Sam Harris' Leap of Faith

Text Box: Unlike Ted Turner and Jesse Ventura, one would assume that Sam Harris has thought his views through a little more carefully. While Turner follows the path that seems most lucrative for a business man and Ventura the path that seems more the result of one head-shot too many as a “professional” wrestler, Harris has developed a worldview in which he excludes God totally from reality. That is why both Turner and Ventura resort to childlike name calling while cultural academics, like Harris, con them into believing that their atheism and/ or agnosticism actually makes sense. The one problem standing between the atheism that Harris and others of like persuasion promote, however, is the real world they face everyday. Notice what Harris said from the front page, "I hope to show that the very idea 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." (Harris) Sam Harris makes a drastic leap in his assessment of “religion.” If I understand his position, and I think I do, then he, as an atheist, is as strict a naturalistic evolutionist as anyone you might ever meet. He has eliminated God from what he considers reality and with it, all possibilities of an immaterial or spiritual world. He would deny, if he retained the least bit of consistency, the idea of an immaterial mind that existed independently of the chemical process of the human brain. It is here that I have the greatest difficulty connecting the philosophical dots with his critique of religious men and women and it is here that reality weighs heavily upon his worldview. In all honesty, it is also here that he should leave men and women of faith alone. If his view of reality is true, and I’m sure he believes it is, human beings, like all other creatures, are nothing but chemical machines, advanced animals whose “brains secrete thought as the liver secretes bile,” (another atheist). We are different from animal in degree only, not in essence. With his view of man and thought, he has no logical grounds upon which to say that our religiosity is wrong. Our religiosity simply IS. What his trusted “nature” has put together, “let no man put asunder,” to borrow a few of Jesus’ words. The greatest tension between what Harris and other atheists believe and the real world is their insistence on telling people how they SHOULD believe and SHOULD act as if they, contrary to the mere chemically determined little creatures we are, can actually “choose.” I really thought that, according to his own atheistic view of the world, that there was no SHOULD. I thought that we were chemically determined creatures whose brains merely “secreted thought as the liver secreted bile.”

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Sam Harris’ Leap of Faith

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