Sam Harris Rants Against Christianity

Sam Harris is back on the warpath against Christianity:

If Christianity is right, all other religions are wrong:

Jesus Christ was the Messiah—so the Jews are wrong.
Jesus was divine and resurrected—so the Muslims are wrong (“Jesus son of Mary, Allah’s messenger—they slew him not nor crucified him, but it appeared so unto them.” Qur’an, 4:157).
There is only one God—so the Hindus are wrong.

But, of course, the Christians have no better reason to think they’re right than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus do.

Christianity has built great civilizations. Not those other religions. So yes, Christians do have reason to think that they are more right.

And religion often inspires people to do bad things that they would not otherwise do. For instance, at this very moment in Syria and Iraq, perfectly ordinary Shia and Sunni Muslims can be found drilling holes into each other’s skulls with power tools. What are the chances they would be doing this without the “benefit” of their incompatible religious beliefs and identities?

Again, this is an argument that Christianity is better than Islam.

While I have spent a fair amount of time thinking about the brain, I do not think that the reducibility of consciousness to unconscious information processing has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us.

Interesting admission. He almost concedes that we might have souls. Odd for such a hard-core religion hater. If we have souls, then how can we address their health, except by religion?

One of the greatest problems with religion is that it is built, to a remarkable degree, upon lies. Mommy claims to know that Granny went straight to heaven after she died. But Mommy doesn’t actually know this. The truth is that, while Mommy may be honest on every other topic, in this instance, she doesn’t want to distinguish what she really knows (i.e. what she has good reasons to believe) from (1) what she wants to be true or (2) what will keep her children from being too sad in Granny’s absence. So Mommy is lying—either to herself or to her kids—and we’ve all agreed not to talk about it. Rather than learn how to grieve, we learn to lie to ourselves, or to those we love.

So maybe religious folks tell themselves convenient lies. But this is coming from Harris who wrote a whole book against free will, and arguing that we are all pre-programmed automatons. If so, no one chooses what to believe. Truth is not a requirement. We just believe what we are programmed to believe, whether true or not.

Harris is some sort of Jewish Atheist Leftist Buddhist Trump-hater. He lacks the free will to make an informed judgment on Trump, but regularly posts stupid rants against him anyway. He says that he does not even have a feeling of free will. It is all based on his DNA or whatever he thinks is determinitive.

Here is his moral gripe with Christianity.

The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor, the meek, and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument — and they knew it.

Christians believe in free will, and freedom of the human spirit. The truth will set you free. Those without free will are the real slaves.