Sam harris: End of Faith

in exit surveys the number one issue on voters Minds in the 2004 election was moral values next neuroscientist Sam Harris takes a critical look at the role of religion in public life in his new book the end of faith religion terror and the future of reason this talk as an hour-and-a-half Sam Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University he has studied both both Eastern and Western religious traditions along with a variety of spiritual disciplines for 20 years he is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience studying the brain as the basis of belief disbelief and uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging and of course he is the author of the end of faith religion terror and the future of Reason several foreign editions of his book are currently in the process of being published a quote from the New York Times Book Review the end of faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religions so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it vindicated almost personally understood harris writes what a sizable number of us think but few were willing to say in contemporary american this is an important book on a topic that for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason it is my great pleasure on behalf of the irvine united Congregational Church and university synagogue to present sam harris well thank you all for coming first of all and thank you to Rabbi raucous and the IECC and the University Senate God for inviting me it's it is really a pleasure to get a chance to speak with you a surprising pleasure given the radical nature of my critique of faith I was not expecting to give talks in synagogues quite frankly so hopefully over the next hour I can give you something to think about that is in fact worth thinking about of course this is often easier said than done and we can we can have a discussion I will at the end take questions as rabbi Rocco said so if I've said anything that is just too troublesome or too stupid for words you'll get a chance to take me up on it and I look forward to that also as you mentioned this is being taped by c-span so if things break down horribly for us we will have a record of just what not to say to a congregation of Jews and Christians in Orange County now the problem I want to talk about tonight is the problem of belief what does it mean to believe we we use this word all the time and I think behind it lurks some really extraordinary taboos and confusions what I want to argue tonight is that how we talk about belief how we fail to criticize or criticize the beliefs of others has more importance to us personally more consequence to us personally and to civilization than perhaps anything else that is in our power to influence so what is belief what beliefs are representations of the world clearly their mental representations of the world but they're not only that a belief is a representation of the world which is taken to actually represent the world which is is taken to be true this is what separates beliefs from suspicions or hopes this is why beliefs can really guide our behavior you know we all believe that we were meeting here for a talk at 7:30 tonight anyone who thought that talk was cut was going to start at 8:00 we'll be wandering through the door in a few minutes beliefs organize our behavior just imagine the change in you neurologically that would occur if you came to believe suddenly that this building was about to collapse you know someone mere words someone would just come into the door and say run for your lives and if he if he looked like a plausible version of a fire marshal you would have a very different state of being emotionally behaviorally so that the fact that your content to even stay seated here at the moment the rest very much on what you believe to be true about your your circumstance now I want to talk in particular about religious beliefs and this is where we may run into some difficulty because I'm going to say some very nasty things about religious belief and some of you may get offended I know you're a very reformed moderate Bunch but some of you undoubtedly will get offended I want you to notice this process the dynamics of it you know if I say something and the walls start to go up in you I want I want you to remember just what it was presumably I haven't said anything offensive yet and we're still having a conversation but as you'll see I think the conversation really is the issue and what prevents it what derails it is really the challenge for us for us to specify as a species really now there's a taboo here that has already begun casting its shadow over our conversation and I want to make it explicit before violating it it is taboo in our society to criticize a person's religious faith I know may you two fundamentalists complain a lot about having their beliefs criticized not the way I'm about to criticize them it's taboo even to notice the differences among our religions it's taboo for in for instance to even notice that certain religions lead to violence in a way that others don't certain religious doctrines promulgate violence now what I argue in my book is that these taboos are offensive deeply unreasonable but worse than that they're getting people killed and this is really my concern my concern is that our religions the diversity of our religious doctrines is going to get us killed I'm worried that that our religious discourse our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization it seems to me to be absolutely obvious that there is no future in which nuclear-armed fundamentalist regimes will live side-by-side with one another and managed to keep the missiles happily in their silos indefinitely people really believe that certain books were written by the creator of the universe given the contents of these books people really believe that death in the right circumstances is the highest good people really believe that such a death can't come soon enough for themselves and for even for their children people are really motivated by these beliefs so I wrote the end of faith because I believe that the the concessions we have all made you have all made religious moderates especially have made to faith in our discourse these concessions have rendered us powerless to really resist the the encroach of fundamentalism and therefore religious extremism and religious violence these concessions I think prevent us from ultimately protecting civilization from its genuine enemies now before I start careening into blasphemy I want to put something to the fore because you're going to lose sight of it I guarantee you I take ethics and spirituality very seriously I think ethics and spirituality are the the only game in town ultimately they lie at the core of what is most beautiful and profound and necessary in our circumstance as human beings but what I'm asking you to entertain is that there is nothing we need to believe on insufficient evidence in order to have deeply ethical and spiritual lives there's nothing that we need to believe on insufficient evidence to invoke the power of ritual to build beautiful sanctuaries to come together as communities now we're all familiar with this notion that you should respect another person's religious beliefs your neighbor has the right to believe whatever he wants to about God or the moral structure to this universe or what happens after death and you should respect these beliefs merely because he believes them because does this sound strange to anybody where else do we play by these rules when was the last time any of us was admonished to respect someone's beliefs about history or biology or geography if someone comes into this room and claims to believe with all his heart down to his toes that Tennessee is on the west coast of the United States you are under no obligation at all to respect him for it and you're certainly under no obligation to give him a job as a fighter pilot or an airline pilot now what we do in every other area of our lives is rather than expect somebody's beliefs we evaluate their reasons if a person's reasons behind his beliefs