What makes you happy?

Harris:  Well it’s . . .  an elusive thing to get a hold of.  I think the absence of neurosis, the absence of fear, the absence of anxiety.  When you recognize what consciousness is like when those states of mind have subsided, it seems to me intrinsically happy.  It’s intrinsically at ease.  It’s intrinsically peaceful, and at times even blissful.  It’s just the lack of complication – just merely being aware of one’s self in the present moment, and not continually being in conversation with one’s self about the present moment and just thinking, thinking, thinking incessantly.  When that can subside, either because you’re meditating, or because you’re enjoying yourself so much in sports.  Or you’re having sex.  I mean any peak experience has this feature of having your attention really focused in a very uncomplicated way on your experience in the present.  And that state of mind is what I would call happiness.  And all of the obstacles to being at rest in that state of mind, I would . . . I think of as the obstacles to happiness.  And those are things like, you know, a neurotic self-absorption with how other people perceive you; or anxiety about the future; or regret about the thing you didn’t say yesterday.  Those are the ways . . . those are the modes of thought that keep us from recognizing that it’s possible to be really at ease in the present, and happy with . . . happy before anything happens.  I mean to have happiness that’s not contingent upon the next good thing that’s gonna happen, but to just actually be at rest with what is happening right now.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

 Collectively, what should we be doing?

Harris:  Well I think we . . .  It’s really just a matter of conversation, and releasing these taboos that prevent us from applying pressure to people’s religious beliefs, particularly at the level of politics.   You know we had this recent Republican debate where three presidents . . . or candidates for the presidency of the United States raised their hands to testify that they don’t believe in evolution.  And there’s no follow-up question, and there’s no penalty paid by these guys endorsing the starkest ignorance about the state of our knowledge . . . about biology.  And then worse than that, the New York Times publishes a further defense about intelligent design by one of these candidates, Sam Brownback, a week later.  This has to change.  I mean there has to be a price paid for being . . .   You know, if one of the candidates said he thought the earth was flat, that would be synonymous with mental illness in that conte . . .  We would just be worried about his health at that point, and his political life essentially would be over.  And I think the same kind of . . .  There’s a reason why people who are certain that Elvis is still alive don’t get promoted to positions of great power and responsibility in our society.  And it’s not like we’ve passed a law against Elvis worship.  We haven’t . . .  We just cease to take these people seriously.  And I think we have to just cease to take people’s religious certainties, metaphysical certainties, certainties about the divine origin of certain books seriously.  And that can happen very, very, quickly.  And I think we should not be . . .  I don’t think we should doubt that a sea change in our discourse is possible, because it clearly is on that . . .  Look how racism has undergone a . . .  has fallen into disrepute in the last 40 years.  Fifty years ago, 60 years ago there were editorials in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times that were starkly racist by today’s standards.  And we have made real progress in a very short span, and I think we could make the same kind of progress in talking about religion.  It’s just, you know, whether we’re likely to do that, I don’t know.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

 Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Harris:  Well I can’t say that I’m an optimist.  I see that this . . . Our emotional attachment to these myths is so well subscribed and so deep.  And the belief . . .  Even people who are not religious believe that everyone else needs to be religious.  It’s like, “I don’t need it” – it’s the ultimate condescending attitude – “but everyone else does.”  This is a myth that is also widely subscribed even among atheists.  So the inertia in the system around really just having an honest conversation about what it’s reasonable to believe, and what religion is doing in the world is profound.  So I’m certainly not optimistic, but I don’t know what else to do.  And I see how . . . how tissue-thin these beliefs actually are.  I mean it would be so easy to just unburden ourselves of all of this mythology.  It would be an accomplishment of a single generation if we just taught our children reasonably about the Bible’s place in literature.  You know the Bible is not science, and it’s not particularly good philosophy; but it is literature.  Let’s read the Bible, and then let’s read all these other books about dead gods like _______ “Metamorphoses.”  If we taught the Bible and the Koran in that way, in a single generation, the God of Abraham would take his place alongside Zeus, and Poseidon, and Apollo and the other dead gods, and none of this would be a problem.  But that . . .  Is that likely to happen?  I think not.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

 When you read the newspaper or watch the news, what issues stand out for you?

