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Preaching to the choir
Last week I attended another in a series of talks sponsored by the New York Public Library, this one a “debate” between professional atheist Sam Harris and Oliver McTernan, a former priest and humanitarian. Ostensibly, it was supposed to address the charges leveled against religion in Harris’s slight new book [Letter to a Christian Nation], but it never really took off. McTernan tried, repeatedly, to get Harris to respond to charges that he was as anti-pluralist as he charges religious people to be — a secular fundamentalist — but Harris wouldn’t play.
The book under discussion, a pocket-sized polemic (literally, at 5 x 7.5 inches and less than 100 pages), is hardly worthy of serious consideration. It simply rehashes ages-old atheist complaints about the inconsistencies of ancient religious texts and the disconnect between the moral protestations of conservative Christians and their immoral behavior. In it, he holds up a straw man version of Christianity — closely identified with the loonier precincts of the faith — and ridicules it.
Ho hum.
The entire effort reeks of “up-sell”, an attempt by Harris and his publisher to make a few more coins off the popularity of his first book, [The End of Faith
It’s too bad Harris isn’t using his intelligence to plumb the more essential qualities of religious fervor (such as the spry lady’s desire for a figure in which to invest her faith) and seriously analyzing how they do or do not adapt to a world made more dangerous by technology. But that would require seriousness and subtlety and one thing you will not find in books like his, or those of his zealous friends Daniel Dennet and Richard Dawkins, is subtlety. They are quite happy to chuck thousands of years of bathwater out with the accursed baby. Granted, there is something exhilarating about calling out crazy religious ideas — but it’s the same exhilaration a 16-year-old feels once he realizes that he can thumb his nose at God without fear of a lightening bolt. One would hope that by the time he is old enough to write books, the nose-thumber had acquired a more sophisticated view of the meaning of religion in the life of humanity.
Harris is supposedly working toward a Ph.D. in neuroscience. We can see where this is going. He aims to find the part of the brain that lights up when we think of God and surely it will only be a short jump from there to finding a cure for what ails us. But who, of those who need it most, will buy it?
Posted in Religion 10/1/06 | 
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You sound like an angry child who is finally realizing there is no Santa. Get over it! You may continue to sit with the kids at the dumb table. You’ve got one thing right. Harris is wasting his time on people like you.
Comment by The Truth Is — October 30, 2006 @ 5:36 pm
This post is about religion…
Now the diarist at ratdiary.com makes a few interesting points in his post - Preaching to the choir. In said post he talks about Sam Harris and a rather lame publicity attempt to promote the typical……
Trackback by The fantastic site of Lord Matt — January 12, 2007 @ 7:24 am
In your attempt to criticize the work of Mr. Harris, you amaze me in that you barely touch on his work. Instead, you say it’s “hardly worthy of consideration” because of its size (it’s certainly the longest letter I read last year), and toss out such subtle and helpful responses as “Ho hum.” Had you read it (which I doubt, based on your summary), you’d surely know it goes far beyond “atheist complaints” and the morals and behavior of conservative Christians. I hardly think it a “ho hum” issue that 44% of Americans believe (no “straw man” here… this is real) that all true born-again Christians (whatever that means) will be “raptured” out of wordly existence within the next 50 years, and that they’re pushing harder than ever to put their fellow believers in political office. I, personally, find it quite disturbing to think that Bush and his ilk are making long-range policies founded in a belief that anything beyond 50 years hence is irrelevant. The “loonier precincts of the faith” are far more populous than you seem to understand (around 33 million Americans) and growing steadily, while at the same time the mainstream denominations are dwindling. If indeed you have read Harris’s work, you must also be in remarkably deep denial if you think the religious wars in the Middle East aren’t becoming ever more possible in the United States. THAT’s Harris’s whole point; when people’s irrational belief systems start gaining power in government and society, it’s high time those systems be questioned and yes, if necessary, ridiculed. True, Harris may be preaching to the choir, but isn’t that always the case with any author writing on a controversial topic? My hope is that even non-atheists will wake up enough to recognize the dangers of the growing fundamentalist Christian movement in this country (again, this is no straw man), and the danger of moderate Christians who insist we must all be tolerant. Had the Germans been more critical and less tolerant of the early Nazi party, well…
Comment by JLI — January 31, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
JLI,
I don’t comment on books I haven’t read. You clearly think I didn’t read it because I didn’t see in it what you did.
I don’t share your and Harris’s histrionic fear of religious people, or a paranoid fear of a growing “fundamentalism”. This country was far more religious at its inception than it is now and things (for the most part) turned out alright.
Since writing this post I have changed my opinion of Harris. I thought he was merely unsophisticated and unsubtle on matters of religion. After watching him in [this] debate, wherein his “understanding” of religion was handily demolished by Reza Aslan, I now believe he is a dishonest fanatic.
Comment by Sprague Dawley — February 4, 2007 @ 1:38 am