Sam Harris: On Interpreting Scripture

well this is a common criticism the idea that the atheist is guilty of a literalist reading of Scripture no better than the reading of fundamentalists it's a very naive way of approaching religion and there's a far more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion on offer and the atheist is disregarding that few problems with this first is anyone making that argument is is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally I mean whether they're selectively literalists or literal all the way down the line there is a there are certain passages in these in scripture that just cannot be read figuratively and people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books so you know the Quran says hate the infidel and Muslims hate the infidel because the Quran spells it out ad nauseam now it's true that you can cherry-pick scripture and you can look for all the good parts you can ignore where it says in Leviticus that if a woman is not a virgin on our wedding night you're supposed to stone her to death on her father's doorstep you can ignore that and now to my knowledge all Jews and Christians do ignore that in fact that's not true there's some Christians who actually do you know reconstructionist Christians dominionist Christians in the u.s. who will say you know I think the the penalty for adultery should be death I mean so they're people who are have the courage of their convictions there but most of us most religious people ignore those pastors which really can only be read literally and say that oh they were only appropriate for the time and they don't don't apply now and likewise Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war they said well these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting but now we don't have to fight those battles this is all a good thing but we should recognize what is what's it what's happening here people are feeling pressure from a host of all two human concerns that have nothing in principle to do with God I mean secularism and human rights and democracy and scientific progress these have made certain passages in Scripture untenable okay so this is coming from outside religion and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in kind of grappling with these with these pressures once again this is this is a an example of religion losing the argument with modernity it's an example of you know the recent shooting at Virginia Tech the mother of this the shooter recognized that there was something wrong with her son you know he's suffering from some kind of mental problem in the context of her rather doctrinaire Christianity she did not take him to a psychiatrist she took him from church to church in search of exorcism she actually found a church that performed an exorcism maybe that would just picture this there's some you know we have a an atrocity in the making we have a dangerously mentally ill college student we have a concerned mother whose world view about mental health is trimmed down through the the the keyhole of a kind of medieval Christianity and we have a church willing to put forward its expertise in the performance of an exorcism it would be a lot better if everyone involved had a 21st century view of mental health no one is really true Christians and Jews and Muslims have to look at this situation and say well there's something wrong here it'd be better to go to a psychiatrist but the problem is you can't show what's wrong in terms of Scripture you can't show what's wrong in terms of religion because in terms of religion the the mother was right I mean they're either there are demons and Jesus cast them out you know I mean it demonic possession is actually a problem the only reason why we're we we don't take it seriously is because we have a wider view of the universe the university that view of the universe did not come to from religion too came from science let's just grant the possibility that there there is a Creator God who's omniscient who occasionally authors books and he's going to give us a book the most useful book he's of loving God he's a compassionate God and he's going to give us a guide to life he's got a scribe the scribes going to write it down what's going to be in that book I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity I mean there is not a single line in the Bible of the Quran that could not have been authored by a 1st century person I mean there's not there's not one one reference to anything they're they're pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals and keep slaves and who to kill and why there's nothing about electricity there's nothing about DNA there's nothing about how do infectious disease the principles of infectious disease there there's there's nothing particularly useful and there's a lot of Iron Age barbarism in there and superstition this does not mean this is not a candidate book if I can go into a to any Barnes and Noble blindfolded and pull a book off a shelf which is going to have more relevance more wisdom for the 21st century than the Bible or the Quran it's R it's really not an exaggeration it's every one of our specific Sciences has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture from from cosmology to psychology to economics we know more about ourselves than anyone writing the Bible or the Quran did and that is a distinctly inconvenient fact for the the for anyone wanting to believe that this book was was dictated by the creator of the universe you

Channel: Big Think

Views: 416,180

Rating: 4.7572546 out of 5

Keywords: bigthink, Big Think, BigThink, BigThink.com, Sam Harris, interpreting, scripture, God, atheist, author, religion, literalist, Koran, Muslim, Leviticus, Judaism, Christianity, Christian, adultery, holy war, Mohammed, secularism, human rights, democracy, scientific progress, church, exorcism, Virginia Tech shooting, mental health, demonic possession, superstition, Bible, 21st century, cosmology, psychology, economics