Harris:  Well what astonishes me when I read the newspaper or watch the news is how many problems are the direct result of what people believe about God.  I mean there are days when I open the New York Times where fully half of the stories – in a way that’s unacknowledged by the paper – relate to people’s religious convictions.  It’s a matter . . .  I mentioned the Virginia Tech shooting.  The role that religion played in providing a context for this shooting was never really discussed in the media. But we just hear that the mother happened to be a devout Christian, and schlepped her child from church to church in search of an exorcism.  I just see continually our attention bound up in these competing ideas about God.  At best, this is often just a waste of time.  But at worst, it is just . . . it is manufacturing violence, and unnecessary conflict, and misuses of our resources.  And what’s more, it is very rare that we acknowledge . . .  I mean now we’re beginning to acknowledge the role that Islam is playing in Muslim terrorism; but even that has been very slow to come.  I mean it has been obvious for many, many years – long before September 11th – that a certain style of Muslim infatuation was leading to this kind of jihad-y behavior.  We’re . . . Because of the respect we afford religious faith, we are very slow to acknowledge its cause or role in conflict.

 What is the struggle in what you do?

Harris:  Well I think the biggest challenge as a matter of discourse and debate – and certainly the most frustrating challenge – is what comes from otherwise secular and even non-believing people who are just reluctant to admit how much mad work is being done because of religion in this world.  I mean they either can’t believe that people really believe this stuff . . .  So when a suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowd of children, this secular type of person will imagine, “That wasn’t religion.  I mean it had nothing to do with a belief in paradise and 72 virgins.  Who could believe that?  This is a . . . some kind of psychological aberration.  Or it’s caused by economic desperation, or policies in the region.  I mean it’s not a matter of metaphysical beliefs.”  I think the jury is in on this, and we know that people really do believe these things.  They are telling us ad nauseum that they believe these things.  And I don’t think there’s any more powerful rhetorical device for emphasis than blowing yourself up or flying a plane into a building.  And I mean these people are really willing to die for what they believe.  And we know it’s not a matter of economics.  I’m gonna speak specifically to the Muslim word for a moment.   We know it’s not a matter of economics and education, because this recent plot in the U.K., these are all doctors who are . . . who are aspiring suicide bombers.  And you know, how much more education did these doctors need?  One was a neurosurgeon.  You find me a neurosurgeon suicide bomber, and you tell me the problem is education and economics, it clearly isn’t.  And . . . but the deeper problem, and I think a far more sinister problem, is that it is possible to be well educated – so well educated that you can be a neurosurgeon – and still believe that you can get 72 virgins in paradise.  And this is made possible by the fact that we have allowed a certain mode of thought – religion – to thrive in a cocoon of this sphere of protection from criticism.  It is just taboo to criticize people’s religious beliefs.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

 Is there a possibility of a creator?

Well there are many problems with this idea that . . .  I mean first of all, that’s an unfalsifiable thesis.  And there are infinite numbers of unfalsifiable theses that you’re not tempted to believe.  And we could believe that we’re in the matrix.  I mean you could go down that path.  And there’s a lot that could be asserted by people who are sure we’re in the matrix, and some alien civilization is simulating us on their hard drive.  One problem is that we have many holy books authored by the creator of the universe and they’re in conflict.  You know, they’re not . . .  The New Testament makes it perfectly clear that Jesus is the Son of God – really the Son of God – and you have to believe this.  Otherwise you’re gonna spend eternity in hell.  The Koran says twice that Jesus was not the Son of God.  And anyone who believes he’s the Son of God will spend eternity in hell.  I mean this leaves as much room or compromise as a coin toss.  So let’s say we just knew that one of those claims was right.  You know, we have a universe . . . Now we’ve eliminated all the other possibilities.  We’re living in this challenging universe where God has given us a highly imperfect book and asked us to grapple with it.  But now we have the biblical claim – the New Testament claim to the divinity of Jesus – the necessity of believing in that.  And the Koranic claim that belief in Jesus’ identity leads to damnation.  Now which is more likely?  That one of those is right and the other is wrong?  Or that we have these competing tribes that were toiling in the context of just abysmal ignorance about the world, and the birth of the cosmos, and the destiny of any individual soul after death.  You know I would put my lot in with a wider view of the circumstance.  But even if we granted your premise that, “No, no.  There’s a good reason to believe that one of these books is perfect,” we’re still with a coin toss situation.  We don’t know whether to be a Christian or a Muslim.  And we’re noticing that people are . . . are choosing basically on the basis of accidents of birth.  I mean you’re just accidentally born in Afghanistan and you choose to be a Muslim.  And likewise with Christianity elsewhere.  It is a . . . it’s a very strange sort of loving God who would have created these circumstances.  By mere accident of birth, you are raised to believe that a certain book was . . .  And let’s say rightly raised to believe that this book was the perfect book.  But if you happen to be born in China, you know, you go for centuries without hearing about this.  It’s a strange . . . a . . . for I think obvious reasons, a totally provincial and implausible scenario.  And yet it’s the scenario that most people believe in the 21st century.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

Do atheists take a literalist approach to scripture?

