Dialogue with a secularist

[Zhukov]

A dialogue with a secularist
Dennis Prager (archive)


In his just published book, "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason," Sam Harris, who received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and is now completing his doctorate in neuroscience, argues that religion is the cause of the world's evils, while reason is the solution.

I conducted a dialogue/debate with him on my radio show. What follows is one part of that dialogue. The audio of the entire dialogue is available at my Web site www.dennisprager.com, and the entire transcript can also be read there.


Dennis Prager: You believe that in secularism and in reason lie the answers to the moral problems of humanity. Is that a fair summary of your views?

Sam Harris: Yes, up to a point. I'm actually not discounting the range of human experience we might want to call "spiritual" or "mystical."

DP: I believe that if I took a thousand evangelical ministers -- the folks that you have a certain fear of, and I took a thousand professors in the liberal arts, I would bet every penny I have that the moral acuity of the thousand evangelical ministers would dwarf the moral acuity of a thousand liberal arts professors. For which reason Lawrence Summers, for example, the president of Harvard, announced two years ago that the seat -- the seat -- of anti-Semitism in America had shifted to the university. The university had also been the seat of support for Stalin. The university in Germany was the seat of the place to get Nazi philosophers. That you have such faith in secular reason is to me unbelievable, given the record of the secular rationalists.

SH: Well, first, let me agree with you that liberal, ivory-tower discourse right now is certainly in many sectors bereft of real moral acuity, and the kind of discourse you have about Israel in particular vis a vis the conflict with the Palestinians -- all of that is deplorable. But your first question, really, it all turns on what you mean by morality.

DP: Good and evil.

SH: Take something even more precise than that. Our aversion to human cruelty. All of us who are well wired neurologically and do not come into this world with whatever causes sociopathy have a predisposition to recoil at cruelty such as torturing other people certainly, and animals. I would argue that we don't get that out of our religious books. In fact, our religious books offer rather equivocal testimony on the moral status of cruelty. There's a lot of cruelty in them.

DP: I will defend the religious books, but you need to defend the alternative. Why is it that religious folks whom you fear turn out to be more morally accurate today than the secular folks at the university?

SH: I didn't concede that point. I think that when you're talking about something as fundamental as recoiling from cruelty you would find that healthy people are going to be more or less the same across the board. But I agree with you that about any number of things right now, academia has really become unhitched from morality as you and I know it.

DP: I admire the fact that you, who are in academia, would say that. But don't you ask what the root cause might be? To me it is clear: secularism.

SH: Well, actually, no, I think the root cause in academia, certainly liberal academia now, is what we call "political correctness." There are so many taboos in academia and in our culture at large. The one I'm going up against most directly in my book is the taboo around criticizing faith itself.

DP: There's no taboo on criticizing Judaism or Christianity. There's only a taboo in the university on criticizing Islam.

SH: Well, I actually find that people are very reluctant to criticize faith itself, even when they don't have it.

DP: Not Christianity. Everyone who goes to university learns that Christianity is an impediment to progress. It is part of the liberal arts curriculum.

SH: Well, I don't think this is at the core of either our agreement or our differences. I think that the problem we have to face now is that people are flying planes into our buildings because they believe their book was written by God. And it doesn't seem to me that our proper response to that predicament is to say, "No, no, you have it wrong; our book was written by God."

DP: Yet ironically, it is really only very strongly religious Christians, by and large -- and I'm not a Christian, I'm a Jew -- who have been at the forefront of criticizing Islam today. And they are called, by your whole secular liberal world, racists and bigots for doing so.

SH: Right. I agree with you totally. I think it's profoundly ironic that the most sensible statements about Islam to appear in our culture have come from our own religious dogmatists.

DP: It's not ironic. That's where you and I differ. It is their faith that gives them (their values and) the strength to say it. I think the university is a moral failure because it is radically secular. You think it's a failure because they're just weak-willed and politically correct.

If I lived 200 years ago in Europe, I would have been tempted by the argument that reason alone, without God, religion and sacred texts, can lead us to goodness. After the depredations of the French Revolution; the horrors of two secular doctrines, Nazism and Communism; the low moral state of American and European universities; and the moral cowardice and appeasement of evil in contemporary secular Europe, one has to be -- ironically -- a true believer to believe that reason alone will lead us to a more moral world. Of course, we need reason. But we also need God and moral religion.

Full transcript

 

[dilloduck]

well dang----I was hoping for some kind of comment---even a brief one!

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Wow. That SH guy got his ass handed to him on a platter. He sounded like a complete idiot. So much for secular "rationalists".

