Questions for atheists cont’d. (part 7 of 7)
| August 2, 2011 | Posted by Joseph Keysor under Blog |
79. In The End of Faith, Harris stated that “Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them” (pp. 52-53). This raised so many eyebrows, even among atheists, that Harris felt obliged to issue some clarification on the internet. Attempting to dispel criticisms, Harris first gives the relevant passage from The End of Faith. Then he concedes that he did not express himself as well as he might have—“Granted, I made the job of misinterpreting me easier than it might have been”—and goes on to claim that saying he wants to kill people for their ideas “remains a frank distortion of my views.” He explains:
“When one asks why it would be ethical to drop a bomb on Osama bin Laden or Ayman Al Zawahiri, the answer cannot be, ‘because they have killed so many people in the past.’ These men haven’t, to my knowledge, killed anyone personally. However, they are likely to get a lot of innocent people killed because of what they and their followers believe about jihad, martyrdom, the ascendancy of Islam, etc.” Sam Harris, “Response to Controversy,”
http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/; accessed September 2008.
This gives rise to some questions for atheists:
(a) Do you think Sam Harris is out to lunch? If your answer is “Yes,” go on to question #82. If your answer is “No,” I would like to ask:
(b) Millions of people share Osama bin Laden’s ideas. Should they be killed? If you say “Yes,” then you want to slaughter millions of people not because they have done anything wrong, but because they might do something wrong someday. That was Lenin the atheist’s reasoning in a nutshell. It’s easy for people who deny the immortal soul to advocate—and do—such things. If, on the other hand, you say millions of people should not be killed for their ideas, but should only be killed if they put their ideas into practice, or if they enable and cause others to put those ideas into practice, then you think Harris is mistaken here – or perhaps he only expressed himself poorly.
(c) Secondly, Harris identifies not only Islamic extremists, but also Christians as threats to the survival of humanity. Accordingly, Christians, not just Osama bin Laden, might be included among those whose dangerous ideas require their elimination. Do you think Christians should be killed? If you answer “No,” how do we know this is a truthful answer? Didn’t the atheist Lenin act out the natural human tendency to lie, to say one thing and later do another? Note I say this is a human fault, not an atheist one. Atheists do tend to feel threatened by people who disagree with them.
80. Sam “The-sky-is-falling” Harris wants to save the human race from religion—and what might not be done if the fate of humanity is at stake? Wouldn’t it be justified to kill some people to save humanity—especially if they have no immortal souls and are nothing but matter? This leads to two related questions:
(a) Is Harris a demagogue who appeals not to reason and logic, but to fear, hatred, and ignorance?
(b) Doesn’t considering people to be nothing but matter with no immortal souls make it easier to justify killing them?
81. Harris does not just want to save humanity—he wants to “create the world anew.” This requires “the building of strong communities” where everyone will think like Sam Harris (End of Faith, pp. 24, 21). Adolf Hitler, in a speech of 1937, stated that “Its [the National Socialist Party’s] aim is to set up a strong community, to rule wisely and sensibly, to the end that it may thus make life possible for all its fellow citizens” [May 1937, Hitler Speeches and Quotes (London 2008), p. 63]. So, two questions:
(a) Life would be so much easier in a “unified” community where everyone marched to the beat of the same drum – but is that what life is all about?
(b) Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Castro also had (like Harris) the dream of a humanity organized according to their abstract intellectual ideal. Isn’t the Christian belief that we cannot have complete harmony in this life much more realistic?
82. If some atheist or secularist wants nothing to do with me, the Bible-believing Christian, while I am willing to reach out to and communicate with him (which has happened to me more than once), which of us is the most intolerant?
83. If there were a God, would he be obligated to prove his existence to people who mocked and despised him?
84. If you should come to believe in God, what changes would this require in your life?
85. Isn’t fear of change a natural human tendency?
86. What would it be like to live forever and never die?
87. If atheism is correct, are all of our deepest aspirations for meaning, love, significance, purpose, and hope futile and vain?
88. Is atheism a depressing view of life?
89. If you ever have the thought “There must be something more,” will you stifle it, or pursue it to the end?
90. Do you ever feel that there is something missing in your life?
91. Pascal says that people disbelieve in God not because of their reason, but because of their passions. What personal reasons might you have for not wanting to believe in God?
92. Who decided that your belief in the non-existence of God should be the default position?
93. Who laid down the law that atheists don’t have to prove their position “because you don’t have to prove a negative”? If I am accused of a crime, and I present a solid alibi, isn’t that proving a negative (“I did not commit the crime”)?
94. What scientific evidence do you have to prove God does not exist – not inferences or arguments, but evidence?
95. If God whispers to you and asks you to change your mind, will you listen?
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\Do you think Sam Harris is out to lunch?\
No.
\Millions of people share Osama bin Laden’s ideas. Should they be killed?\
This is a strange question. It implies that our role is to dispense justice, killing people who ought to be killed. That’s wrong. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/4×9/crime_and_punishment/ .
We want to maximize some measure of goodness in the world. And we want to survive. We have the right to kill people who want to kill us and are able to kill us. Osama was able. Most of these millions are not.