Harris:  Well this is a common criticism – the idea that the atheist if guilty of a literalist reading of Scripture no better than the reading of fundamentalist.  And that it’s a very naïve way of approaching religion, and that there’s a lot more sophisticated and nuanced view of religion ______ and the atheist as disregarding that.  A few problems with this.  Anyone making that argument is failing to acknowledge just how many people really do approach these texts literally or functionally – whether they’re selective literalists, or literal all the way down the line.  There is a . . .  there are certain passages in Scripture that just cannot be read figuratively.  And people really do live by the lights of what is literally laid out in these books.  So you know, the Koran says “hate the infidel.”  And Muslims hate the infidel because the Koran spells it out ad nauseum.  Now it’s true that you can cherry pick Scripture, and you can look for all the good parts.  You can ignore where it says in Leviticus where it says that if a woman is not a virgin on her wedding night, you’re supposed to stone her to death on her father’s doorstep.  You can ignore that.  And to my knowledge, all Jews and Christians do ignore that.  In fact that’s not true.  There are some Christians who actually do – you know, constructionist Christians, diminuinist Christians in the U.S. – who will say, you know, I think the penalty for adultery should be death.  So there are people who have the courage of their convictions.  But most of us . . . most religious people ignore those passages which really can only be read literally, and say that, “Oh, they were only appropriate for the time.”  And, “They don’t apply now.”  And likewise, Muslims try to have the same reading of passages that advocate holy war.  Well they say, “Well these were appropriate to those battles that Mohammed was fighting; but now we don’t have to fight those battles.”  This is all a good thing, but we should recognize what is . . . what’s at . . . what’s happening here.  People are feeling pressure from a host of all too human concerns that having nothing, in principle, to do with God.  I mean secularism, and human rights, and democracy, and scientific progress – these have made certain passages in Scripture untenable, okay?  So this is coming from outside religion, and religion is now making a great show of its sophistication in kind of grappling with these pressures.  Once again, this is . . . this is an example of religion losing the argument with modernity.  It’s an example of . . .  You know, the recent shooting at Virginia Tech.  The mother of the shooter recognized that there was something wrong with her son.  You know, he was suffering from some kind of mental problem.  In the context of her rather doctrinary Christianity, she did not take him to a psychiatrist.  She took him from church to church in search of exorcism.  She actually found a church that performed an exorcism.  Just picture this.  There’s some . . .  We have an atrocity in the making.  We have a dangerously mental ill college student.  We have a concerned mother whose world view about mental health is trimmed down through the keyhole of a kind of medieval Christianity.  And we have a church willing to put forward its expertise in the performance of an exorcism.  It would be a lot better if everyone involved had a 21st century mental health.  No one has . . .  Moderate people, moderate Christians, and Jews, and Muslims have to look at this situation and say, “Well there’s something wrong here.  It would be better to go to a psychiatrist.”  But the problem is you can’t show what’s wrong in terms of Scripture.  You can’t show what’s wrong in terms of religion; because in terms of religion, the mother was right.  I mean there are demons.  Jesus cast them out, you know?  I mean demonic possession is actually a problem.  The only reason why we don’t take it seriously because we have a wider view of the universe.  The universe . . .  The idea of the universe did not come to us from religion.  It came from science.

Is it possible that God was speaking in metaphors?

Harris: Let’s just grant the possibility that there is a creator God who’s omniscient, who occasionally authors books.                  And he’s gonna give us a book – the most useful book.  He’s a loving God.  He’s a compassionate God, and he’s gonna give us a guide to live.  He’s got a scribe.  The scribe’s gonna write it down.  What’s gonna be in that book?  I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity.  I mean there is not a single line in the bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a 1st century person.  I mean there’s not one reference to anything.  There are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why.  There’s nothing about electricity.  There’s nothing about DNA.  There’s nothing about infectious disease or the principles of infectious disease.  There’s . . .  there’s nothing particularly useful, and there’s a lot of Iron Age barbarism in there and superstition.  This does not. . .  This is not a candidate book  . . .  I mean I can go to any Barnes and Noble blindfolded and pull a book off a shelf which is gonna have more relevance, more wisdom for the 21st century than the Bible or the Koran.  I mean it’s really not an exaggeration.  Every one of our specific sciences has superceded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.  From cosmology, to psychology, to economics, we know more about ourselves than anyone writing the Bible or the Koran did.  And that is a distinctly inconvenient fact for the . . . for anyone wanting to believe that this book was dictated by the creator of the universe.

