Well kids, get your highlighters out as Sam Harris is publishing a new book. By the way, the aka is of my own making. Why? Because his new book, The Moral Landscape is about, as the subtitle states, “How Science Can Determine Human Values.”
Before getting into Sam Harris’ own description let us note that with friends like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris needs no enemies. Note what Dawkins wrote,
I was one of those, who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. Moral philosopher, too, will find their world exhilaratingly turned upside down, as they discover a need to learn some neuroscience.
As for religion and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris.
Do not get me wrong, if there is one thing that the New Atheists know how to do it is getting media and pop-cultural attention. Sam Harris has actually encouraged media figures to besmirch theism others, such as Philip Pullman, write anti-Christian deicidal messages in their children’s books—see here for many more examples. Richard Dawkins views this issue as being between his religion, which is “science” as atheism and/or atheism as “science,” against what? Against, “the preposterous idea that we need God to be good.” Yet, this is an argument that no one has made. Who knows what he means by “need God” but the issue—need it be repeated again—is not whether “we need God to be good” but that God is necessary as an absolute premise for goodness itself. We can happen upon “good” without recognizing God’s existence.
Consider my debate with an atheist on the issue of morality; this is one of the first issues that I got out of the way—here is a sample from the Q&A:
Also keep in mind that Richard Dawkins had stated the following of Sam Harris’ book, The End of Faith,
is one of those books that deserves to replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land.
Of his own book Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris stated,
It’s a book that a person could simply hand to a member of the religious Right and say, “What’s your answer to this?”
Just like a tract.
So, now that Sam Harris has been inducted as a cenobite and has become a neuro-pseudo-scientist he can now speak, authoritatively, on how morality is brain stuff.
But whey refer to him as a “neuro-pseudo-scientist” because he is now a neuroscientist but is, in reality, a pseudo scientist since, as I elucidated in considering his first study, he is not an unbiased researcher but came to the table with preconceived notions so as to find evidence to prove atheism: see “The Neural Correlates of Religious and Nonreligious Belief” – Sam Harris’ Neuroscientific Escapades
I must take another aside to mention that whilst in the hallway, during the break in my debate, two atheists asked the atheist whom I was debating as to whether he could recommend a book on morality. He mentioned one that would tell them what to do in what sort of situation. Now, I was not surprised but think about it; atheists clamoring for a book that would tell them what to do.
Also keep in mind that as you consider Dr. Sam Harris’ prescriptions for morality that this is the very same Sam Harris, supposed champion of reason (and now science) who prescribed capital punishment for thought crime,
Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.1
He also blames deaths of the 6,000,000 Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust on…on the Jews themselves:
The gravity of Jewish suffering over the ages, culminating in the Holocaust, makes it almost impossible to entertain any suggestion that Jews might have brought their troubles upon themselves.
This is, however, in a rather narrow sense, the truth.
He also blamed the rape of Islamic women on Islamic taboos against rape,
The reason why all those women were raped in the Bosnian conflict was that it was so stigmatising in the Muslim community to be raped, that you were essentially ruining the community from within by recourse to its own taboos.2
He also dehumanizes human beings when they are babies in the womb so as to support abortion:
A 3-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst. There are, for the sake of comparison, more than 100,000 cells in the brain of a fly.3
In the next segment we will delve into what he has to say about his new book The Moral Landscape.
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