In 30 years, if technology has developed so that a small group of people can easily and cheaply kill many millions of people far away, then we probably will have to either die, or kill off entire societies if they reliably generate thousands of such extremists. But today, we have the luxury of not needing to do that, so we can tell ourselves we are above that.
\Christians, not just Osama bin Laden, might be included among those whose dangerous ideas require their elimination. Do you think Christians should be killed? If you answer “No,” how do we know this is a truthful answer?\
No, but I get the feeling you’re not going to believe me anyway. If I were living in 16th century Spain, and were forced to attend mass, and forced to mouth platitudes I didn’t believe, made to renounce reason at the whim of the Catholic hierarchy, and threatened with torture and death for questioning any of the above, then I would say, Yes, the Christian ruling class should be killed, like any other undeserving, self-interested, tyrannical ruling class. But I’m living in the 21st century, and Christians are now capable of tolerating other religions and separating Church and State.
\Wouldn’t it be justified to kill some people to save humanity?\
Of course. Society already agrees it’s justified to kill some people because they killed some other people, or because they defied military orders, both of which are much less important reasons than saving humanity.
It’s even considered justified to put people in jail for 20 years, which is not very different from killing them, for selling other people recreational drugs.
But you’re not talking about saving humanity. You’re talking about a temporary political/cultural struggle, in which humans will continue on pretty much the same as before no matter which side wins.
\Doesn’t considering people to be nothing but matter with no immortal souls make it easier to justify killing them?\
No; it makes it harder to justify killing them. If someone is immortal, why not kill them? What’s the difference between living 70 years on Earth and 70 trillion years in Heaven, vs. 30 years on Earth and 69,999,999,999,960 years in Heaven? Believing in immortality makes it easier to justify killing people, like the Spanish conquistadors who baptized native infants and then bashed their brains out, to save their immortal souls.
The comment about \nothing but matter\ is strange. Do you think that atheists don’t believe in love, joy, or friendship? Do you think that atheists believe in the spiritual? To us, there is nothing but matter, and matter encompasses all these things. The world is just as wonderful to us as it is to you; and all these wonderful things take place with matter. \Matter\ for us is just the same as \matter plus spirit\ is to you. So using the phrase \nothing but matter\ shows a gross, basic misunderstanding of atheism.
\Life would be so much easier in a “unified” community where everyone marched to the beat of the same drum – but is that what life is all about?\
It is the religious who want to have a unified community, not the atheists. Atheists don’t have anything in common with each other, except the absence of a few beliefs. Adherents to a religion do.
\If there were a God, would he be obligated to prove his existence to people who mocked and despised him?\
If there were a God, it wouldn’t much matter what we thought he was obligated to do.
\If you should come to believe in God, what changes would this require in your life?\
There may be a God. This wouldn’t require any changes in my life unless I knew something about this God.
\What would it be like to live forever and never die? \
Depends on the life. It could be very nice. But if you aren’t changing, then you’re not alive; and if you are changing, eventually you’re someone else. No person alive now can live forever in any meaningful sense.
\If atheism is correct, are all of our deepest aspirations for meaning, love, significance, purpose, and hope futile and vain?\
No. Again, the question is strange: How can anyone who needs to posit a God to dictate meaning, significance, and purpose, claim to believe in meaning, significance, or purpose? It is precisely because such a person cannot believe life as we know it has meaning, significance, or purpose, that they must invent a God to define such things by fiat.
“Pascal says that people disbelieve in God not because of their reason, but because of their passions.”
Pascal said that not because of his reason, but because of his passions.
“Who decided that your belief in the non-existence of God should be the default position?”
If there is a default position, it would be not having thought about the matter, or not having a belief one way or the other.
\Who laid down the law that atheists don’t have to prove their position “because you don’t have to prove a negative”?\
This one is scary. So you believe that atheists should be required to prove their position? What happens if they don’t?
\If I am accused of a crime, and I present a solid alibi, isn’t that proving a negative (“I did not commit the crime”)?\
The implication of your using this example, is that you believe that people should be presumed guilty until proven innocent.
\What scientific evidence do you have to prove God does not exist – not inferences or arguments, but evidence?\
It is a waste of time to try to prove God does not exist, since, as I noted above, we can do nothing with the information unless we can know something about this God. Therefore the only worthwhile activity is either trying to divine the nature of God, or evaluate the claims of particular beliefs about God.
I feel like you have studied Harris’ book closely, but resisted it at every step, considering every idea only long enough to come up with some surface-level objection to it, always careful to shield yourself from being contaminated with a true understanding of it.
The general pattern to your questions is one I see in many religious people. You feel that you lack something; and you make up a God to try to fill this void. The existence of other people who don’t feel this void terrifies you. Admitting that they don’t would suggest the problem was with you. So you try and try to insist that they must feel this void, they must have this empty, amoral, purposeless attitude towards life. And because this is what you’re really thinking about, all the fears and problems that you personally have show up in your arguments as things you accuse atheists of having. The objections that religious people make against atheism tell us more about religious people than they do about atheists.
If life whispers to you and asks you to change your mind, will you listen?