 How do you define good and evil?

Harris:  I think that there’s this myth that unless you think one of your books was dictated by the creator of the universe, and there he told you what good and evil are, you’ll just have no basis for morality.  You need religion in some sense to have a generalizable morality.  Without religion, there’s no way to say the Nazis were really wrong to do what they did, or believe what they believed.  I think that’s clearly untrue.  I think we have some very serviceable intuitions about . . . about what good and evil are, and what is . . . what constitutes an ethical life.  And we converge on those intuitions.  I mean every culture agrees that cruelty is wrong; that taking pleasure in the suffering of others is wrong within the context of your “in group”.  I mean many cultures think it’s good to take pleasure in the suffering of people who are not part of your tribe.  But in terms of, you know, who you’re going to admit into your moral sphere, we have some very serviceable intuitions about how we treat the people we accept in our sphere.  And the challenge for modernity . . . the challenge for civilization is to extend the sphere of our moral community to include the entire species, and even other species so that we really don’t have these “us and them” boundaries that we have.  And our “us and them” boundaries are really propped up by dogmatism.  I mean they’re propped up by nationalism.  They’re propped up by racism.  And there are many ways to divide your world dogmatically; but the most insidious “us and them” boundary, as far as I’m concerned, is religion.  It really is . . .  Religion causes a transcendental object between you and this other person.   I mean not only are you different because of your skin color or your political persuasion, or because you speak a different language.  You are different for all time for what you believe about God and what he believes about God are so opposed that it’s gonna require eternity to, you know . . . an eternity of punishment, in his case, to work out that difference.  So I think it’s a very . . .  I think our moral . . .  This question of morality is an important one to focus on, because many people are attached to religion not because they’re convinced that the metaphysics make sense, but because they just see no other alternative to teaching kids, you know, right and wrong.  I think there’s a few obvious things to point out.  One is that we clearly don’t get our morality out of our holy books.  Because when you go into the holy books, they are bursting with cruelty.  The Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran – these are profoundly cruel and morally ambiguous books at best.   I mean you know, the Ten Commandments . . . the first four have nothing to do with morality.  They have to do with theological offenses.   You know, “Don’t take any other gods before me.  Don’t take God’s name in vain.  No graven images,” etc.  “Don’t work on the Sabbath.”  What are you supposed to do when people break those commandments?  You’re supposed to kill them.   I mean this is unbelievably immoral.  And yet we’re not doing that now not because the book itself is so wise.  I mean, to take a more relevant example, slavery.  I mean slavery is clearly endorsed in the Bible.  It’s endorsed in the Old Testament.  It’s endorsed in the New Testament.  We all agree that slavery is wrong.  We conquer that ground morally through some very hard fought conversations, and also wars.  Religion was of very little help in that.  I mean there was . . .  It’s true that abolitionists were cherry picking Scripture trying to find ways to justify their project.  But their project wasn’t coming from Scripture, because Scripture is clear.  It supports slavery.  There was . . .  There’s no . . .  The evil of slavery is not recognized in the Bible, and it’s certainly not repudiated in the Bible.  And so the . . . the slave holders of the South were on the winning side of that theological argument.  And it . . .  Religion was an impediment to making that moral progress.  Again, the fact . . .  Even if it were not an impediment – even if it were extremely useful – that would not be a reason to believe that any of our books were dictated by an omniscient being.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

 Can religion be a force for good? 

