Sam Harris: The Moral Failings of Religion

Sam Harris: The Moral Failings of Religion

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2010/11/10/Sam_Harris_Can_Science_Determine_Human_Values

Sam Harris, author of The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, discusses the shortcomings of organized religion as a guide for human morality.

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In this highly anticipated, explosive new book, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation calls for an end to religion's monopoly on morality and human values. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, Sam Harris tears down the wall between scientific facts and human values to dismantle the most common justification for religious faith -- that a moral system cannot be based on science.

The End of Faith ignited a worldwide debate about the validity of religion. In its aftermath, Harris discovered that most people, from secular scientists to religious fundamentalists, agree on one point: Science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Even among religious fundamentalists, the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence that God exists, but that faith in Him provides the only guidance for living a good life. Controversies about human values are controversies about which science has officially had no opinion. Until now.

Morality, Harris argues, is actually an undeveloped branch of neuroscience, and answers to questions of human value can be visualized on a "moral landscape" -- a space of real and potential outcomes whose peaks and valleys correspond to human states of greater or lesser wellbeing. Different ways of thinking and behaving -- different cultural practices, ethical codes, modes of government, etc. -- translate into movements across this landscape. Such changes can be analyzed objectively on many levels, ranging from biochemistry to economics, but they have their crucial realization as experiences in the human brain.

Bringing a fresh, secular perspective to age-old questions of right and wrong, and good and evil, Harris shows that we know enough about the human brain and its relationship to events in the world to say that there are right and wrong answers to the most pressing questions of human life. Because such answers exist, cultural relativism is simply false -- and comes at increasing cost to humanity. And just as there is no such thing as Christian physics or Muslim algebra, there can be no Christian or Muslim morality. Using his expertise in philosophy and neuroscience, along with his experience on the front lines of our "culture wars," Sam Harris delivers a game-changing argument about the future of science and about the real basis of human cooperation. - Berkeley Arts and Letters

Sam Harris is an American non-fiction author, and CEO of Project Reason. He received a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA, and is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. He has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. He is a proponent of scientific skepticism and is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), a rejoinder to criticism of his first book, and The Moral Landscape (2010).

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[RePete360]

@odat83 That's like arguing that without religion, people would simply kill each other because they have no higher power to answer to and be responsible to. If religious people asked themselves if they would kill people if they didn't have their god to watch them, and their answer was yes, I would be absolutely terrified of them and their state of mind.

I think it is blatantly obvious that humans have natural morals and that without religion, peace would be far easier to achieve.

[TomFynn]

@odat83 "Theology was on the side of the slave-holders" And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have religion in a nutshell.

[Jusoon]

@frankielee77 So, then, you are saying the Bible is not the literal word of God? Every single word of it could be 100% wrong, because it was simply "inspired" by God? Look, either it is the inviolate word of an Omnipotent diety or it is not and is thus fallible. If it is, God endorses slavery, genocide, murder. If it isn't why the hell do we care about a 2,000 year old book full of ignorance?

[TheHigherVoltage]

@frankielee77 #1 we know and can prove humanity has existed far longer than the bible timeline claims we have.

#2 we know and can prove that marriage existed in cultures long before they were exposed to Christian superstitions.

#3 fucking around is a breaking of trust...breaks of trust have consequences. I don't need mythology to figure that out.

#4 you reall ythink we get our morality from a cultgod that orders genocides, advocates slavery, and treating women like shit?

[frankielee77]

Christianity taught the world Morality,and of Righteousness,but Sam Harris taught our world deceptively,Immoral and godlessness...and told us we are at liberty to do what we want,and we will not be judge after death,because there are none,..really...SAM HAD THE CHEEK TO LIE TO US ALL?He even accuse us of Moral Failings?Is he not an Idiot?

[frankielee77]

@TheHigherVoltage ...Do you think that the basic understanding of "Not fucking with married people,...a kind of moral came from Common Sense"?If not for the Bible where do you think we get our moral,and the God's sense of what is Right and Wrong?

[frankielee77]

@Jusoon ...The writer is not God,and it was plain that he told us that he is no God.Which part you cannot understand?God inspired writers to write the Bible and it has never been dictation of word for word from God.The Bible is God's words.It still does.

[DaReegz]

@sgtzero1337 I read your comment wrong, and I apologize.

The way it was phrased made it seem like you did still want to have children believe it.

I've had friends who were not religious, and as soon as they had kids, they started sending them to church; that's the only reason I replied (for fear that was your thought process, as well).

[sgtzero1337]

@DaReegz I never said that we should make children believe because that only creates a negative impact of fear...

[DaReegz]

@sgtzero1337 The problem with that statement: So, you're saying that we should tell our children something we may or may not believe, so that they'll live happier lives? You're really saying that we should send our children to church, fill them with hateful ideas, and unleash them into the world?

This isn't meant to sound accusatory, and I apologize if it does, but the logic behind such a statement makes little sense. If anything, we should be steering our children AWAY from religious teachings.

[sgtzero1337]

I can't say that the world is good with religion, but I can't say the world would be 100% good without it. The implementations of it create fear for people, and it creates a huge impact towards children when taught. What I think makes the world worse with religion is the fundamentalism and extremist people that attack people