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Letter to a Christian Nation
by
Sam Harris

Sam Harris

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Letter to a Christian Nation

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Letter to a Christian Nation

Copyright © 2006 by Sam Harris

Note to the Reader

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to me to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own. The truth is that many who claim to be transformed by Christ’s love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism. While we may want to ascribe this to human nature, it is clear that such hatred draws considerable support from the Bible. How do I know this? The most disturbed of my correspondents always cite chapter and verse.

The primary purpose of the book is to arm secularists in our society, who believe that religion should be kept out of public policy, against their opponents on the Christian Right. Consequently, the “Christian” I address throughout is a Christian in the narrow sense of the term. Such a person believes, at a minimum, that the Bible is the inspired word of God and that only those who accept the divinity of Jesus Christ will experience salvation after death.

Note (Hal’s):
Although I have no problem with the Nicene or Apostles’s creeds, I don’t meet Harris’s definition of a “Christian”!

— end note

The Wisdom of the Bible

In assessing the moral wisdom of the Bible, it is useful to consider moral questions that have been solved to everyone’s satisfaction. Consider the question of slavery. The entire civilized world now agrees that slavery is an abomination.

Note (Hal’s):
Apparently Harris is unaware that slavery is now practiced more widely, including much of the “civilized world,” than in most past ages.

— end note

If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.”

Note (Hal’s):
A remarkable assertion, given that Harris himself argues torture is morally acceptable.

— end note

Real Morality

For there to be objective moral truths worth knowing, there need only be better and worse ways to seek happiness in this world. If there are psychological laws that govern human well-being, knowledge of these laws would provide an enduring basis for an objective morality. [...] Everything about human experience suggests that love is more conducive to happiness than hate is. This is an objective claim about the human mind, about the dynamics of social relations, and about the moral order of our world. It is clearly possible to say that someone like Hitler was wrong in moral terms without reference to scripture.

While feeling love for others is surely one of the greatest sources of our own happiness, it entails a very deep concern for the happiness and suffering of those we love. Our own search for happiness, therefore, provides a rationale for self-sacrifice and self-denial. There is no question that there are times when making enormous sacrifices for the good of others is essential for one’s own deeper well-being.

Compare to:

Dorothy Sayers

Topic:

Self-denial

Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not—that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral—that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings. This explains why Christians like yourself expend more “moral” energy opposing abortion than fighting genocide.

Note (Hal’s):
The notion that alleviation of suffering is the only basis for moral action seems oversimplified.

— end note

Doing Good for God It is undeniable that many people of faith make heroic sacrifices to relieve the suffering of other human beings. But is it necessary to believe anything on insufficient evidence in order to behave this way? If compassion were really dependent upon religious dogmatism, how could we explain the work of secular doctors in the most war-ravaged regions of the developing world? Many doctors are moved simply to alleviate human suffering, without any thought of God.

Note (Hal’s):
Whether these doctors profess a religious motivation or not, they certainly appear to believe something “on insufficient evidence.”

— end note

Are Atheists Evil? It is time that Christians like yourself stop pretending that a rational rejection of your faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea. The problem with religion—as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology—is the problem of dogma itself. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

Note (Hal’s):
As the selections I have made attest, Harris is very fond of declarations beginning with “It is time...” He generally uses these to proclaim that everyone else should be compelled to adopt his beliefs, on (need I say it?) extremely insufficient evidence and sloppy logic.

