. Atran countered with data and statistics that show religious belief is not a predictor of radicalization and terrorism. Further, Harris has rhetorically asked: "Where are the Christian or Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers?" apparently not understanding that the Hindu Tamil Tigers have undertaken some 400 suicide bombings, or that Christians have carried out suicide attacks on behalf of the Popular Front For the Liberation Of Palestine (or that Robert F. Kennedy was murdered by a Christian Palestinian). Moreover, Harris "never quite stoops to articulate why suicide bombing is objectively worse than more common variants of homicide like the monopoly enjoyed by Christians and Jews on aerial bombing which rubbles entire nations with far more loss of life than a semtex in a rucksack." In ironic fashion, Harris endorses bombing that will almost surely result in casualties of innocent Muslims (in Muslim-majority countries that is), declaring that both drones or units of Navy Seals mean: "you’re going to kill some number of innocent people and that’s terrible; and the terrible truth is there is no alternative to that."

Israel and the Palestinians

While Harris has said that Zionist settlers should be "dragged by their beards" from the illegally occupied Palestinian territories, he spends more time criticizing the radicalization of the victims Palestinian population. Harris either doesn't recognize or downplays the impact on the Palestinians of the myriad appalling aspects of Israel's history and occupation. Instead, he focuses almost solely on what's wrong with Hamas rather than what's also wrong with Israel. This behavior is no doubt why Harris's book, The End of Faith, was blurbed by the rabidly anti-Palestinian, pro-Israel Alan Dershowitz. In that work Harris heavily draws on Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel.

To a great extent, Harris regurgitates what the Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs claims, taking it as true without a hint of even-handed skepticism. For example, Harris uncritically repeats Israel's claim that Palestinians use human shields, even though human rights groups have found no evidence of this. To compound this failure of skeptical praxis, easily obtained evidence -- from Israel's highest court -- shows that Israel has used Palestinian civilians as human shields at least 1200 times; the Israeli military almost certainly continue to do this.. Harris also claims the IDF acts with great restraint and does not target civilians, notwithstanding many reports from human rights organizations and dissident IDF soldiers debunking that illusion.. Harris seems either remarkably ill-informed about Israel's atrocities or is willfully ignorant of evidence that doesn't support his depiction of well-intentioned, noble military operations undertaken by a Western army -- to such an extent one might even call him an apologist for these crimes.

Debating the Importance of Intent

In mid 2015, Harris and radical linguist Noam Chomsky held a public conversation “about the ethics of war, terrorism, state surveillance, and related topics.” Harris posted the email exchange, characterizing it as an “unpleasant and fruitless encounter.” The core disagreement was about the role of intent when cataloging the crimes committed by the West. For example, Chomsky argues that "the U.S. government has conferred upon itself the right and freedom to murder and exterminate people for their own good" and that therefore the intent of the West is just as bad, if not sometimes worse, than the intent of its enemies. Harris maintains otherwise, insisting that "we are, in many respects, just such a 'well-intentioned giant,'" and that "what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us." It certainly doesn't seem to especially appall him, since Harris often dismisses or excuses western crimes against humanity.

Not surprisingly, Harris claimed that "delusional liberals" felt he lost the debate.

Feminists are slackers

Sweeping one's own side of the street doesn't appeal to Harris and he has been known to adopt the not as bad as argument, saying that feminists must "agitate" and fight against Muslim oppression of women rather than focus so much on abortion rights at home. Harris admonishes Western feminists to instead join him his primary obsession. This is best shown in a podcast with Kyle Kulinski, when he said western feminists "spend more time complaining about Gamergate" than actually pushing for women's rights. It doesn't seem to occur to Harris that feminists can walk and chew gum simultaneously address multiple issues or that there might actually be serious problems in Western society involving the treatment of women. Of course, in the end it might just be an example of his more rightward leanings.

On Ted Cruz and Ben Carson

In a podcast with noted neocon Douglas Murray on the topic of Syrian refugees, Sam Harris demonstrated his exquisitely refined political judgment that leads him to approve of the clerical fascists GOP's religious loons.

While admitting that the man is a "religious nutjob," Harris said it's "totally unhelpful" to treat Ted Cruz as a bigot. He goes further, saying "Is it crazy to express, as Ted Cruz did, a preference for Christian [refugees] over Muslims in this process? Of course not."