are good enough and he can articulate them you will helplessly believe what he believes that's what it is to be a rational human being beliefs are contagious if they're backed up by reasons except on matters of faith so so what is faith then now clearly we use this term in a variety of ways in at least two ways and and there there's only one sense of this term that I'm criticizing and there's a very ordinary use of faith we talk for instance of having faith in yourself you know all of us have to live our lives in the context of uncertainty and this kind of faith is it's just a positive orientation toward life you know if anyone needs a written guarantee before they get out of bed in the morning that the day is going to go well they're going to have profound difficulties living their lives so we need to be able to to work and live in the context of uncertainty and in the context of very troubling certainties like the certainty of death so there's nothing wrong with this kind of faith but this is not the faith that has given us religion the faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence religious faith is the presumption of knowledge that certain facts are true that certain books for instance were written by God or otherwise inspired by God that certain historical figures were divine or something more than human and we rely on faith only in the context of claims for which there is no sufficient sensory or logical evidence otherwise you would never think to invoke faith if you were if you are standing on the mountaintop and the voice of God is booming at you from the whirlwind when you come down from the mountain and somebody asks you why do you believe in God you are not going to invoke faith you're going to say I was there God spoke to me I heard him there is no satisfactory explanation for my experience apart from a supernatural visitation and that's what I'm calling God if your child gets cancer and the doctors say there's nothing that can be done for and you convene your church or your synagogue and you end the congregation prays over her and she gets better I can guarantee you that for the rest of your life if someone asks you why do you believe in God that is going to be the first thing that comes to mind the doctor said she was going to die we prayed over her she was healed okay that is not faith that is a reason that is an evidentiary frame of mind that is practically science it's not good science it's not a double-blind study it should be obvious to all of you that there is room for wishful thinking and sheer coincidence to intrude there but where we have reasons where we can have a even a semblance of a reason we seized upon them so one of the things I argue my book is that no one is content really to rely on faith faith simply greases the wheels of cognition in the meantime allowing us to take on board representations of the world that are presumed to actually represent the world they're presumed to be true it's presumed that Jesus really was the Son of God or that a cracker literally becomes Jesus if you say the right Latin words over it or that or that there is a God who can respond to prayer and we presume these propositions to be true in the absence of sufficient evidence now undoubtedly there are people in this room who are going to want to say that faith is something else entirely it's a an inner knowing it's a movement of the heart it is some other kind of esoteric experience what I'm arguing is that that is not what billions of people on this earth mean by faith now the faith of billions these incompatible claims about the divine origin of certain books this faith has divided our world has balkanized our world into separate moral communities Christians Muslims Jews Hindus this is a problem these are divisions in the human community over which conflict is inevitably happening either you believe Jesus was the son of God or you don't if you do if you believe that there's no path to the Father but through the son it is impossible logically impossible emotionally impossible for you to really respect the beliefs of Muslims and Jews those beliefs lead to damnation when the stakes are this high when when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do so this is why the heretic is actually far more dangerous than the child molester the heretic next door by the if he articulates his heresy stands a chance of damning the souls of your children for all time if you really believe this stuff if you really believe that a certain book was written by God it becomes quite reasonable to treat heretics very badly what do we do to child molesters we lock them up what have we what did we do to heretics for centuries we burn them alive this was reasonable given what we believed the the patriarchs of the Western tradition that the great men still taught to all college freshmen st. Thomas Aquinas st. Augustine in the in Aquinas this case he thought heretics should be killed Augustine thought they should be tortured Augustine's argument for the torture of heretics inspired the Inquisition now you may say you know we don't torture heretics anymore but we have secularism to thank for that we have centuries of secular dialogue secular politics and scientific insight we now know that you know when the crops fail it wasn't because a jealous neighbor cast a spell we know that epileptics are not possessed by demons we know this by virtue of science so centuries of secular conversation have essentially edited our faith and even the faith of fundamentalists in the West but the same is not true at the moment in the Muslim world specifically the crime of apostasy the disavowal of your religion this is still punishable by death everywhere under Islam now how often at that sanction is carried out is changes from country to country but the the fundamental problem here is that it is a normative conception under Islam that dis event the disavow of the Quran the disavowal of your religion as a Muslim is punishable by death you never hear moderate Muslims saying it isn't not even cat stevens an ex hippie rock star can tell you that it isn't this is why scarcely a sensible sound in defense of salman rushdie emerge from the Muslim world in the aftermath of Khomeini span so let's get our bearings here domestically what do our neighbors believe what do many people in this room very likely believe well 22% of Americans claim to be certain certain that Jesus is going to return to Earth sometime in the next 50 years another 22 percent believe he probably will do so this is 44 percent of the electorate this is a hundred and fifty million people in our country 150 million people believe that a historical figure who incidentally was crucified 2,000 years ago is going to come out of the sky like a superhero and wield his magic powers over the face of the earth kill all the bad people and save the day sometime in the next 50 years now this belief of course entails other beliefs it's no accident that 44% of Americans also believe that we were created from dust sometime in the last ten thousand years with no genetic precursors 44% of Americans want us to stop teaching our children about the biological fact of evolution 62% actually want us to teach creationism in schools but 44% want only creationism 44% of Americans also believe that the creator of the universe literally gave the Land of Israel to the Jews this is God as an omniscient real estate broker so one thing I argue in my book is that we are building a civilization of ignorance and it's not just that we're in danger of losing our technological edge to China or that medical research may be impeded though although those things undoubtedly are happening beliefs of this sort have geopolitical consequences 44% of Americans if they turned on their television tomorrow morning and saw that a mushroom cloud had replaced Jerusalem or New York would see a silver lining in that cloud because that cloud would be a portent that the best thing that is ever going to happen is about to happen the return of Christ and this is this is not these people elect not only elect our congressmen and our presidents they get elected as our