Best of Sam Harris Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks Part 1

it's true that some people define God as pure consciousness or as being synonymous with the laws of nature but if we talk about consciousness and the laws of nature we won't be talking about the God but most of our neighbors believe in which is a personal God who hears our prayers and occasionally answers them so I just want you to be sensitive to this because if Michael or I say something derogatory about Islam or Christianity which seems possible the response from the other side shouldn't mention quantum mechanics and it shouldn't reference a notion of God that is so denuded of doctrine as to more or less be synonymous with pure mystery or pure information or pure energy or pure anything so I just want I wanted to plant a flag there where you all can see it because because the God that our neighbors believe in is essentially an invisible person is a creator deity who created the universe to have a relationship with one species of primate lucky us and and he's got he's got galaxies upon galaxies to attend to but he's especially concerned with what we do and he's especially concerned with what we do while naked and he almost certainly disapproves of homosexuality and he's created this cosmos as a vast laboratory in which to test our powers of credulity and the test is this can you believe in this God on bad evidence which is to say on faith and if you can you will win an eternity of happiness after you die and it's precisely this sort of God and this sort of scheme that you must believe in if you're going to have a any kind of future in politics in this country no matter what your gifts may be you could be you could be an unprecedented genius you could look like George Clooney you could have a billion dollars and you could have the social skills of Oprah and you are going nowhere in politics in this country unless you believe in that sort of God I'd like to take a moment as many people have to just acknowledge the void that is left by the death of our friend hitch while it might be possible to guess what he would have thought about a number of the top is raised here it's almost impossible to imagine how well he would have expressed those thoughts with a man had more wit and style and substance than a few civilizations I could name many people claimed to find it impossible to believe or to imagine that they won't exist after death just try it for a second you imagine that everyone in Paris right now is getting along fine without all of us none of us are in Paris we are really really materially absent from whatever is going on in every other city on this planet right now you were absent for all of human history before your birth the idea that you that you simply can't imagine not existing after death is really kind of just for lack of trying I think the deeper point here and this is where the whole style and content of what you're saying is so deeply unscientific is that there's not that there's not a physicist sitting on this stage right now okay I would never be tempted to lecture a roomful of a thousand people at Caltech about physics I'm not a physicist you're not a physicist and and and basically every sentence demonstrates that that you speak on the subject now to not believe in God is to know that it falls to us to make the world a better place and we have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism it's not it's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world it is hard work to climb down out of the trees walk upright and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that's made of rocks and sticks and fur and this is this is this is a project and progress is difficult but just just picture going back a hundred generations within your own family but just picture picture it kind of mapped on to this room maybe this this front row just people your father's fathers mothers fathers mothers fathers fathers on back I don't care how cultured you are what how well educated your family you can be Matthew Chapman whose great-great-grandfather was Charles Darwin but if you just keep going in no more than 100 conversations you were going to meet someone who thinks that sacrificing your firstborn child just might be a good way to control the weather it is some of you probably don't have to go back quite that far you just have to go in for Christmas okay if you're going to say that that nonlocality is it is an operable principle in neuroscience that is woo right now in fact that is thirteen supalen morphogenesis and differentiation it's a principle in the workings of the pacemaker of your heart with a hundred it's basically the cells to fire simultaneously she's not on locally Asura saying it louder and and relentlessly it's not going to make it true the great irony of the popular conception of science science as arrogant is that when you go to a scientific meeting you you know you don't see arrogance I'm here at your best likely to see real arrogance as you're likely to see nudity at a scientific conference I mean this is this is people are constantly offering caveats and hedges toward what they say that every every statement is couched in I'm sure there's someone in the room who knows more about this than me but because everyone is desperate to avoid public embarrassment and this seems to be something you are not okay just that just think about the Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up convinced that they are agents of God's will there is absolutely nothing that dr. Craig can say against their behavior in moral terms apart from his own faith-based claim that they're praying to the wrong God if they had the right God what they were doing would be good on divine command theory now I'm obviously not saying that all the dr. Craig are all religious people are psychopaths and psychotics but this to me is the true horror of religion it allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own okay if you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that's saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is going to turn them into the body of Elvis Presley okay you have lost your mind okay but if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus you're just a Catholic I think you've put enough on the table that okay none of those are scientific evidence as many of them as many of those claims trespass upon the territory of science overtly the claim about you are understanding other human beings being suggestive of a divine artificer it's that scientific claim absolutely expanding of mathematics also suggestive of a divine artifice right now it has to do with my experience your ability to learn language you understand it has to do with my experience of you when I'm looking at you right now you may assume that what I see is a material but that's not what I see and it's not what I believe and I think I understand it's not what you there's something in you that is more than you believe I really think so this is how you want if you want to make that if you want to make that a scientific claim you can but I'm telling you it's a metaphysical claim and to confuse the two is a mistake okay you can add any metaphysics you want thank you baby in that by that means I mean I can say you know I see you as reincarnate personality and I think you were probably resuming fame on Atlantis yes tell me I'm like a washerwoman and people people said do this all the time I mean you can broad kami this is this is constrained by our common sense in every other domain of discourse we're just taking for example the people who think Elvis is still alive okay well what's wrong with this claim I mean why is this claim not vitiating our academic departments and corporations I mean I'll tell you why and it's very simple we have not passed laws against believing Elvis is still alive it just is the problem is that whenever somebody seriously represents his believes that Elvis is still alive in a conversation on a first date at a lecture job interview he immediately pays a price he pays a price in ill-concealed laughter right now surely you can agree with that that is a good thing now he can then he could rattle on about this is not a scientific claim this is a matter of phase you know when I look at you I see you might be Elvis at me