Harris goes on to say, "What percentage of Christians will be jihadists or want to live under Sharia law? Zero. And this is a massive, in fact the only, concern when talking about security. We know that some percentage of Muslims will be jihadists inevitably... So it is not mere bigotry or mere xenophobia to express that preference." Thus our man Harris decrees that Cruz "is a quite reasonable concerned voice." The learned Harris seems unaware that some American Christians themselves are not only pushing their own version of Sharia law, but also are committing the most terrorist acts in the United States of America (along with right wing militias and sovereign citizens, where there is extensive overlap with Christians).

Harris's political acumen goes further still. "Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time," Harris stated. "Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile... the fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal, but at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy.”

In the view of many, Sam Harris is not a progressive; he's fundamentally rightwing. Not because he criticizes Islam, but rather that his criticism is merely an intellectualized version of the rhetoric of anti-immigrant xenophobia and crosses into bigotry based on religion. Criticism of Islam -- or any religion -- is warranted; not warranted is hysteria about refugees coming in to harm you and posing a danger to your community (the fifth column/demographic ticking time bomb). Also unacceptable are notions that native born Muslims are spies and potential jihadis who need to be locked away (a la treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII) for the safety of True Americans^TM. In fact, rank bigotry like Harris's inflames religious fundamentalists of both Islamic and Christian varieties by giving Islamic extremists more fodder and Christian whackjobs an intellectual 'ally' in their hatred of other faiths.

Harris, unfortunately is not alone. Since 9/11 an increasing number of Western atheists have been promoting wingnut-friendly xenophobia and Western imperialism:

In the name of enlightened atheism, you thus arrive at an old-fashioned imperialism: the people we just happen to be bombing are simple-minded savages, impervious to reason and civilisation....You can proclaim you’re an atheist, a freethinker, a devotee of the enlightenment – and yet somehow still end up backing rightwing Christians like... Ben Carson in their campaigns against the Muslim hordes.

Paranormal

Harris apparently takes a range of alleged paranormal phenomena more seriously than do most scientists (links added by RW);

My views on the paranormal: ESP, reincarnation, etc.

My position on the paranormal is this: While there have been many frauds in the history of parapsychology, I believe that this field of study has been unfairly stigmatized. If some experimental psychologists want to spend their days studying telepathy, or the effects of prayer, I will be interested to know what they find out. And if it is true that toddlers occasionally start speaking in ancient languages (as Ian Stevenson alleges), I would like to know about it. However, I have not spent any time attempting to authenticate the data put forward in books like Dean Radin's The Conscious Universe or Ian Stevenson's 20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. The fact that I have not spent any time on this should suggest how worthy of my time I think such a project would be. Still, I found these books interesting, and I cannot categorically dismiss their contents in the way that I can dismiss the claims of religious dogmatists. (Here, I am making a point about gradations of certainty: Can I say for certain that a century of experimentation proves that telepathy doesn’t exist? No. It seems to me that reasonable people can disagree about the statistical data. Can I say for certain that the Bible and the Koran show every sign of having been written by ignorant mortals? Yes. And this is the only certainty one needs to dismiss the God of Abraham as a creature of fiction.)

Project Reason

See the main article on this topic: 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 is a mixed bag of various scientists, skeptics and atheists, including;

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali (known for some slight miscommunication in the Netherlands, holder of some wingnut beliefs and often guilty of accommodationism of Christians, including a desire to see Christians proselytize and convert Muslims)
• Richard Dawkins (unfortunately becoming increasingly well known for his... distrust... of Muslims rather than anything else)
• Christopher Hitchens (until he popped his clogs)
• Bill Maher (Quite a rational man, if one overlooks his denial of germ theory and his notion that Louis Pasteur recanted it on his death bed, and his anti-vaccination stance)

Books and professional writing

In his book The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Harris argues that unjustified beliefs, specifically religious beliefs, need to be challenged. He describes a belief as a "lever that, once pulled, moves almost everything else in a person's life."^p. 12

He dedicates a section of the book to what he sees as the problem with Islam.^p. 109 He considers Islam to be a special case, due to the amount of text in the Qur'an that would need to be ignored for it to be a truly peaceful religion, of course whether he's giving a pass to the Bible or just doesn't want to tread a well worn path is up for debate. 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.^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. Given some statements Harris has made, even within the book, it's possible he may actually have some sort of bias, but he is surely not a bigot, because everyone is only taking his statements out of context! Statements like:

We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.

And:

We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come.

We have to be monsters because, writes Harris, we are fighting Islam, and thus fighting Muslim monsters. But, no doubt, it is unfair -- an exercise in political correctness -- to treat Harris's text as if plain words carry plain meaning.

