Those Times Sam Harris Made Us Slap Our Knees

if you pay attention you can see that you you know more author the next thing you think then the next thing I say thoughts simply appear in consciousness now what are you gonna think next what am I gonna say next I could suddenly start talking about why we don't eat Al's why don't we Dalles they seem perfectly good okay no no good what where did that come from okay okay it came it came out of nowhere as far as you're concerned but the same thing is happening in your own mind at this moment maybe you've all made an effort to be here tonight presumably because you wanted to hear what I had to say about freewill and now you're trying to listen to me but you also have a voice in your head that says things haven't you noticed and it says things are the it it says things that are completely unconstrained at times by the thing you're trying to focus on I mean I'm standing up here trying to reason with you and you you will think he does look a little like Ben Stiller [Applause] yeah he said in his final address he said we've taken out tens or 10,000 terrorists and I'm sure most of them are if not all of them were ones who believed in the Koran that seems like an awful lot if you're just saying this is the fringe yeah yeah well it's it's not just the fringe Matt the problem is it is the fringe is probably just the people who are actually violent well it's again the last time we were here and this is where you know we'll begin saying things that that will piss off people and if Batman will call us a racist Jainism is a that the core principle of Jainism is non-violence Gandhi God has non-violence from the James the crazier you get as a Jain the less we have to worry about you it is this is a Jain extremists are actually they are they are paralyzed by their pacifism Jain extremists just they they can't take their eyes off the ground when they walk less they step on an ant they filter every sip of water through cheesecloth lest they swallow and they're thereby kill a bug I mean needless to say they're they're vegetarian now I'm obviously not saying that all the dr. Craig or 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 gonna 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 people begin to worry well what about all the good moods I mean can you still love people while viewing them as part of this vast fabric of causality and I find that that there is no sacrifice to the good stuff I mean it's not maybe first of all things have to be a sort of situationally appropriate I'm not constantly looking at my daughter thinking about she's just a part of the physical universe and Wow you know neurotransmitters giving rise to all this cuteness I mean that's that's not the mode I'm in I apologize for the cartoonish nature of this image of Muhammad but quality images are difficult to come by at the moment that point of not knowing what happens after death is what worries me about this conversation I was I've been very worried about this that all of you have given up a perfectly serviceable Tuesday evening only to hear the four of us tell you every which way that we have no idea what happens after that and I expressed the spirit of my wife and she was actually able to put me at ease I'm worried obviously about boring all of you and she said nothing Hitchens does is ever boring so I have that going for me speaking more generally Christianity Judaism in his long are founded on the claim that the Bible in the Koran were dictated by the creator of the universe and with it there is a there is a creator there is a personal God and he occasionally writes books he doesn't he doesn't code software he doesn't produce films Mel Gibson's claimed to have been toiling all the while under the influence of the Holy Spirit I think it's probably an exception here and religion is is a nearly useless term it's a term like sports now there are sports like badminton and there are sports like like Thai boxing and they have almost nothing in common apart from breathing there are sports that are just synonymous with the risk of physical injury or even death I mean there's sports that are just synonymous with violence now if you get injured playing badminton you're just embarrassed yeah I just like to point out that you could have made precisely the say I'm speaking to you I forgot your name Charles from Templeton right here you could have made precisely the same comment simply changing a single word to from God or a personal God to Poseidon and without any change and since really and I and I I've said this before publicly and Richard Dawkins has has said more times and he cares to count I'm sure that that everyone knows what it's like to be an atheist with respect to zoos we all reject Zeus out of hand we would resist mightily any encroachment into public policy that tried to constrain scientific research out of deference to the Iliad and the Odyssey or any other Zeus worship and you can you could say no scientific study has ruled out the existence of Poseidon and yet this this analogy which I'm now drawing between Poseidon and the personal Christian God or the Jewish God or the Muslim God really strikes the theists Christians Jews and Muslims as a total non sequitur so as an aside I might say that that I now get hate mail from people who actually believe in Poseidon which is you know quite a surprise I mean Richard and I confidently trot out this this analogy saying you know we all know that Poseidon doesn't exist Christians or Jews or Muslims like yourself think at a totally spurious analogy and yet you know that the hate mail comes pouring in to my email box from from Neil pagans who who you know I've been called a racist for for you know denying the validity of these religious beliefs what it does give you a rationale for is ceaselessly worshiping the perfect being who has given you this mediocre book and this is this is a photo of Muslims and Kashmir worshipping at a shrine believed to contain a single beard hair from the Prophet Mohammed now in showing you this image I don't actually mean to denigrate the the positive emotions that can be associated with this kind of practice and I think devotion is a positive emotion that we want in our lives and I certainly don't mean to make light of how difficult life undoubtedly is for Muslims in Kashmir but it seems to me patently obvious given the challenges that they face and that we all face in creating a world worth living in these people have