congressmen and presidents we are not talking about the fringes of society we are we are quite literally talking about the fringes of the Oval Office it's not its present occupant so one thing I argue is that this should be terrifying to us the idea that there's only 50 years left the idea that there may only be 50 years left this is perfectly maladaptive bad ideas don't get much worse than this this is perfectly hostile to creating a sustainable future for ourselves environmentally even economically some of you probably remember that the story about James Watt Reagan's first Secretary of the Interior who said in testimony before Congress when the last tree is felled Christ will return as a Secretary of the Interior now most secularists didn't know what to make of this comment but the devout certainly did Reagan is reported to have brought Jerry Falwell into his National Security Council briefings he had Hal Lindsey a religious lunatic of the highest order lecture to the Pentagon about the the implications of Bible prophecy for nuclear war with the Soviet Union so so what is the problem with taking things on faith well there - and the first should be very obvious if faith is what hat what you have to go on if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large your beliefs are very likely to be wrong the leaves can be right or wrong if you if you believe you can fly that belief is only true if indeed you can fly somebody who thinks he can fly and is wrong about it will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world faith does not offer a strong link between our beliefs and actual states of the world and this is not an accident because it is what we rely on when no such links exist it is what we rely on when the reasons are not there when the sensory evidence is not there but there's another problem with faith and it occurs between people in between societies you see we have a choice we have two options as human beings we have a choice between conversation and war that's it conversation and violence and faith is a conversation stopper the only thing that guarantees an open ended collaboration among human beings the only thing that guarantees that this project is is truly open-ended is a willingness to have our beliefs and behaviors modified by the power of conversation it should be clear what else could do it what else could guarantee that our future together of collaboration is actually open into we have to we have a consensual space where we continually revise our our description of the world new data comes in new arguments come in now failing that when the stakes are high we just start clubbing each other over the heads if there's nothing that a devout Muslim and a devout Christian can say to one another that will put their beliefs about the world in check that will that will make them mutually susceptible to the power of conversation then when the stakes are high there is nothing to appeal to but force so now what is it that most people take on faith there really is the central claim that certain books are unique generally the claim is certain books were written or dictated by God among moderates it may be certain books may have been dictated by God more moderate still certain books were written by the wisest people who ever lived and we can't improve on them whatever the claim it leads certain books to be uniquely venerated now the question is do the contents of these books warrant this No consider it consider the Bible as a source of moral instruction that the Bible is undoubtedly a great work of literature but consider it as a moral document consider books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy and Exodus in 2nd Samuel as moral documents these are diabolical books these texts tell us to kill people for all manner of infraction to kill your children for talking back to you you kill people who work on the Sabbath you kill people who have homosexual sex men at any rate you kill people for adultery you kill people for wizardry but the list is long and preposterous now most Christians and Jews imagine that somehow these admonishments were appropriate to the time that the Canaanites were so ill behaved that that a a prescription like kill your children if they talk back to you was an improvement over the status quo this is ludicrous this is historically ludicrous at the exact same moment in history people like Mahavira the founder of Jainism in Indian religion and Buddha incidentally what they were preaching highly moral doctrines to moral Mahavira Jainism is is is a doctrine of utter non-violence his contemporary in the Old Testament Elijah was running around killing the prophets of Baal for their wayward beliefs these are different moral visions it was possible back then to realize you shouldn't kill your children for talking back to you now here I violated another taboo or that second taboo I mentioned earlier it is taboo to notice that our religions are actually different our religions are not all equally wise they're not teaching exactly the same thing on every point and where they do teach the same thing they don't teach it equally well now let's linger on this supposed length between Scripture and morality because it's often claimed that unless we think one of our books was actually written by the creator of the universe we will just be at sea morally we will be practicing cannibalism and having sex with our children there is no evidence for this but let's consider a moral question that is solved at least in the civilised world consider slavery we can all agree that slavery was an abomination Thomas Jefferson as good as that man was he would have been a better person if he had freed his slaves absolutely you anyone who thinks it's slavery in moral terms still may have something going for it has been completely marginalized in our society well what sort of instruction do we get from the Bible on the subject of slavery the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves this is true in the Old Testament this is true in the New Testament Jesus clearly expects us to keep slaves many Christians imagine that Jesus has repudiated or somehow rescinded all of Old Testament law this is untrue I can assure you that the ecclesiastics were burning heretics for centuries in Europe had read all of the New Testament they found some rationale for their actions but on the subject of slavery first Timothy 6 a New Testament it Mohnish his slaves to serve their masters well serve your serve your believing masters all the better and they thereby partake in their virtue so if we think this book was written by the creator of the universe or if we think this book is somehow even if written by men unsurpassed and unsurpassable in moral terms we should own other human beings and make them work for us the only guy only restraint that God urges upon us on this subject is not to beat them so badly that we knock out their eyes or their teeth but we can surely beat them their slaves after all we can beat it we should beat our children incidentally proverbs proverbs 23 says do not withhold correction from the child if you beat him with a rod he will not die if you beat him with a rod he will save his soul from hell now I think it should go without saying that any person in 21st century America who's beating his kids with a rod is a bad parent but if you believe this is the best book on the planet in moral terms that's the only kind of parent you should be so there's a basic problem here if we hold these books aside from the rest of the human conversation make them immune to criticism if they are uniquely wise then we are at the mercy of their contents and the problem is exquisitely acute in the Muslim world now because there really are doctrines in mainstream Islam that are incompatible with civil society specifically the doctrines of martyrdom and jihad these are deal-breakers there is no possible future in which aspiring martyrs are going to make good neighbors for us now if if you think and being moderates you're very likely to think this if you think that Muslim violence is really just a matter of politics if you think it's the product