At the end of the book Harris seems to show a greater respect for Eastern religions than 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.^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.^p. 217 This is part of a larger argument which he makes in the book: it needs to be acknowledged that spiritual experiences can be experienced regardless of religious belief, and they are not evidence of any claims other than the experiences themselves. This makes mysticism a rational enterprise that can make claims about subjective experiences and consciousness without attempting to attach them to claims about the universe as a whole.^p. 221 YMMV on if it goes too far into woo territory.

Another Harris book, The Moral Landscape, argues that all moral claims are in principle scientific claims, Harris's contention being that all moral claims are claims about the well-being or suffering of conscious creatures and so there must be facts about the experiences of these creatures whether we know these facts or not. He was notably savaged for this, within both the philosophical and the atheist communities. Many criticisms focused on the perceived totalitarianism inherent in science telling people how to achieve wellbeing as articulated in the novel 'Brave New World'. Other criticisms claimed that defining wellbeing in scientific terms to be an impossible task in principle because wellbeing is subjective and different for all. In philosophical circles, he was criticized for breaking Hume's law and straw manning ethical and moral philosophies, or rather for denigrating the debates that occur in within moral philosophy as "boring". Harris has responded to these criticisms by stating that Hume's law is not an actual law of the universe and that it does not stand up to deeper scrutiny, and by comparing the abstract definition of 'wellbeing' to that of 'health' such that the words do not need rigorous definition to be practical. His full response to many different critics has been posted to his website.

Harris has conducted scientific research, and by research we mean three papers, on the neuroscience of religious belief. Harris has ceased to do major work in neuroscience to focus on his career in philosophy and on the New Atheism circuit. Harris has done very little actual publications on neuroscience.

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 only future devout Muslims can envisage — as Muslims — is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed." answer
• "In the case of Islam, the bad acts of the worst individuals—the jihadists, the murderers of apostates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice".^answer
• "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."^answer
• "The Israelis are confronting people who will blow themselves up to kill the maximum number of noncombatants and will even use their own children as human shields. They’ll launch their missiles from the edge of a hospital or school so that any retaliation will produce the maximum number of innocent casualties. And they do all this secure in the knowledge that their opponents are genuinely worried about killing innocent people. It’s the most cynical thing imaginable. And yet within the moral discourse of the liberal West, the Israeli side looks like it’s the most egregiously insensitive to the cost of the conflict." ^answer
• "I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."^answer
• On the Taliban, al Qaeda, and al Shabab: "These groups have as good a claim as any to being impeccable Muslims" ^answer
• "The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization."^answer
• "The 'Ground Zero mosque' will be viewed as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice..."^answer
• "It is time we admitted that we are not at war with 'terrorism.' We are at war with Islam. This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims, but we are absolutely at war with the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran. The only reason Muslim fundamentalism is a threat to us is because the fundamentals of Islam are a threat to us."^answer
• "Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim.^[answer
• "I think we should say we don't torture, it's illegal, there are good reasons never to do it. Yet I can well imagine an interrogator being in a situation where clearly the ethical thing to do is to make someone uncomfortable until they talk. ...if you can't imagine any situation in which depriving someone of sleep, playing loud music, water-boarding them - doing something which leaves no lasting physical damage other than making them exquisitely uncomfortable for the moment so that they talk - if you can't imagine a situation in which you'd be willing to do that or sanction that, then you're just not thinking hard enough. "^answer
• “Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe. The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow. Throughout Western Europe, Muslim immigrants show little inclination to acquire the secular and civil values of their host countries, and yet exploit these values to the utmost—demanding tolerance for their backwardness, their misogyny, their anti-Semitism, and the genocidal hatred that is regularly preached in their mosques. Political correctness and fears of racism have rendered many secular Europeans incapable of opposing the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst.”^answer
• “And one of the problems we have is that many Muslims, for understandable reasons and some for really deplorable reasons, are playing hide the ball with the articles of faith, and are eager to have the conversations of the sort you have had from a very cynical and manipulative perspective. We’re just going to keep having big families, and eventually it’s going to be Eurabia, and the war will be won. There are people who really think in those terms, and they’re not necessarily just the people in the center of the bull’s-eye of Islamic infatuation.”^answer
• "Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."^answer
• "In fact, there is a doctrine of deception within Islam called taqiyya, wherein lying to infidels has been decreed a perfectly ethical way of achieving one’s goals."^answer
• "When I search my heart, I discover that I want to keep the barbarians beyond the city walls just as much as my conservative neighbors do, and I recognize that sacrifices of my own freedom may be warranted for this purpose. I expect that epiphanies of this sort could well multiply in the coming years".^answer
• "We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come".^answer
• "It seems obvious that the misapplication of torture should be far less troubling to us than collateral damage: there are, after all, no infants interned at Guantanamo Bay, just rather scrofulous young men, many of whom were caught in the very act of trying to kill our soldiers".^answer
• "Give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root. We should not for a moment lose sight of the possibility that they would curtail our freedoms as well, if they only had the power to do so".^answer
• "It seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key—and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude:they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives."^answer
• "If you get a truly ethical despot in charge—a benevolent despot—that may be the necessary transitional mechanism to democracy. It should be pretty clear that much of the Muslim world is not ready for democracy, and we have to confront that reality. Many Muslims are prepared to tear out their freedoms by the root the moment they are given a chance to decide their destiny. How we transition to a democracy in the Middle East—a true democracy—is a very difficult problem. We should consider the examples of Muslim communities living in Western Europe, and their failure to assimilate democratic values. If ever there were a test case for how immune a community can be to the charms of democracy, just look at the Muslim communities in Holland or France or Denmark. Look at the crowds of people who want newspaper editors and cartoonists decapitated. These are people who are living in Western Europe. Many of them have lived their whole lives there."^answer
• "This is a terrible truth that we have to face: the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses that we have helped to erect. This situation must be remedied, but we cannot merely force Muslim dictators from power and open the polls. It would be like opening the polls to the Christians of the fourteenth century".^answer
• "I suspect that Muslim prosperity might even make matters worse, because the only thing that seems likely to persuade most Muslims that their worldview is problematic is the demonstrable failure of their societies. If Muslim orthodoxy were as economically and technologically viable as Western liberalism, we would probably be doomed to witness the Islamification of the earth".^answer
• "We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it." ^answer
• "[Muslims] must tolerate, advocate, and even practice ethnic profiling."^answer
• "In fact, there is a doctrine of deception within Islam called taqiyya, wherein lying to infidels has been decreed a perfectly ethical way of achieving one’s goals." ^answer

