Sam Harris: The Truthdig Interview

[galtgulch]

Although Sam Harris is not an Objectivist he does have an appealing writing style and has drawn attention to the dark side of religious faith in all religions.

If you click on the word Interviews at the top of the page above his name you will find a lengthy list of interviews one of which is with Christopher Hitchens who is also delightful to ponder.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200604...rris_interview/

Enjoy!

gulch

[Ed Hudgins]

FYI - Here my review of Harris's books The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--1914-Feisty_sam.aspx

[Chris Grieb]

Ed; Thanks for reminding the OL readers of the reviews and other good work from the Atlas Society. I appreciate the work the Atlas Society does.

[Ross Barlow]

Gulch, thanks for linking this great interview with Sam Harris after *The End of Faith* came out:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200604...rris_interview/

Very, very good reading.

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Ed, thanks for writing and linking your own extremely fine review of Harris’s work:

Ed Hudgins’s review: “From Faith to Force” (this title referring of course to a great Ayn Rand essay of 1960, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World.”):

http://www.objectivistcenter.org/cth--1914-Feisty_sam.aspx

Excellent

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I had first read *The End of Faith* in the winter of 2005-06 while convalescing after quitting teaching and preparing to move to Thailand. I first heard of Sam Harris and this book on an e-list dedicated to the academic study of Buddhism, where it was favorably reviewed. I reviewed it for another libertarian-objectivist e-list soon after, but evidently I did not review it on OL (or at least I cannot find it here in the archives).

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I just found the Vintage paperback edition (2008) of Harris’s short *Letter to a Christian Nation* in a Bangkok bookstore yesterday and read it in a few hours last night. Wow! This newer paperback edition includes a new Afterward that is also very powerful.

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Harris, like Rand, does not compromise, and he takes names and kicks ass. They both criticize those “moderates” who are accommodating to blind Faith. Faith = a lie to oneself. Harris reminds me a lot of Voltaire – although Voltaire always claimed to remain a “deist” – because Voltaire’s words cut like a well-honed knife through the orthodox religious bullshit of his day, and they were concise and beautifully crafted thrusts to the heart of irrationality. Harris can really write, and he is a joy to read.

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I highly recommend both of these books by Harris. In the case of both books, it seems that the later paperback editions have additional material that makes for a very good addition.

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A very gratifying thing to see in Harris’s *Letter to a Christian Nation* was a mention of our own George H. Smith’s classic *Atheism: The Case Against God* at the back of the book in his page listing “Ten Books I Recommend.” I think George’s work was ignored in Harris’s first book, so I am glad to see it here even though it is number 10 on the list. The anathema of its mentions of Ayn Rand probably condemned it to that rank, but it is an indispensible modern pillar of freethinking. Harris is not an Objectivist, but he is not too far away.

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On a personal note, I want to comment on Harris’s mentions of Buddhism (a specialty of mine, in a way). In *The End of Faith,* he suggests that scientists should investigate such things as meditation. He is interested as a neuroscientist and sees it as a kind of technology of the mind, a therapy if you will (and as I see as the Buddha’s original intent). In this first book, Harris is rather kind overall to Buddhism as compared to other religious traditions. But in the Truthdig interview linked above, he states that 99% of the world’s Buddhists are living it like it is a regular dogmatic religion, and I agree with him mostly on this point.

Also, in his *Letter to a Christian Nation* he lists the Sinhalese Buddhist majority in Sri Lanka as among the list of unholy religious killers elsewhere – and he is right to do so because some of the Sri Lankan Buddhists are a gross anomaly and have become (almost, not quite) a mirror image of their terrorist separatist adversaries, the minority Hindu Tamil Tigers who long ago taught the world much about the use of suicide bombings. Many of the Sinhalese Buddhists in Sri Lanka are true reactionaries and are reacting fiercely to centuries of brutal oppression, first by the Portuguese (who almost wiped Buddhism out there) and later by the British (who put the Tamil minority in the best civil service posts), and they are so angered by the constant Tamil separatist atrocities that they have resorted to inflicting their own versions of brutality when striking back. Many of these monks are the most warlike Buddhists that I have seen in my own lifetime, and they do not fit the general historical behavioral profile.