 

[rtwngAvngr]

AJ, read this transcript. The jew host believes life begins before birth. What say you?

 

[Zhukov]

Wow. That SH guy got his ass handed to him on a platter. He sounded like a complete idiot.

I know. Isn't that funny?

Makes you wonder exactly what would be in a book so pompously titled "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason". Must be a horror novel.

 

[wade]

This is a fake interview. The interviewer is not even close to objective, he is just using the interview to promote his beliefs and belittle those he does not like.

Wade.

 

[Zhukov]

It's from Dennis' radio talk show, he never claimed or even pretended to be objective, and it certainly isn't fake.


Anyways, it says, right at the begining:

I conducted a dialogue/debate with him on my radio show.

 

[wade]

Choosing your victim like this, setting things up so you can expouse your own views, is a "fake" interview. It was not an interview at all.

Wade.

 

[Zhukov]

He had a guy on his radio show. Dennis is well known to be a conservative and religious talk show host. This guy came on because of the book he wrote, and Dennis wanted to talk about it. What is your problem with that?

The radio show exists, Dennis exists, his guest exists, [ame=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393035158/qid=1095017726/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/103-9043501-4853404?v=glance&s=books&n=507846]the book[/ame] exists. I don't understand how it's fake.

If the guy can't defend himself properly perhaps he shouldn't have written the book.

 

[wade]

Because they didn't really discuss the book, the interviewer (I use the term loosly) started it off by presenting his own views and put the "guest" on the defensive without even allowing him to present much of a position. That's not an interview - it's just using a guest as a means of espousing your own (the host's) positions.

Such "interviews" should be ignored, and the interviewer should not be listened to.

Wade.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Because they didn't really discuss the book, the interviewer (I use the term loosly) started it off by presenting his own views and put the "guest" on the defensive without even allowing him to present much of a position. That's not an interview - it's just using a guest as a means of espousing your own (the host's) positions.

Such "interviews" should be ignored, and the interviewer should not be listened to.

Wade.

wade. The interviewer gave ample opportunities for the secularist to make his case on how a secularist would arrive at any moral conclusion at all. The secularist repeatedly agreed with the interviewer and then backed off of that, when it was pointed out that he was not making any secular conclusion whatsoever. The secularist was mentally and morally weak. Did you even read the transcript? Your summary of it is assinine.

 

[nakedemperor]

Choosing your victim like this, setting things up so you can expouse your own views, is a "fake" interview. It was not an interview at all.

Wade.

See: all the idiotic, inarticulate, and inept liberals that Bill O'Rielly has on his show. Its a pretty good tactic.

 

[Annie]

I know. Isn't that funny?

Makes you wonder exactly what would be in a book so pompously titled "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason". Must be a horror novel.

and that coming from, I believe, an atheist? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm used to it.)

 

[rtwngAvngr]

and that coming from, I believe, an atheist? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm used to it.)

Even atheists can comprehend the value of ethical codes designed to create better societies.

 

[Zhukov]

and that coming from, I believe, an atheist? (Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm used to it.)

What can I say? I'm not so foolish to believe something as silly as saying religion is responsible for all the world's woes and should be outright eliminated when the Communist revolutions of the last century, which described itself as being based purely on reason and atheism, resulted in more muders than every other idea over the course of human history combined just because I am myself an atheist.

Atheism is just another kind of faith. Too many atheists either don't realize that or refuse to accept it. Too many athiests adopt an attitude of superiority over non-atheists. But so long as popular atheism remains morally neutral it will remain incapable of meeting the needs of society and continue to be a serious danger to humanity.

See: all the idiotic, inarticulate, and inept liberals that Bill O'Rielly has on his show.

An incredibly redundant statement, but Bill challenges everyone. If only the 'idiotic' liberals show up perhaps that's because the other's don't want to be embarrassed in front of the whole country.

Because they didn't really discuss the book, the interviewer (I use the term loosly) started it off by presenting his own views and put the "guest" on the defensive without even allowing him to present much of a position.

Actually he started by introducing the author than provided a synopsis of the author's position. A synopsis the author agreed was accurate.

That's not an interview - it's just using a guest as a means of espousing your own (the host's) positions.

Well, it is the "Dennis Prager show".

Such "interviews" should be ignored, and the interviewer should not be listened to.

If all day long you only listened to things you agreed with, you wouldn't learn much would you?

But I suspect that's the real reason you didn't like the debate. You don't like the host's opinion. Is that so? If so, the format of the debate aside, is there a particular point of the host's that you take exception to?