Id: 8zV3vIXZ-1Y

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 07 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/OhTheHueManatee]

I kind of get not mentioning things that apply to the thousands of years in the future. Even things like infections diseases would cause panic back then. What really shows me that it wasn't made by a loving God is not mentioning things like washing your hands, boiling water or basic hygiene and first aid. How much suffering would've been stopped by telling people how to brush their teeth? Or maybe "Blood Moons and Eclipses are neat looking normal things but don't actually make any difference to your life on Earth, so long as you don't look directly at an Eclipse."

[u/moschles]

Sam Harris scratches the surface. Not a single event in the Bible took place outside this little 200 Kilometer circle centered around Jerusalem.

The Bible doesn't even mention the North or South American continents. During the colonization of the Incan empire by Spain, the missionary priests of the time wrote extensively about how or why those continents were not mentioned by the Bible and were somehow not known to the Europeans. When you read these missionaries, you get a palpable sense that this "issue" of the New World deeply bothered them.

(Continuing with this rant)

In 1869, AD, nobody on earth knew what the Sun was made out of.

As late as 1940, nobody had any idea of the existence of DNA. Most biologists of that time were rather convinced that genes were transmitted and stored by some kind of protein.

[u/neonrideraryeh]

By claiming these poorly written and corrupt books as the word of their god, who is supposedly omniscient and good, they are insulting their god way more than any of us could even try. The very act of assuming an all-powerful being would bother to come down and make a bunch of arbitrary rules, be insecure enough to demand worship despite being powerful and produce books full of bronze age rubbish with no actual relevance to the future that is filled with all kinds of weird stuff, is to insult their deity far more than an atheist could. Their own claims about their god is more disrespectful to their god than anything else we could say, which is pretty funny.

[u/ccaitgames]

My family is super religious and I’ve often argued this point, among other things such as:

-the Bible doesn’t acknowledge other peoples outside the geographic regions aforementioned.

-the Bible focuses more punishment on women than on men, which wouldn’t make sense for a “fair and just God”. They are both simply his creation, why would he place one in more importance than the other?

-Doesn’t ever mention dinosaurs or “giant lizards” or “giant beasts”, which we have found. They try to say it took place before the creation of Adam and Eve and that gods time is different than ours so days could have been years. However, what is described is only what man could see or determine to be the order of things.

-Somehow once humanity’s usefulness in populating the Earth had passed, we started living shorter and shorter lives.

-Doesn’t account for other planets or celestial bodies outside the sun, moon, and visible stars. They have existed. However, man couldn’t see them. So they aren’t written about.

I could go on and on... I grew up with it and was forced to study as I was the granddaughter of a pastor in a small Southern town in a family of church leaders. They pick and choose, interpret things as they see fit. I am glad I was able to see through all of its faults and get out so that my daughter doesn’t have to face the same sexism and push for perfection I am now having to overcome as an adult.

[u/duckyzero]

It’s a manual on how to be evil

[u/redditUserError404]

We know that evil either comes out of nature or nurture, given the fact that god dictates both our parents and therefor our environment and the nature of ourself of course. God is the only one that could be responsible for all the evil in the world.

[u/willworkforjokes]

If I showed up as an alien God for a primitive planet, I would think long and hard about what to tell them.

Anything can go bad, but here is my list: Scientific method Basic analytic geometry, trigonometry calculus. Statistics

[u/RicknMorty93]

Speaking of DNA, why is he associated with the same group of weirdos as Jordan Peterson, who believes that ancient people knew about the double helix of DNA becasue they got high and created art of snakes fucking?^[1]

[u/Richard__Grayson]

Sam: *goes into Barnes and noble blind folded

Sam: *accidentally grabs the Book of Mormon