Harris claims that these quotations have been taken out of context. (We've linked them in the footnotes, you can judge for yourself.)

The poor misunderstood Sam Harris

In a post titled The saga of Slippery Sam, PZ Myers derides Harris and his acolytes, writing: "Sam Harris has an amazing talent: he can say the most awful things, and a horde of helpful apologists will rise up in righteous fury and simultaneously insist that he didn’t really say that, and yeah, he said that, but it only makes sense." Myers also observes about the constant demand for a Talmudic approach to Harris, "you must parse his words very carefully, one by one, and yet also his words must be understood in their greater context."

Glenn Greenwald, in a livestream with Kyle Kulinski, noted that Harris is one of the only public intellectuals who does not own what he says. Rather, he publishes provocatively titled articles littered with equally provocative assertions and when people criticize him for it, he then insists not only that you didn't understand what he said, you're lying about it. Harris follows that up with "clarifications" that, according to Greenwald, are comparatively banal. Given that Harris is quite intelligent and must know what he's doing, it's reasonable to consider that he may be being intentionally controversial for the publicity.

Cenk Uygur has particularly received flak for his criticism of Harris, receiving a relentless barrage of negativity on Twitter and Youtube. Harris disciples accuse Uygur of not understanding Harris or, as some sort of personal vendetta, of intentionally misrepresenting him. When Uygur received word that Harris would honestly vote for "an imbecile" like Ben Carson rather than Noam Chomsky, and that he defended Ted Cruz's preferring Christian refugees over Muslim ones from Syria, Uygur completely took off the gloves.

He denounced Harris for packaging heinous arguments as "thought experiments," focusing specifically on Harris's vile proposal mere ponderings that the West's only option against certain Islamists "may be" a nuclear first strike that would, so sadly, entail killing "millions of innocent civilians in a single day." Uygur rhetorically inquired how this thought experiment would sound if those civilians were in the State of Florida or the city of Tel Aviv. After showing the moral depravity of Harris's "non-endorsement" of such a position, Uygur addressed the Harris fans who contact him every time he covers Harris and his views:

“Even though I’ve given you full context, tell me how the beloved Dr. Harris is once again misrepresented by his own words, and misunderstood by feeble minds like Noam Chomsky.”

Bibliography

• The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004). ISBN 0-393-03515-8
• Letter to a Christian Nation (2006). ISBN 0-307-26577-3
• The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010). ISBN 978-1-4391-7121-9
• Lying (2011) ISBN 978-1940051000
• Free Will (2012). ISBN 978-1451683400
• Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014) ISBN 978-1451636017
• Islam and the Future of Tolerance (2015) ISBN 978-0674088702

External links

• Sam Harris homepage
• Sam Harris quotes