 

[fuzzykitten99]

Even atheists can comprehend the value of ethical codes designed to create better societies.

i totally agree with this. I am not religous (not that much) and I am not an atheist. I believe that there is a higher power or powers above me, but i hesitate to say one specific God(i think along the lines of many Gods, such as American Indians). I do feel that the Christian values and teachings of the Bible, are ones that have helped me steer a better path in life. I was married in a religeous ceremony, but because the pastor is a great friend of mine, and I had not only worked with him at my first job, but my second, and i went to high school with his daughters. I did get my son baptized, mainly because it was important to my hubby and his family. I may not have done it otherwise. But the stories in the Bible hold a lot of wisdom. I don't even believe that most of them happened(some of them are a bit far fetched), but they have great value nonetheless.

Though I am not particularly religeous, I respect those that are-whatever floats your boat. And I don't let little things like a statue of the 10 Commandments at a government center, that has been there for 50 years, not hurting anyone, bother me.

 

[Said1]

Because they didn't really discuss the book, the interviewer (I use the term loosly) started it off by presenting his own views and put the "guest" on the defensive without even allowing him to present much of a position. That's not an interview - it's just using a guest as a means of espousing your own (the host's) positions.

Such "interviews" should be ignored, and the interviewer should not be listened to.

Wade.

I have to agree with Zhukov, Wade. The author should have know what sort of host he was being interviewed by. Most hosts have pretty standard approaches, he didn't do so well. Sorry, smell ya later.

 

[techhead]

After living for 55 years and studying human natural from an atheist view it brings me to the conclusion the atheists are reasonable people who don't believe in a god.

Making that statement let me further state the atheist also if he or she is living in this world are affected by the faiths of religion. Morals good or bad come from some source. Your parents, their parents and on down the line in history particular in the US have been affected by religion whether by attendance or observation. They still learn their moral lives from this association.

Freedom from religion is not really possible today simply because we are bombarded with it from every direction. I have no quarrels with any one on religion other than the muslin faith. live and let live is the best motto. I don't cram my beliefs down your throat and you should do the same. A good thought but not practical since the christian population refuses to allow non christains the right to not believe.


politicians and preachers are associated by their williness to keep the masses poor and uneducated for their own gain. E.L. Lewis

 

[Bonnie]

After living for 55 years and studying human natural from an atheist view it brings me to the conclusion the atheists are reasonable people who don't believe in a god.

Making that statement let me further state the atheist also if he or she is living in this world are affected by the faiths of religion. Morals good or bad come from some source. Your parents, their parents and on down the line in history particular in the US have been affected by religion whether by attendance or observation. They still learn their moral lives from this association.

Freedom from religion is not really possible today simply because we are bombarded with it from every direction. I have no quarrels with any one on religion other than the muslin faith. live and let live is the best motto. I don't cram my beliefs down your throat and you should do the same. A good thought but not practical since the christian population refuses to allow non christains the right to not believe.


politicians and preachers are associated by their williness to keep the masses poor and uneducated for their own gain. E.L. Lewis

I really take exception to your statement that the christain population refuses to allow non christains the right to not believe. In what areas does this actually happen? If your speaking to the fact that christains are open and willing to debate and discuss their faith as way of stifling non christains you are way off! Are christains supposed to just muzzle themselves so as to not offend non believers????
It would seem to me that the mere existence of christains then annoys non beleivers?

 

[5stringJeff]

After living for 55 years and studying human natural from an atheist view it brings me to the conclusion the atheists are reasonable people who don't believe in a god.

Making that statement let me further state the atheist also if he or she is living in this world are affected by the faiths of religion. Morals good or bad come from some source. Your parents, their parents and on down the line in history particular in the US have been affected by religion whether by attendance or observation. They still learn their moral lives from this association.

Freedom from religion is not really possible today simply because we are bombarded with it from every direction. I have no quarrels with any one on religion other than the muslin faith. live and let live is the best motto. I don't cram my beliefs down your throat and you should do the same. A good thought but not practical since the christian population refuses to allow non christains the right to not believe.


politicians and preachers are associated by their williness to keep the masses poor and uneducated for their own gain. E.L. Lewis

A few questions regarding your post:

1. You state that morals basically come from religion, yet you reject religion. Where, then, should morals come from?

2. Where was anyone ever granted "freedom from religion?"

3. "the christian population refuses to allow non christains the right to not believe." What? As a Christian, I am called to share my faith. However, I don't know anywhere is the US where atheists are being forced to 'convert or die.' What on earth are you talking about?

4. Again, you being up the assumption that those who follow religion are necessarily less intellegent than those who do not. I'd love to see your proof for this claim.