something more important to do than worship the beard hair of a man who may well have been a schizophrenic another problem with accepting a label is that we are consenting to be thought of as a marginal interest group we're consenting to be thought of as a cranky subculture that meets in hotel ballrooms I mean there are things that you and I might not be comfortable with the first time we consider them that we can get comfortable with by thinking it through or imagining things from other people the very least that we think are immoral and but still think that we have no business and doing it yeah and ultimately there are cases of kind of moral dumbfounding where you would you would have to admit that it's it's moral in the sense that that you you can't point to a victim right and nothing I talked about experiments like this let somebody who's you know having sex with the dead judge but I still discuss discuss you like to take it out of the moral sphere for a second if I told you well I have I have Jeffrey Dahmer's sweater you know it's been dry-cleaned would you like to would you try it on right now everyone recoils from that right right but it's not if you actually think about it it's not something that it's like oh there's kind of a magical superstition intrude in there where you wrapped in something that's been deposited in the sweat or even though you know we we dryclean you know 450 times right so it's and if maybe a sweater is to charge but to take something that we're you there would be absolutely no question that has DNA it's not covered with his creepy guys DNA it's it's something that you just in order to recoil from it you are you are making super right the problem isn't fundamentalism which we often hear this said these are euphemisms I mean the only problem with Islamic fundamentalism are the fundamentals of Islam dan dan and I were at a meeting of atheists an atheist convention actually about a month ago and I had the good sense at that meeting to stand up in front of 500 of the most committed atheist in the country and say that atheism as a philosophy was bankrupt and as a word was disastrous and we should not use the term this had more or less the effect that any social scientists in this room could have warned me about I think this was the only talk I had ever been to that began with a standing ovation and ended with something some scarcely mammalian sounds of disgruntlement incidentally Dan's talk began with standing ovation and ended with one and I noticed that that conduces to a better mood later in the evening before I go deeper into this issue of religious truth I just want to illustrate how confused a person must be to argue that that is reasonable to believe in God because religion is useful because it gives life meaning because it makes people more moral than the otherwise would be as the rabbi suggested because it makes people happy any of the benefits you can imagine of religion okay imagine you're walking down the street and you you run into an old friend and he looks radiantly happy you asked him what what's going on in his life and he tells you that everything changed for him the day he realized that he was destined to marry Angelina Jolie hey it might occur to you ask why why why does he believe this Angelina Jolie is after all one of the most beautiful and famous people on the planet she's not incidentally married to Brad Pitt they have something like 27 children at this point okay what what if you're a friend sensing your skepticism said clearly don't understand this belief gives my life meaning okay I now know my purpose in life is to be Angelina's husband what if your friend said that this belief has made me a better person I'm now incredibly kind to children anticipating having to raise angelina's once Brad leaves but what if your friend said to you you can believe whatever you want but I wouldn't want to live in a universe where I don't marry Angelina Jolie look at it it should be quite clear at this point that your friend has lost his mind okay it's probably a dangerous person and yet this is precisely the kind of talk that so often passes for wisdom in religious circles and may attempt to pass for wisdom here certainly the more out the morality argument is of that sort and no one I think we just imagined India is it possible that they believe the the billion Hindus in India at the moment that they alone among all the worst of the world's people well they could probably build me a better remote there's no doubt about that dude I would consider the unique features of Mormonism which may play some role in the next presidential election Mormonism it seems to me objectively is just a little bit more idiotic than Christianity is it has to be it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas but for instance the Mormons think that Jesus is going to return to earth and administer his thousand years of peace at least part of the time from the state of Missouri now why does this make Mormonism objectively less likely to be true than Christianity because what whatever probability was signed to Jesus is coming back you have to assign a lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in Jackson County Missouri well what if someone wanted to torture all conscious beings to the point of madness how could you ever prove that he's not as good as you are okay and this is the kind of email I get hi thanks for that that was great um my questions hypothetical but I think it's rather plausible what should we and I said we as a global community may be rational members of the global community do in the event of a faith-based nuclear attack and perhaps take the position of a hypothetical President of the United States but how would you address that well and maybe also speculate how President Obama or President Romney god forbid how they made what what what should we do how would he respond in the aftermath of a faith-based Records Act and not a new killer 9/11 I guess it seems to me that that that the the faith part is is not in particularly relevant once the bombs have actually fallen right I used to be in the habit of saying that undoubtedly there's a Tiger Woods of compassion out there for obvious reasons that analogy doesn't work so well why can't you do the same thing why can't you attack the philosophical underpinnings in medicine in the same way if you're if you're continually vomiting you should you should go to the doctor and get X Y & Z but that just assumes you don't