One ought to appreciate honesty and Sam Harris certainly makes his endgame crystal clear; his goal in life is to bring about the utter obliteration of any and all religions or faith based beliefs (he actually wants to establish an atheist religion). Yet, he not only seeks to do away with beliefs and rituals but the very language that is employed define and describe them. He writes, “Words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ and ‘Baal,’ or they will unmake our world_Faith-based religion must suffer the same slide into obsolescence.”1 Sam Harris is against any and all religious expression, the orthodox/fundamentalist and the liberal/moderate. He wrote, “I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance-born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God-is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”2I do not mean to oversimplify Sam Harris but I must point out that, ultimately, what he succeeds in accomplishing with his writing of books and articles and with his lectures and interviews is a non-succinct version of John Lennon’s song Imagine: “Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky_And no religion too” and here is the punch line, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one, I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.” According to this worldview the world will be as one when religious people forsake their beliefs and accept, on dogmatic authority, absolute materialism.
Also, note that Sam Harris introduces his myth busting by lamenting the following statistic, “According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 37% of Americans would vote for an otherwise qualified atheist for president.” Yet, what is his response? Elsewhere, he looks forward to a time when “making religious certitude look stupid will be exploited, and we’ll start laughing at people who believe_We’ll laugh at them in a way that will be synonymous with excluding them from our halls of power”3 (emphasis added). Actually, Sam Harris must be thrilled at the progress that atheists are making since a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll conducted in March 2007 has 48% answering “Yes” 48% answering “No” and 4% answering “Don’t know/other.” Apparently, religious people should not keep atheists from our halls of power but atheists should keep religious people from our halls of power-two wrongs_
Now let us begin our consideration of Sam Harris’ attempts at myth busting.
“1) Atheists believe that life is meaningless”:
Atheists generally argue that life has meaning because we give meaning to life. Yet, the issue is that they must give meaning to life because life has no absolute-intrinsic-objective meaning. Life is meaningless and so any meaning they concoct is necessarily a self-induced consoling delusion, which is the very thing of which they accuse theists.Please understand that for the atheist this fact is nothing short of a complement. That is to say, they would take pride in the fact that they do not need a supernatural entity to tell them what the meaning of life is; they are intelligent enough to find their own.
However, there have been atheists who have made their purpose to slaughter millions upon millions of people in order to gain, and maintain, their political power. In such cases how could other atheists condemn such personal prescriptions of meaning? Perhaps the only way would be to borrow from Judeo-Christian ethics.
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