— end note

Who Puts the Good in the “Good Book”? Rather than say that they believe in God because certain biblical prophecies have come true, or because the miracles recounted in the Gospels are convincing, liberals and moderates tend to talk in terms of the good consequences of believing as they do. Such believers often say that they believe in God because this “gives their lives meaning.” When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, 2004, many conservative Christians viewed the cataclysm as evidence of God’s wrath. God was apparently sending another coded message about the evils of abortion, idolatry, and homosexuality. While I consider this interpretation of events to be utterly repellent, it at least has the virtue of being reasonable, given a certain set of assumptions. Liberals and moderates, on the other hand, refuse to draw any conclusions whatsoever about God from his works. God remains an absolute mystery, a mere source of consolation that is compatible with the most desolating evil.
You are using your own moral intuitions to authenticate the wisdom of the Bible—and then, in the next moment, you assert that we human beings cannot possibly rely upon our own intuitions to rightly guide us in this world; rather, we must depend upon the prescriptions of the Bible. You are using your own moral intuitions to decide that the Bible is the appropriate guarantor of your moral intuitions. Your own intuitions are still primary, and your reasoning is circular.
The Goodness of God Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” [...] Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

Topic:

Atheism

It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledged how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world’s suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. You may now be tempted to execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God’s goodness in the first place.

Note (Hal’s):
If you postulate someone else’s beliefs for the sake of discussion, you then have to examine the whole set of beliefs before judging them. Harris here pretends to accept the notion of God only to declare that all God’s characteristics are his to describe and evaluate. This is among the most virulent forms of religious bigotry.

— end note

The Power of Prophecy It seems all but certain that the dogma of the virgin birth, and much of the Christian world’s resulting anxiety about sex, was a product of a mistranslation from the Hebrew. Another strike against the doctrine of the virgin birth is that the other evangelists have not heard of it.

A book written by an omniscient being could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known. Instead, the Bible contains no formal discussion of mathematics and some obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book states that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1 (I Kings 7:23–26 and II Chronicles 4:2–5). As an approximation of the constant π, this is not impressive.

Note (Hal’s):
This is a common assertion on the Internet, and it’s actually bad math. Both passages describe a large water-reservoir measuring 30 cubits in circumference and 10 cubits across.

Even assuming it was perfectly circular, the problem here is the violation of rules for significant figures taught in grade school. π can, indeed, be computed to many decimal places, but the measurements have only one significant digit, so any computations made using them cannot improve on that precision. If the Bible were to report the circumference as 31.4159 cubits, that would be ridiculous; apparently, Harris would be impressed.

— end note

The Clash of Science and Religion The core of science is not controlled experiment or mathematical modeling; it is intellectual honesty. It is time we acknowledged a basic feature of human discourse: when considering the truth of a proposition, one is either engaged in an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments, or one isn’t. Religion is the one area of our lives where people imagine that some other standard of intellectual integrity applies.

Note (Hal’s):
As the selections I have made attest, Harris is very fond of declarations beginning with “It is time...” He generally uses these to proclaim that everyone else should be compelled to adopt his beliefs, on (need I say it?) extremely insufficient evidence and sloppy logic.

— end note

The Fact of Life Any honest reading of the biblical account of creation suggests that God created all animals and plants as we now see them. There is no question that the Bible is wrong about this.

Note (Hal’s):
Any honest reading of the biblical account of creation suggests that the writer did not mean it to be taken literally.

— end note

Compare to:

Jaroslav Pelikan

Over 99 percent of the species that ever walked, flew, or slithered upon this earth are now extinct. This fact alone appears to rule out intelligent design. When we look at the natural world, we see extraordinary complexity, but we do not see optimal design. We see redundancy, regressions, and unnecessary complications; we see bewildering inefficiencies that result in suffering and death. We see flightless birds and snakes with pelvises. We see species of fish, salamanders, and crustaceans that have nonfunctional eyes, because they continued to evolve in darkness for millions of years. We see whales that produce teeth during fetal development, only to reabsorb them as adults. Such features of our world are utterly mysterious if God created all species of life on earth “intelligently”; none of them are perplexing in light of evolution.

Topic:

Evolution

Conclusion We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we accord religious faith.

Note (Hal’s):
One thing does stand in the way more than that: religious bigotry. If you accord no one else’s beliefs any respect at all, how can you examine your own critically and honestly?

— end note

text checked (see note) Feb 2008

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