of the history of oppression and the lack of Economic Opportunity you should ask yourselves why we don't see Tibetan Buddhists suicide bombers the Tibetans have suffered an occupation every bit as brutal and far more cynical than any occupation that has been visited on the Muslim world many people believe that 1.2 1.3 million Tibetans have died as a result of the Chinese occupation we don't see throngs of Tibetans calling for the deaths of China of Chinese non-combatants we don't see Tibetan Buddhists suicide bombers blowing up Chinese children in their schools what we do see are Tibetan monks and nuns who have spent decades in Chinese prisons being tortured who come out and say things like my greatest fear while in prison was that the pain of torture would cause me to lose the strength of my compassion and I would start to hate my torturers now finally a Muslim who after decades of being tortured with an electric cattle prod in an Israeli Jail comes out speaking that way and I will eat my book I'm serious it is unthinkable given what Muslims believe now let me be very clear about this I am NOT talking about an ethnicity I'm not talking about Arabs I'm talking about the logical entailment of the doctrine of Islam I'm talking about John Walker Lindh the white guy from Marin who went to fight with the Taliban now we may question the wisdom and the desirability of the Buddhist response the this emphasis on compassion I'm absolutely open to argument on this subject and if you read my book you'll discover I'm not a pacifist but what I'm not open to argument on is this taboo that prevents us from noticing the difference between a doctrine of compassion and a doctrine of jihad the truth is in the Muslim world we even see people who haven't suffered much of anything willing to spend their lives trying to figure out how to kill as many non-combatants as possible Osama bin Laden is really the the reductio ad absurdum of any argument that suggests that you need to be insane or poor or the victim of oppression to take up jihad so this is an extraordinary circumstance wherein we we have certain religious beliefs leading to the most nihilistic violence but what what could be more nihilistic then blowing yourself up in a crowd of children and having your mother approve of it this is the situation we're in now I really want to nail this down because many of you are very likely still to believe nonono Islam is a religion of peace these are these are economic and political issues this is a result of the misadventures of American foreign policy America has a tremendous amount to apologize for in the world there is no doubt but this is a separate issue yes they're related but this is a separate issue there is no possibility that we will ever have a problem with Jain suicide bombers insofar as a Jain becomes more and more religious even more and more deranged by his religious dogmas he will become less and less violent the doctrine of Jainism is a doctrine of total pacifism Jane's drink every sip of water observant James drink every sip of water through cheesecloth so that they won't small swallow a bug they sweep the path upon which they walk so they won't step on ants they can scarcely figure out how to live in this world they're so nonviolent so if you don't think religion is the difference that makes a difference you have to explain the James so where does that leave us we have the situation where religious beliefs are inevitably dividing one community from another because they're incompatible we have religious beliefs and the sheer divisions among communities leading to violence and the most reasonable people in our societies societies in the West moderates and secularists are constrained by taboos from talking about this we have really medieval superstitions deciding social policy in 21st century America and what I argue in my book is that we cannot sufficiently criticize the encroach of medievalism and the spread of fundamentalism because of the lip service we pay to faith because of the validity we Accord it in our discourse there's no one in the White House press corps who can stand up when the president says something like we need common sense judges I'm quoting now we need common sense judges who realize that our rights are derived from God and these are the kinds of judges I plan to put on the bench okay no one in the White House press corps can stand up and say mr. president how is that any different from needing common-sense judges who understand that our rights are derived from Poseidon or Zeus okay that would be the last question that journalists ever asked and needless to say we cannot possibly elect a president who openly doubts the existence of God openly doubts the existence of a personal God who can hear our prayers who takes an interest in our affairs seventy percent of Americans believe that it is important to have a president who is strongly religious over 50% of Americans claim to find atheists highly disagreeable now I think we can all agree that if anyone was dying on account of Zeus if people were organizing their lives around different dogmas about Mount Olympus if books were being written trying to explain and constrain science in light of the Iliad and the Odyssey this would be an obscene misuse of human life it isn't but it's not like someone figured out in the third century that Zeus doesn't exist but the biblical God does that's not a discovery that anyone made this is the situation we are in people are dying for an imaginary God and we are not talking about it you can read the newspaper for a year and not be reminded that the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians is a religious conflict it is always framed as a conflict over land it is only about land because the religious beliefs are incompatible but the theological claims on the real estate are incompatible and moderates like yourselves are uniquely unable to appreciate the link between religious dogma and violence you are blinded by your own moderation when the jihadi looks into the video camera and says we love death more than the infidel loves life and then blows himself up the religious dogmatist on our side the jerry falwell z' of the world they have no problem understanding that he was being quite candid he really did have the courage of his convictions this was not propaganda he went to paradise or so he thought turns out he has the wrong religion but he was after the 72 virgins so one thing I argue in my book is that it's time we took these people at their word they're telling us what they believe and I don't know I don't know how many architects and mechanical engineers need to hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we take them at their word so what is the alternative to religious vague now there are two answers to this first the first answer is it's the wrong question to ask either God exists or he doesn't if he doesn't exist then we would be better off not believing in him and what what is the alternative to a belief in Santa Claus the answer really is nothing now it's not that a belief in Santa Claus was doing nothing for a child you know a child is entranced and consoled and interested and happy that Santa Claus exists you take the belief away you've taken something away you haven't replaced it with something but whatever conspired to make the belief untenable perhaps he saw that it was his present is his parents wrapping the presents the belief disappears and we all know that no one wants to be the last kid in class who believes in Santa Claus and imagine how untenable the position of a child would be if he if he claimed not to want to throw the baby out with the bathwater he claimed to have found a moderate position on Santa and he could keep the sleigh and the elves but but jettison the guy in the suit so the first answer to the question what are the alternatives to faith they don't have to be alternatives if these beliefs are false if they're untenable we can relinquish them as many countries in Western Europe have done only 10% of Swedes 10 to 15% are believers of the sort we recognize in the States incidentally 83% of Americans believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead not again it may seem insane it may seem counterproductive it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater to just say we can relinquish these beliefs without an alternative but let me remind you about how easy it is to see the wisdom of this when we simply change the word God to Zeus no one is feeling that we should be maybe we should hold on to Zeus you know when we woke up the day after Christmas and turned on our televisions and saw that a killing wall of water had swept multitudes off the beaches of 12 countries nobody said you know I think maybe we should be praying to Poseidon you know it's just let's just cover our bases but another way of answering this question is that yes clearly there are alternatives to faith whatever our spiritual possibilities are they have to transcend culture and tradition whatever is true ultimately transcends culture and tradition there is a very good reason why we don't talk about Christian physics or Muslim algebra though that the Christians invented physics as we know it as we know the Jews brought it to the next level but we don't talk about the cultural context in which these disciplines arose because there really is are they're there they really are legitimate domains of knowledge that transcend culture an experiment done in Los Angeles is going to work just like an experiment done in Baghdad if in fact it really is - teasing out some real truth about the nature of the world now contemplatives in a variety of religious traditions have looked in to the connection between how we use our attention and human happiness how we behave among others ethics and human happiness there's a lot of wisdom in our religious traditions on these subjects but invariably this testimony is mingled with Dogma there's no doubt that doing the jesus prayer for 18 hours a day it's going to radically transform your moment to moment experience of the world very likely for the better a christian doing this practice will interpret these changes these positive changes as a confirmation of christian dogma as a confirmation of the idea that Jesus really was the son of God for instance now it seems to me that there's a cure for this kind of provincial ISM you only have to read about the identical experiences of Hindus to realize that the the conclusion that Jesus is the Son of God is not the best interpretation of the data of your even of your own experience as a Christian so the challenge for us as I see it is to find ways about ways for talking about our deepest personal concerns about the inevitability of death about the inevitability of human suffering about whatever we can do to transcend suffering deepen communities use ritual to talk about all of this in terms that don't demand belief in anything on insufficient evidence because reason and evidence are our only link to one another a fundamental openness to evidence is the only thing that guarantees the human conversation is truly open-ended and that said I'd like to thank you for listening to my side of it thank you very much we're going to ask those who wish to ask questions to line up behind the microphone here and I'd like to begin and then Reverend Swope of IU CC will be making will be asking a question and then we really invite everyone here to comment Sam your your critique of religion was chillingly clear very precise I don't think anyone would doubt that most of it is true I was thinking that one line you used was even more provocative than your provocative title for your book you said people are dying because of a belief in an imaginary God that would have been a more provocative title for the book you spoke about religious moderates that's about as far as you took it to the left I would dare say that most of us in this room are religious liberals and and we think most of us we think of God the term God many of I don't to say most because I don't know everybody in the room but many of us think of God that term is a metaphor for a force or power inside people that lead them to goodness to being caring and loving people P as a path towards fulfillment self-actualization altruism that's how God or godliness works through us and we don't think of text as coming from God but rather being human products we're human beings wrote those texts asserting what they thought was the highest and truest in their era but for us the text raised questions not give answers we don't think of the tour is a giant Ouija board you know that we open up and has answers so my question for you is what should liberal religionists do in the face of these alarming numbers statistics you quoted about the number of religious fundamentalists and some truly scary beliefs about reality what should liberals Jews and Christians and people of other faiths do to to combat that level of what I would call spiritual ignorance it might be religious faith but it's spiritual and intellectual ignorance is on can you hear me for this one oh really what I'm arguing for I am I'm arguing for a kind of intolerance there's no way around it but it is conversational intolerance I'm arguing for new rules of conversation you know this is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag in the former Soviet Union I'm not advocating that people be jailed for believing the wrong thing about God but I'm arguing that the rules that apply in every other area of our lives apply on matters of faith imply apply on matters of spirituality and ethics and the kinds of claims people made under the aegis of religion we take one example stem-cell research now you can be a senator standing on the floor of the Senate saying things like God creates life man should not meddle in it in end of argument that's the ethical argument as I said faith is a conversation stopper as long as you don't have to give real reason and real arguments for your position then the sky's the limit you just you can stand in the way of what is undoubtedly one of the most promising lines and biology of research as far as generating medical therapies and you can stand there smugly and stupidly as a college-educated politician and undoubtedly not lose any sleep over it I mean it's not that these people are sinister they have their beliefs but their beliefs are arising in the context that is not criticizing them that is not putting him to the kind of challenges that we put beliefs in any other area of our lives it is the stem cell research conversation should go more like this we should talk about what these human embryos that will be destroyed in stem-cell research really are a human blastocyst a three-day-old embryo is a collection of 150 cells that may sound like a lot of cells there are a hundred thousand cells in the brain of apply okay we're talking about 150 cells arrange this fear without any nervous system these this collection of cells is not discernibly human in any way of part from its genome and the interests of these cells are being used to trump really the interests of little girls with diabetes and men and women with parkinson's disease people with full-body burns and a score of other scores really of other conditions that could very likely be remediated if stem cell research proceeded completely without hindrance now stem cell research is not outlawed as you know is just being impeded by lack of funding but 35 percent of Americans want it outlawed 35 percent of Americans you can raise the bar as high as you want on the side of benefit no matter what possible benefit we could get from stem cell research those are those are souls those blastocysts are fully in sold and souls our equipment so what I'm arguing is that religious moderates can't stand for this discourse and I think it's a very difficult game to play as a religious moderate because as long as you want to dignify the claim that it makes sense to organize your life around the Bible say because it really is such a good book uniquely inscribed in our tradition uniquely wise then you really have very little to very little purchase on a criticism of the people who are going to take the Bible far more literally because the Bible doesn't