Free Thinking

A new interview with Sam Harris was posted up at TruthDig a few days ago. There's not a whole lot new as much of it is a rehash of the ideas in his book The End of Faith. But his majors ideas are elucidated.

But perhaps the most central thesis of your book, the attack on irrational faith itself, doesn’t that offend people on both sides of the political spectrum?

The most controversial aspect of my book has been this criticism I make of religious moderates. Most people think that while religious extremism is problematic and polarizing, religious tolerance is entirely blameless and is the remedy for all that ails us on this front.

But religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.

You also say religious moderation closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to spirituality, ethics and the building of strong communities. What did you mean by that?

Religious moderation is just a cherry-picking of scripture, ultimately. It is just diluted Iron Age philosophy. It isn’t a 21st century approach to talking about the contemplative life, or spiritual experience, or ethical norms, or those features that keep communities strong and healthy.

Religious moderation is a relaxation of the standards of adherence to ancient taboos and superstitions. That’s really all it is. Moderate Christians have agreed not to read the bible literally, and not read certain sections of it at all, and then they come away with a much more progressive, tolerant and ecumenical version of Christianity. They just pay attention to Jesus when he’s sermonizing on the Mount, and claim that is the true Christianity. Well that’s not the true Christianity. It’s a selective reading of certain aspects of Christianity. The other face of Christianity is always waiting in the book to be resurrected. You can find the Jesus of Second Thessalonians who’s going to come back and hurl sinners into the pit. This is the Jesus being celebrated in the Left Behind novels. This is the Jesus that half the American population is expecting to see come down out of the clouds.

One of the most persistent criticisms of your theory is that the two largest genocides of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges, were explicitly irreligious. How do you respond to that?

The problem that I am confronting is the problem of dogma. What you have just done is to point to political dogmatism, instead of religious dogmatism. The argument against religious dogma is not an argument for atheist dogma. We should be fundamentally hostile to claims to certainty that are not backed up by evidence and argument. And what we find with Nazism is a kind of political religion. We find this with Stalinism as well—where claims about racial purity and the march of history and the dangers of intellectualism, are made in a fanatical and rigid and indefensible way. The people at the top of these hierarchies—Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung in North Korea —these were not the kings of reason. These were highly peculiar individuals who had all kinds of strange convictions. The upper echelons of the Third Reich were filled with people who believed crazy things, like that the Aryans had been preserved in ice since the beginning of the world. Heinrich Himmler created a meteorological division of the Reich to test this ice theory. This is not what people do when they reason too carefully, or become too unwilling to accept mythology as fact. It’s another kind of mythology, and one that is no less dangerous than religious mythology.

He also revealed his future endeavors.

Are you interested in joining or leading organizations that push for this kind of revolution of belief?

I’m actually in the process of creating a foundation for this purpose. It is going to produce media events, documentaries, conferences, and other means of waging this war of ideas. It’s not something I’ve formally announced yet, but I’m going to look to bring in the most motivated and articulate scientists, journalists, entertainers, and business people around the issue of eroding the prestige of religious dogma in our world. We will be taking on specific projects: for example, empowering secularists in the Muslim world, or empowering the women of the Muslim world. To some degree the organization will take on projects of its own, but it will also find projects that other people are doing that are worth supporting. I think the time is right for it.

What stage are you at with that?

At the moment I’m just drawing up a prospectus, creating a 501c3, meeting with people, and putting out feelers for who will be on the advisory board. So it’s in the earliest stages. But I hope that by the end of the year, I will be in a position to announce the birth of the organization.

What other projects are you working on?

I’ve got a book coming out around Thanksgiving, by Knopf, entitled “Letter to a Christian Nation.” It’s going to be a short broadside against fundamentalist Christianity. It’s a book that a person could simply hand to a member of the religious Right and say, “What’s your answer to this?” It will be my best effort to arm progressives and secularists against the religious certainties of Christian fundamentalists—in about a hundred pages.

Along these same godless/freethought line, I urge folks to check out this collection of freethought media. It includes audio & video clips from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, et al.

And here's some links to more media (thanks to The Atheist Jew):

Penn & Teller: The Bible Is Crap
Penn & Teller: Creationism
The Root of All Evil? 1 (Richard Dawkins documentary)
The Root of All Evil? 2