Years ago, while participating on a Theravadin Buddhist e-list, I was very much tempted to post a photo of a very famous contemporary Sinhalese Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka, but I didn’t post it because I didn’t feel like getting into a fight at the time. The photo was remarkable, as it showed what looked like an extremely angry and seemingly wildly psyched-out individual, and its expression didn’t exemplify any of the usual emotions people usually associate with Theravadin monks. Calm, equanimity and compassion are the expected norm but were eclipsed here. This was the photo of an angry religious-political fanatic, and it was shocking to see. Without knowing anything about this monk, I could easily see that he was a deeply disturbed individual, consumed by confrontation, hate and anger. It was just so obvious. If you saw a man on the street looking at you like this, you would step wide of him to avoid attack. What I originally wanted to post to that list was this photo along with the question: “What is wrong with this picture?” And by that I meant, “Is this a good example of Buddhist emotional expression?” I later found out that this monk was a major Sinhalese nationalist who urged the Sri Lankan military on in the most aggressive attacks on the Tamil Tigers and the Tamil people. He soon went on a diplomatic mission of some kind to Russia, and he died of a heart attack there. As he was not an old man, many of his followers suggested a conspiracy theory involving a murder plot. But to me, his photo (supplemented by later reading his emotional and angry speeches) pointed to an extremely agitated individual who was just asking for an early natural death by stroke or heart attack. What in the hell happened to the monkhood in Sri Lanka?

So, all in all, I agree with what I’ve read so far about Harris’s thoughts on Buddhism.

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Harris’s critiques of Christianity are right on. He concisely points out some of the Bible’s gross contradictions as well as its atrocious moral ideas. His evaluations of Islam and extreme Judaism are also well-balanced and equally deadly. I agree with what he says in the Truthdig interview, that in order to defeat an irrational ideology the best method is often to “embarrass” it and reduce its essence to public mockery.

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-Ross Barlow.

[Michelle]

It is interesting to me how people keep putting him in the same league as Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins. The man is clearly not an atheist. He believes in reincarnation, for goodness' sake!

[kiaer.ts]

It is interesting to me how people keep putting him in the same league as Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins. The man is clearly not an atheist. He believes in reincarnation, for goodness' sake!

Do you mean Ed Harris, the actor? I had never read anything by Sam Harris indicating a belief in reincarnation.

[Michelle]

It is interesting to me how people keep putting him in the same league as Hitchens, Dennett, and Dawkins. The man is clearly not an atheist. He believes in reincarnation, for goodness' sake!

Do you mean Ed Harris, the actor? I had never read anything by Sam Harris indicating a belief in reincarnation.

Not clearly or consistently.

In interviews, he states that there is evidence for it.

He downplays the Eastern mysticism/ESP stuff on his website:

"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 data."

No surprise, though. Haven't you read The End of Faith, and the section where he talks about the superiority of Eastern religion?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I just now moved this over the Living Room. Like another recent topic I moved, it was in a strange place...

Michael

[Selene]

While Harris claims in his books that the world is crazed by religion and that it is time to stop believing in anything not grounded in evidence, it seems Harris is not without his own unorthodox beliefs in the supernatural.

Gorenfeld, who has read Harris' books and interviewed the celebrity atheist, reports

the author believes in reincarnation and psychic phenomena.

What's the evidence for reincarnation?

"When a kid starts speaking Bengali, we have no idea scientifically what's going on," explains Harris.

How about psychic phenomena?

"There seems to be a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream science."

He is particularly struck by a study of renowned sitarist Ravi Shankar, which concludes he was born with a birthmark in the very place where he was knifed to death in his past life at the age of 2.

"Either he is a victim of truly elaborate fraud, or something interesting is going on," says Harris. "Most scientists would say this doesn't happen. Most would say that if it does happen, it's a case of fraud. … It's hard to see why anyone would be perpetrating a fraud."

I think it was the Italian philosopher Umberto Eco who said: "When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: They believe in everything."

Harris is living proof of this statement.

http://atheismsucks.blogspot.com/2007/01/sam-harris-believes-in-reincarnation.html

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