say don't take me literally on this God doesn't say when you get to the new world and you develop your three branches of government you can jettison all the barbarism I talked about in Leviticus thanks Sam for those of you who don't know me I'm Steve Swope pastor for the interim and Irvine United Congregational Church and and as an introduction I want to say again to Ernie that we are thrilled to continue this long relationship and particularly to be part of this discussion I would invite any of you who are interested in asking questions to begin forming a line at the microphones it looks like Arne and I are monopolizing things here but we really don't mean to Sam I appreciate the enormous amount of research and thought that you put into this project one of the things that we have been talking about at Irvine United Congregational is how we might begin really a conversation with Christians of other faiths styles of fundamentalist Christians evangelical Christians because one of the things that we discover on a regular basis as progressive liberal Christians is that we get shut down Christianity is about X it's about signing on to a list of belief statements and you don't buy the whole package and you're damned for all eternity and it seems to us that there ought to be some other way of of conceptualizing our faith but there ought to be a way to to translate progressive religious concepts into a common language and one of the things that that that I appreciate about your book in your comments is that you really throw it out there but the thing that I'm concerned about with my own experience of discussion with with fundamentalist and conservative Christians is that it's real easy to shut the dialogue off as well and and I fear that as constructive as you desire to be that the door the door would easily be closed with the kind of approach that you seem to be taking how can we maintain an openness so that we begin can begin to discuss and develop the kind of common approach that you'd like to have well I see your point I've had this attempt a dialogue that has been this book and subsequent communication about the book has demonstrated to me that yet it is a it is a challenge given how radical my criticism of faith the faith is to meet people it's not a matter of meeting people halfway I really as you see it is I really think it's an all-or-nothing game here and I think that we have 50 years - 50 years more or less to sort this out given given the spread of the weapons of mass destruction and just disruptive technology you know just just the ability to write a computer virus that confounds a country for some days you know this we are being so pressed together by technology now and this that the pace of this consolidation of our world is only increasing so I don't think we have a lot of time and I am mindful of how of the effect of my criticism on people and the truth is I think it would be a terrible thing if the President of the United States suddenly started speaking the way I speak we cannot keep it president cannot get up and say we're at war with Islam I Got News for you but we need a clear appraisal of our situation in the world and I don't hear that appraisal coming religious moderates and religious liberals and I don't see the purchase point theologically where they can stand and say listen guys you have it wrong because your interpretation is is false that that's really what it is there's nothing more sacred than the facts there's nothing more sacred than the truth and we have rival conceptions of what is true religious fundamentalists really think that God is letting people fly planes into our buildings because we're tolerating gay marriage okay so it seems to me that you to combat that you really need a place to stand where you can argue about about how unseemly that view of the world is in logical terms in factual terms and in moral terms but and this is where I think your your going and this is really where I can meet you halfway I think there is a a huge role for people who talk the talk you talk way that my language is not really fashioned for export very well and and and we need religious moderates who find some way to articulate the traditional game of religion in ways that are not offensive to reason and in ways that do not distort our social policy but it has to be much more radical than it seems to be and you know it's a real challenge I am someone who wrote this book and gives talks like this really without any hope that I'm going to make a bit of difference if it's just no I just can't these are the noises I make when I open my mouth but there's there it's not based on any expectation that it's really to change the world in any sense at all well I hope you do make a difference you mentioned that 10% of people in Sweden are believers and that the trend in Europe seems to be going in a more secular direction could you talk a little bit about why in this country the trend seems to be in the opposite direction if that's true and why why that is right well the trendy you know religiosity fundamentalist religiosity became very visible obviously in this last election but the trend has really been stable for many many years but we the Gallup polling on religious conviction in this country has really been flat for 80 years or so since they've been doing everything you ask questions like do you believe that Satan literally exists 65% of Americans say yes and that's been true you know give or take a few percentage points for four decades so the question that Sweden and Western Europe in general is interesting there are some theories about it I don't know what really explains it one one theory is that when you have state religions when you have no marketplace that it requires the competition among denominations then religion kind of gets ossified and uncharismatic and people stopped going to church whereas here we have this marketplace of religions and everyone is hanging up a shingle and then you have this vibrant ecosystem of ignorance mixed metaphors terrible thing but I'm not entirely satisfied with that hypothesis about Western Europe yeah Sam thank you for for all this Emma when you're when you're pen pals on email I basic so part of my dissertation on my essay paper on you for a secular humanist such as myself what value of any does the Bible have in our lives in my life well I think it has the same value as Shakespeare has that's not written as well well yeah parts of it are written very well it's a spear this is a line in my book but it's strange that shakes that God made Shakespeare a better writer than himself it could be a problem so yeah it's literature I would look at it as literature okay and and there's a lot of wisdom in it you know the Bible the Bible would not be the Bible it would not have influenced us as much as it has if there were nothing in there that's a moral template but I wonder if it's good template really well you take Jesus in half his moods and it's it's about as good as you get the Golden Rule and much of what was said on the Mount it's Jesus that the the literary Jesus if that was in fact the historical Jesus that there's no doubt that Jesus was a spiritual genius there's no doubt that he had realized something really profound about the link between ethics and spiritual experience but he's one of thousands this is the other thing that's quite surprising when you get into Eastern religion when you read that you're the Buddhist Canon it's just the wealth of testimony about compassion about the possibilities of ordinary people realizing the most profound insights that any mystic ever articulated this has been sketched out in the east in a way that is really quite comprehensive and and there are their shards of that in every tradition you know in Islam you have rooming the great Sufi poet who was an absolute genius and clearly seen the world with shocking clarity and occasionally mentioning the Quran or Allah as his the touchstone for his vision but it's just there's a caste of the human mind to realize deeper and redeeming truths about the present moment and every one of our religions has been the vehicle of