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[–] antiracistMetal [S] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

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[–] chirogonemd 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

I like Sam Harris, as a personality. I enjoy listening to him. I've always found him overrated in terms of his actual thought. The Moral Landscape was dog shit. In this video he is making some fairly conventional cases, nothing innovative. He relies most strongly on the dating of the NT gospels, and I think that's at least a fairly easy hurdle to overcome (maybe not entirely in your opinion). The first examples of written word are not coterminus with the earliest beliefs. The question that needs to be sussed out for an oral culture is not how quickly they wrote something down, but how soon they evidenced belief. For that, a genre like a narrative epic isn't as useful. Something more like letters or the testimony of historians of the period would be better.

The later dating of the NT gospels suggests, to me, that a constellation of beliefs passing mostly via oral transmission, took a couple of decades to fall into the hands of men trained in writing to codify them. This cannot be understood or analyzed outside of the context that there was massive persecution taking place against the earliest Christians. Think about how difficult it would be to get an anti-Jewish text disseminated properly today, and that's with the advent of the internet, and the so-called enlightened politico-religious tolerance of "modern" civilization. Try it during an age when stealing some bread could get you nailed, literally, to a tree and most of the townspeople wouldn't even find that odd to see on a Tuesday.

That might seem unconvincing, but modern dating for Paul's earliest letters are within 2-5 years of the crucifixion. What is at issue here is what the earliest Christians believed. How early is the first belief situated with respect to the crucifixion? Paul's letters evidence very early belief in the divinity of Christ and the miracles, and he was surprised at the conviction - to me, that by itself suggests something about the rate at which belief/legend formed in that time period. To have been surprised at the ubiquity of belief within a certain sect, two years after the event, suggests that Paul thought this was a preternatural diffusion of similar belief. I'm sure if people had Youtube at that point, the whole matter would have been put before the public and decided on in a couple of days. I say that just to emphasize that these dating objections seem anachronistic - we're retro-projecting modern demands.

The Hebrews inherited a mostly oral tradition, and so for years these stories circulated regionally, with the nuance you'd expect, but mostly maintaining the core narrative. That isn't to say there weren't other traditions mixed in with this, Gnostics for example.

I know this isn't the only argument he makes in the video. He also refers to Sai Baba. But this is the argument he references twice and seems to think it is somehow devastating. It is, for people that don't know jack shit. For the typical westerner with a K-12 and perhaps undergrad education without much in the way of exposure to academic study of religion, this shit always seems terribly convincing. It's fucking heuristic mostly. Man proclaims intelligence and atheism, he looks right, talks right, and he's behind a podium and so charmingly relaxed. The significance is authority.

The people who make more informed opposing arguments are usually academics who you won't find widely published by Simon Schuster in the popular category, or actively campaigning for acclaim via Youtube and podcasts.

There is such a social element to the success of people like Sam. And I like him! That's half of it. I know that @antiracistmetal is going to scoff at this sort of analysis. But the phenomenon seems citrus-juicy to me when it comes to this. The modern atheists are just much slicker marketers. There is a cunning, cut-throat, and canine sort of rhetorical-sensibility. The most educated Christian apologists appear to lack this. But you take into account the nature of Christian belief, and it all becomes just so... fitting. Doesn't it? You take someone like a William Lane Craig. Highly intelligent, but he's still a Christian sheep among wolves. I think Christianity would do a lot better in today's landscape if it had some wolves, but that also seems to be a bit contradictory. Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins - these guys are not nice. But the Christian apologists, no matter how good their arguments, are always so very nice.

This entire dynamic has even been evident in this debate we've been having with @antiracistmetal, to a much smaller extent. The devil understands the temptation to be popular, and the clever sword-swinging of the 'I'm a tortured troubled intellectual' is as convincing in a debate as a square punch is in a street brawl. We love a bad guy. The atheist, someone trying to take down instead of build up, has that allure. Not the one putting his neck out there to be dispositive about the nature of reality, but the one doing the neck chopping. I wish Christians would get a little hungrier for blood.

@PeaceSeeker

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[–] antiracistMetal [S] 0 points 3 points (+3|-0) ago 

The Moral Landscape was dog shit.

Antisemite.

@peaceseeker

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[–] antiracistMetal [S] 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

I loved The Moral Landscape.

@peaceseeker

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[–] PeaceSeeker 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Of all the New Atheists, Sam Harris is one of the few who was actually a trained philosopher - which makes the shallowness of his worldview all the more damning. On Daniel Dennett, and then Harris:

You would think someone trained in philosophy would understand that there is no intermediary stage between being and nothing, but if something that obvious escaped his notice, it should come as no surprise that he missed the obvious error in his main statement: the universe created itself ex nihilo. In spite of his credentials as a professional philosopher (or perhaps because of them), Dennett failed to see that the idea of a self-creating universe is an absurdity for a very simple reason: In order to bring itself into existence, the universe would have to exist before it existed. If Dennett wants us to take his atheist cosmology seriously, he will have to explain how something can exist before it exists. The fact that he feels no need to explain the most obvious objection his cosmology raises, bespeaks an appalling ignorance of the philosophical tradition Dennett supposedly mastered on his way to becoming a professional philosopher.

Or I guess as you'd put it, he invented a new tradition from the ground up!

When it comes to defending atheism, metaphysics is, as Feser puts it, "rationally unavoidable", but that didn't stop the new atheists from making fools of themselves in public by displaying "their manifest ignorance" of the philosophical tradition they purport to overturn. The "shallowness of their philosophical analysis" is "breathtaking." Feser "gets the impression that the bulk of their education in Christian theology consisted of reading Elmer Gantry while in college, supplemented with a viewing of Inherit the Wind and a Sunday morning spent channel-surfing televangelists." Feser finds this ignorance unsurprising "in the case of either Dawkins - a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn't know metaphysics from Metamucil - or Vanity Fair boy Hitchens, who probably thinks metaphysics is the sort of thing people like Shirley MacLaine start babbling about when they've lost their box office cachet," but appalling "in the case of Dennett and Harris, who are trained philosophers" and yet unaware that "the vast majority of the greatest philosophers and scientists in the history of Western civilization...have firmly believed in the existence of God...on the basis of entirely rational arguments".

E. Michael Jones, Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality, pgs. 34-35

As for Harris' actual comments here, he readily conflates many points. Private revelation vs public. Evidence vs faith uninformed by reason. And he seems to think the Gospels being written decades after the events calls into question their reporting, whereas the number of manuscripts and proximity in time to the events described rivals all other historic texts from that period. The reason "half the world" believes in Jesus Christ is because eleven fishermen and a lawyer, plus a former violent persecutor of Christians, all went to their deaths to testify to the many miracles they saw, and in so doing established a Church which has served to dispense grace to those within it, and that includes further miracles, ever since. I'm sure a bunch of Indians desperate for spiritual validation would show up to see underwhelming "miracles" from a guy with an afro. But the miracles of Lourdes, or Sokolka, or Fatima, or Guadeloupe, are far from underwhelming...nor is the miracle of a bunch of fishermen establishing a worldwide religion by letting themselves be martyred underwhelming. Not at all.

@chirogonemd