want to continually vomit yeah it does exactly what about that what about the person who wants to continually vomit but that's that's an assumption I'm your example was if I want to live longer than I should but not everybody does longer that's shorthand for all a whole suite of concerns that everyone recognizes are the only intelligible discussion about human health and now the fact and and if we can find one person who says listen I like vomiting I like continuous pain and I'd like to die tomorrow he's not he's not offering an alternate medical health based worldview that we have to take seriously he just doesn't get invited back to the conference about medicine [Laughter] so though it could be with the conference on morality that's wrong look the Catholic Church could talk about physics it could say well you know we're actually interested in the physics of the transubstantiation or the physics that allows the Holy Ghost to be here and there and everywhere all at once but there's not a physicist alive who would have to take those other into seriously okay I'm saying that that have you if you talk that way you don't get invited back to the physics conference but Satya Sai Baba is not a fringe figure he's not the David Koresh of Hinduism his followers threw a birthday party for him recently and a million people showed up so there are there are vast numbers of people who believe he is a living God you can even watch his miracles on YouTube prepare to be underwhelmed but it's true that he has an afro of sufficient diameter as to suggest a total detachment from the opinions of his fellow human beings but I'm not sure this is reason enough to worship Him and this is something we actually will face I mean we will we will get drugs that can really for instance take away grief I think at some point in the lifetime of someone in this room there will be an antidote to sadness so that when you're you know your wife dies and you're inconsolable there will be a pill you can take that will take that feeling away now the question is when do you want to take it you want to take it 15 minutes after she dies yeah you want to take it a month after you want to take it a year after you want to take it before she dies so that you'll be indifferent to her guy I mean these are these are real these are real ethical problems the utility yes but the utility argument though is separate from the truth argument I mean to say that religion is useful is not at all to say that it's true that it is true okay and so so we as scientists we're in the truth business we're not in the useful delusion business I mean I could invent a religion right now that I guarantee you would be more useful than any religion on offer and if we could spread it to billions we would live in a better world and this religion would be transparently false to everyone in this room it would be a lie I mean here's the religion you know they help people for the best of your ability don't lie cheat or steal and here's where it gets novel raise your children to value science and mathematics and excel in these areas as best as they can and if you don't do this you will be tortured after death by a 17 headed demon named Phyllis okay now if we could if we could spread this all over the world we could replace Islam with this faith we would live in a better world absolutely okay does that lend the slightest credence to the idea that this demon named Phyllis exists no so we have to talk like this as scientists now it turns out to denigrate the Taliban at a scientific conference is to court controversy and so after I spoke a a another speaker came up to me and said well how could you ever say that the compulsory veiling of women is wrong from the point of view of science and I said well okay the moment you link questions of right and wrong to questions of human well-being then it seems pretty clear that forcing half the population to live in cloth bags and beating them or killing them when they try to get out is not a way of maximizing well-being and therefore not a good practice and she said well that's just your opinion I said okay well let's just make it easier let's imagine we found a culture that was removing the eyeballs of every third child okay would you then agree that we had found a culture that was not perfectly maximizing human wellbeing and she said it would depend on why they were doing it okay so the after I picked my jaw back up off the floor I said okay let's say they're doing it for religious reasons let's say they have a scripture which says every third should walk in darkness or some such nonsense and you'll be pleased or horrified to know that she just bit the bullet here and said then you could never say that they were wrong if we enjoy some great professional success this remains vivid and intoxicating to us for about an hour maybe a day but then people begin to ask you well what are you gonna do next you know don't you have something in the pipeline I mean Steve Jobs releases the iPhone I'm sure it was wasn't 20 minutes before someone came up to him and said when are you gonna make this thing smaller now notice at this juncture very few people say oh I'm done I've met all my goals and now I'm just gonna stay here and eat ice cream until I die in front of you okay you you can add any metaphysics you want thank you in that by that means I mean I can say you know I see you as reincarnate personality and I think you were probably I was a man on Atlantis yes tell me I'm like a washerwoman and people people say 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 but just take for example the people who think Elvis is still alive okay what what's wrong with this claim I mean why is this claim not vitiating our academic departments and corporations 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 belief that Elvis is still alive in a conversation on a first date at a lecture at a 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 have then he could rattle on about this is not a scientific claim this is a matter of faith you know when I look at you I see you you might be Elvis I mean he could do this

Channel: Enlightainment

Views: 391,541

Rating: 4.6830506 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, funny moments, compilation, religion, comedy, philosophy, atheism

Id: KIIOM6o3FUc

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ronreddit17]

It took me almost 4 minutes to realize that was posted to YouTube completely unironically