discussing that those kinds of villas Asians but there is so much other stuff dogmatism and so many other commitments ideological commitments in these traditions that you know the pivots the babies in that bath water it's not doing too well Thanks hello thank you for coming to speak with us this evening um I have a few questions hoping you can articulate on them though I don't have a fully organized question I'm just going to kind of throw things out if that's okay and to go to well with them or my first comment or question is you mentioned that spirituality must transcend culture and you also mentioned the benefit of perhaps of community and whatnot is there a viable future for a community-based spirituality that is expressed other than a religious organization that perhaps could project a universal Maxim or whatever around the world at best achieving a universal utopia at most more realistically perhaps achieving open dialog can you think of any opportunity that would come about for that for perhaps liberal people like ourselves who are more religious persuaded and my second question is going along the idea of perhaps Eastern Buddhist philosophies being healthier or more advanced in Western giving the fact that there are some expressions of Buddhist fundamentalism that we see including patriarchy misogynistic expressions and also secular ideologies and their disruptive technology perhaps that in general they sell to religious fundamentalists so to tie things up my main question is if religion is accountable for religious fundamentalism Ken's secularism be accountable for secular ideological fundamentalism that we get perhaps in Lenin and Stalin or not season or whatever that have been responsible for so many Wars so okay I'll take your last question first and clearly I am NOT claiming that religion is the only source of violence people have killed one another for perfectly secular reasons and will continue to know that now it's often this is the challenge to my thesis is often raised that the worst offenders in the genocide game have been secular idea nazism Stalinism Communist China my pirouette on this subject is really I'm arguing against dog religion just has more than its fair share of dogma I'm arguing against unsubstantiated beliefs to which people hold in the face of any contrary evidence so taking that heuristic you look at Stalinism you see very quickly Stalinism was not a rational enterprise this is not what happens to people when they get to rational and Nazism Heinrich Himmler thought that the Aryans had descended from outer space and were preserved in ice since the beginning of time and he created a meteorological division of the Reich people look for this ice evidence these are not highly rational people the pseudoscience that was the basis of Nazism this sort of weird tweak on Darwinism and all of this all this religion really a pure-blooded German ISM and all of this was a kind of religion really it was a political religion it just did it just wasn't otherworldly and the same is true of Stalinism so one thing I say in my book is that when you see people killing mass numbers of non-combatants intentionally killing non-combatants committing genocide ask yourself what these people believe I think you will find that it is always preposterous this is this is practically a truism because there's just no good reason to kill non-combatants indiscriminately now the other issue of community and you asked about Buddhists the possibility of Buddhism or Eastern philosophy inspiring violence there's an example the kamikaze pilots were inspired by a very perverse Zen form of other worldliness and you know the Rinzai Zen masters basically signing off on their kamikaze missions so the Buddhism is not exempt and there are lots of weird stories about theocracy into pet and there are my faith is that you can put your faith in seems to me you can only put your faith in the human conversation and the question is are you going to put your faith in the 21st century human conversation are you going to get in your time machine and go back and put your faith in some other century's conversation in the 7th century if you're Muslim or the you know way back if you're a Christian or a Jew I mean really the Iron Age so it really in community if community is all we have because science is just as a complete as a communal enterprise all we have is dialogue and it seems to me that the the rules of dialogue should not change from discipline to discipline when when the truth is what's being talked about thank you for coming if you were suddenly in the position of advising the President of the United States on policy god forbid how would your positions inform what you would advise him or her to do with regard to the current status of conflict let's say in the Middle East well I've actually thought about this my visit my position really cuts across ideological lines and it's very strange for me to talk about my book in the media because you'll get on a a right-wing am talk show and everything I say about Islam they just love it you know then I turn the spotlight on Christianity and we've run completely into the ditch and I get on liberal radio and everything I say that Islam they just they just recoil at it way too politically incorrect but I turn the spotlight on Christianity and they love it so we are really quite stratified here and my argument cuts across that it's really orthogonal to right and left and I'm not a pacifist I think there really are people in this world who are beyond conversation at this point Osama bin Laden is a great example I don't think there's anything we're going to say to him that is going to basically change his orientation now what subset is to speak specifically about the war on terror and the problem the Middle East we have an issue with Islam and the West is lawmen and Jews we have an issue with with Judt the Jewish settlers the Jewish settlers their their theological claims on that real estate have to be completely repudiated by the Israeli government I mean I made a great supporter of Israel really only because of the anti-semitism of the rest of the world the only thing that that justifies the existence of Israel is the omnipresence of anti-semitism otherwise Israel it is an obnoxious idea to have a state organized around a religion so the short answer is I think that we have to one acknowledge the role that religion is playing we have to solicit the involvement of moderate Muslims wherever they exist if we if they don't exist we have to create them you know we're all very hopeful that the vast vast majority of Muslims are exquisitely moderate and and would just repudiate everything that goes on bin Laden stands for I think that's far too hopeful we have to find some way of winning a war of ideas with Islam or get or getting a subset of the Muslim world to win a war of ideas with itself and what is one thing that was incredibly clear now given that George Bush is in charge for four more years is that we cannot do this alone we have alienated even our allies so to take an example like Iraq intelligent people could disagree about whether it was the right thing to do to go into Iraq but one thing is pretty clear going in we should have gone in with everybody I mean we need a truly international effort we need to convince civilized democracies everywhere that civilization itself has genuine enemies these totalitarian theocratic tribal eruptions in many parts of the globe on a hundred crimes many most at this moment are our Mosul so it's just we need a part of the problem of part of the reason why we are so isolated from the rest of the world from our allies is our own religiosity we look incredibly retrograde from the perspective of Western Europe our air swallow allies in Western Europe we look like a deranged theocracy in the making with all the bombs we have to be terrifying to the rest of the world so until we put our own house in order it seems to me that you know we're hardly the kingdom of reason to be clubbing everyone over the head saying you can't be theocrats anymore hi thank you for being here you stated that as moderates our