Channel: Agatan Foundation

Views: 1,969,289

Rating: 4.8224578 out of 5

Keywords: Best, of, Sam, Harris, Amazing, Arguments, And, Delivery, Sam Harris (Author), Atheism (Religion), Atheist (Religion), Antitheism (Literature Subject), Debate (Quotation Subject), Religion (Literary Genre), Philosophy (Professional Field), argument, funny, Science (Literary Genre), great, nice, cool, Good, Fun, debate, comeback, answer, Christopher Hitchens (Author), anti-theist, anti, theist, clever, intelligent, bright, smart, part, one

Id: IWJfdRpHWuk

Length: 10min 38sec (638 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 11 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/shway250]

Boy, he really tears into Deepak Chopra

[u/codysattva]

It's comforting for me to know that there is someone out there with his eloquence, poise, and intelligence that is willing to stand up for logic and reason. Very comforting indeed.

[u/Null_Fawkes]

You know, I'm not a native speaker. The first time a saw the last debate on the video I though he was talking about "elves".
I think it was better that way.

[u/Che_Niko]

I enjoyed this, I always find myself saying to my friends that the need for religion is gone, a new era is upon us where science leads the way, and we should embrace it with the same enthusiasms and fanaticism that we did with religion, especially because science is fact based and it makes sense in every conversation we can have and in explaining and allowing the world to function as it is today, to conquer what we have conquered, to do what we have done, to develop as we have developed. Imagine how much much much more we could do as a species if we found it in ourselves to finally move forward with unified progress, determination and innovation that only science can bring?

[u/LIGHTNlNG]

What comeback? barely anyone else is talking in the video.

[u/[deleted]]

I know I'll be downvoted to hell for this, but I don't understand why so many of you feel that everyone should conform to one uniform cultural perspective. We all have contrasting principles, and that's what makes us human. I see so many of you who sound so stilted and bombastic, all in the name of regulating this explicit mentality to which all must yield, otherwise they'll be viewed as subordinates to you. The extent to which some of you generalize entire groups is asinine and ignorant. Just quit with the pretense and open your minds a bit.

[u/white_bread]

I always feel like there's a conflation between religious believes, which are sometimes extreme, and spiritual philosophies. It's so easy to point out the ridiculous antiquated concepts of how a group of people thought we should live a few thousand years ago—as written in the Bible. My cell phone from the 90s already seems like a joke so there's just no reason that the rule book from 20 centuries ago would hold true. However, when you debate a spiritual teacher trying to help people grasp the feeling of their own higher consciousness but pepper in antidotes of profoundly confused people who are so self identified with their own thoughts that they feel the need to kill another person to maintain their "rightness" is just stupid. These are two completely different spiritual paths.

If you want to debate the shit out of Christian Fundamentalists who are trying to petition the laws to conform to their beliefs please be my guest but taking that same vitriol to someone who teaches enlightenment is ironically just as egoic and annoying as the fundamentalists.

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Here is a list of video links collected from comments that redditors have made in response to this submission:

Source Comment	Score	Video Link
anomoly	19	The Future of God Debate Sam Harris and Michael Shermer vs Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston
dogamusprime	8	Alan Watts - What happens after Death Lecture
xhaereticusx	5	Deepak Chopra Gets Owned.
dancingapple	3	Sam Harris - It Is Always Now
I_HOPE_YOU_ALL_DIE	1	official Is God Necessary for Morality? - William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan Discuss
I_HOPE_YOU_ALL_DIE	1	The God Debate II: Harris vs. Craig
Dampwaffles11	0	The Truth About Muhammad - Robert Spencer
Dampwaffles11	0	islam penalty for apostasy

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[u/scouse_till_idie]

so fucking euphoric right now