rationalization of the Bible is improper that we really should face the fact that that's wrong I agree with you that it's a rationalization and I agree with you that the Christians who are doing the same thing are rationalizing there are also Muslims who I've heard rationalize in the same way though I happen to dialogue with many different religions and what I find is that what moderates can do is dialogue we can dialogue by talking about the similarities in each religion the schizophrenic God that's really good and not the one that's bad right and we do look for the good in our religions we look for the similarities and that good and I think it's a binding influence and perhaps can grow do you think that maybe that kind of thing would could happen well Steve's question I think it should row it has to grow is the most likely approach given what everyone believes but I also think that it's not good enough I think it has to unwind itself ultimately because the religions are not the same really and the fundamentalists really have no reason to listen to the moderates you know the moderate discourse is not so compelling that the fundamentalists are going to wake up and say whoa they're really onto something you know that the fundamentalist read the books you know they know what's in the books it's that's that's certainly true the fundamentalists but what I'm saying is do you feel that there could be a growing movement among moderates in all the religions seeing all this bloodshed and seeing the ridiculousness of the wars one would hope yeah you know I think it's clearly moderates are better than fundamentalists and if I can wave a magic wand I think that's all moderates there's no we no hesitation it's just it's interesting to consider the example of a place like Sweden where it's beyond being moderate they're really people who are living virtually in an atheistic state and they're the most jet as far as they be their level of altruism they they are among the most generous nations in the world you know it's not like they're just holed up there and and their atheism has somehow sapped them of moral vigor and that they almost every leading indicator of the health of a nation apart from suicide incidentally and I would attribute the light up there and the cold to that but everything else literacy and infant mortality and gender issues and violent crime the top 20 atheist nations are the best on all those UN indices and the worst nations are inevitably theocracies so this idea that somehow without religious dogmatism however under Matic we we're going to lose the fiber of society or or personal morality I just think there's no evidence for that Ellen we're going to give you the last question but there will be time at the reception afterwards for people to come up informally and speak to mr. Harris Sam you've been talking about the book and talking about others how about yourself okay what's your background and what brought you to this topic and why the interest in this topic well the topic I literally started writing this book on September 12 2001 it was my immediate reaction to that event it just so happened I had been spending a lot of time studying religion and studying the what seemed to me to be the rational alternatives to stay I was very interested in meditation and that interest brought me into neuroscience and I'm now studying the brain basis of belief I'm looking for the difference in a brain in a in a living human being we do this what's called functional MRI the difference between a person who believes and disbelieves a proposition irrespective of what that proposition is whether it's religious whether it's math and so I'm very interested in just what belief is at the level of the brain okay so before 9/11 or did you have a belief system did you have faith you know did you have religion were you involved in religion and at what level and then did you change prior to that and then all of a sudden 9/11 really put you over the edge that's my question is what happened before that okay well I was raised in a very secular household my mother gave me a choice at the age of 10 Sam do you want to go to Sunday school like your friends and I said no and that was basically sealed my fate as far as the environment so it was concerned but I've I have been all I've been interested in religion from you know my my teenage years and got very into Buddhism and Hindu meditation at a certain point made many trips to India and Nepal and spent probably two years on silent meditation retreats just well you just meditate you do nothing but meditate for 12 18 hours a day so I the concerns of the faithful and a seekers of spiritual experience are really well known to me that not so much in a Jewish context but I you know I had various points I was at a dogmatic Buddhist and a dogmatic Hindu believing all manner of nonsense really from my point of view now but this is not to say that I think we have all the mystery solved their fundamental mysteries about the nature of this you and I am quite open to the data I've been pilloried by atheists for a few footnotes in my book that declare an open-mindedness to data on psychic phenomenon and and other spooky things that most scientists don't want to touch but there is data there and it seems to me that we just can't close our accounts as James said with reality until we we fully fit all the data so I recognize here's a question thank you it's not too late for that bar mitzvah Sam there what there was there was a young woman standing behind Ellen and I and I would like to ask her to come up again give her the last question all right so because she was patiently waiting I have two questions for you one for my friend and one for me um based on your statistics about voting for a president because of religion do you think that we are violating the law of the separation of church and state no I don't think we're violating the law but I just don't think the law is good enough I think the thing felishj is more powerful and inevitable than any law is going to protect us from if people really believed that God wrote one of our books and people really believed that that for instance God hates homosexuals they're going to find some way to conform our policies and our laws to that even if we have the First Amendment saying you you can't respect you can't establish a law respecting any one religion okay and my second question do you think that the facts that we have in the Bible about events are coincidences or modify beliefs Oh would you repeat that do you think that the facts that we have in the Bible about events are coincidences or modified beliefs the facts in the Bible I don't know no I I wasn't being catty the event the events in the Bible well I you know undoubtedly some of the Bible is is history you know or I would expect that some of it has actually happened there there are other texts that it corroborates claims in the Bible much of it is is probably a novel like like any other novel and it's some writer sat down and said wouldn't be wouldn't it be nice this happens so and it's difficult to tell the difference at this distance we know it when you when you study how the Bible actually became the Bible and how certain books were included and others thrown out and certain certain books in there for hundreds of years and then thrown out with the Bible is this grab bag of ancient text that that how anyone can read about is composition and think that it probably is perfect and every syllable that that's that's quite a stretch so thank you very much - thank you thank you very much on behalf of rabbi rock listen the people of both of our congregations Sam thank you very much I would invite all of you to a reception in the synagogue social hall the end of faith is published by WW Norton & Company visit wwm for more information

Channel: TheEthanwashere

Views: 258,162

Rating: 4.7074723 out of 5

Keywords: 185448, MP4, STD, 01, mp4, end, of, faith, sam, harris, ben, stiller, new, atheism, christopher, hitchens, religion, totalitarianism, islam

Id: sQuDWt9qmBs

Length: 93min 20sec (5600 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 16 2013