Harris: I’m not saying that religion can’t ever be useful or inspire good things.  It certainly can, and has, and will.  And that’s better than the alternative.  But there’s a distinction.  We have to recognize there’s a distinction between something being true and something being useful.  Every religion . . . every benign religion . . . every religion that’s actually helping somebody sometimes could be functioning like a placebo.  It could be totally barren of content and still useful in certain circumstances.  I mean I could invent a religion right now which we know is not true, and would be extremely useful if I could spread it to billions.  I could invent it right now.  This religion is . . . The principles are “Do your best to love your neighbor, and your family, and every person you meet; encourage your children to study science and mathematics to the best of their abilities; and if you don’t do this, you will be punished for eternity by 17 demons after death.”  Now I have no doubt that if I could spread this to billions, this would be a better religion than the religions we’ve got.  It would be better than Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam.  You’d have no suicide bombers.  What you would have is a generation of children bearing down on science and mathematics to the best of their abilities encouraged by their otherwise ethical parents, all under the compulsion of “do this or else these 17 demons will torture you for eternity.”  Does this . . . Does the usefulness of this . . . I mean we would live in a much better world, no question.  Would the useful of this suggest for a moment that the 17 demons actually exist?  Would it provide a reason to believe in these 17 demons?  Not even slightly.  So that’s the divide here.  There’s . . .  There’s a big difference between the utility of an idea, or the consoling nature of an idea, or the idea that God has a plan for me, or everything happens for a reason.  And the idea that these there are consoling are quite distinct from whether there are good reasons to believe them.

Recorded on: Jul 4 2007 

 Do you have any existential worries?

Harris:  Well I do have existential words.  And I, I think like everybody else, am concerned about death. You know it’s . . .  Death is, in some ways, unacceptable.  It’s just an astonishing fact of our being here that we die; but I think worse than that is if we live long enough, we lose everyone we love in this world.  I mean people die and disappear, and we’re left with this stark mystery: just the sheer not knowing of what happened to them.  And into this void, religion comes rushing with a very consoling story saying, “Nothing happened to them.  They’re in a better place, and you’re gonna meet up with them after you die.  You’re gonna get everything you want after you die.  Death is an illusion.”  There’s no question that that . . . if you could believe it, that would pay emotional dividends.  I mean there’s no other story you can tell somebody who has lost her daughter to cancer, say, to make her feel good.  You know, it is consoling to believe that the daughter was just taken up with Jesus, and everyone’s gonna be reunited in a few short years.  There’s no replacement for that.  There doesn’t need to be a replacement for that.  I think we have to be . . .  We have to just witness the cost of that.  There are many obvious costs of that way of thinking.  One is we just don’t teach people how to grieve.  You know, religion is the epitome, the antithesis of teaching your children how to grieve.  You tell your child that, “Grandma is in heaven”, and there’s nothing to be sad about.  That’s religion.  It would be better to equip your child for the reality of this life, which is, you know, we . . . death is a fact.  And we don’t know what happens after death.  And I’m not pretending to know that you get a dial tone after death.  I don’t know what happens after the physical brain dies.  I don’t know what the relationship between consciousness and the physical world is.  I don’t think anyone does know.  Now I think there are many reasons to be doubtful of naïve conceptions about the soul, and about this idea that you could just migrate to a better place after death.  But I simply don’t know about what . . .  I don’t know what I believe about death.  And I don’t think it’s necessary to know in order to live as sanely and ethically and happily as possible.  I don’t think you get . . .  You don’t get anything worth getting by pretending to know things you don’t know.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

 What motivates your work? 

Harris:  Well it seems to be a moral and intellectual necessity for me to call a spade a spade.  I mean, to argue against _______ ignorance.  I mean there’s a certain species of ignorance that we call religion, that we call faith, that is just given a free ride in our society.  And it’s not that it just thrives in a benign way.  You know, it’s not like astrology where millions of people are into it, but nothing really matters.  Nothing really turns on their astrological beliefs.  This is really . . .  I mean you could not get elected to high office in this country without pretending to believe that one of your books was authored by the creator of the universe.  That, it seems to me, is a problem.  And it’s a problem . . .  Even if we didn’t have to worry about the conflict that we have in the Muslim world, which is explicitly theological . . .  Even if our only problem was the role that religion is playing in our society; the way in which it’s blocking medical research; the way in which it’s causing us to debate things like gay marriage as if it’s the greatest moral issue of the time.  Meanwhile we have huge problems like global warming, and a variety of merging conflicts, and nuclear proliferation.  I mean we’re not spending . . .  We don’t spend the same kind of emotional energy on nuclear proliferation that we spend on abortion and gay marriage.  That is a . . .  It really is a psychotically strange subversion of our better interest.  I mean, you know, we have some real problems in this world that we could creatively solve.  And yet we’re debating things like gay marriage.  That is a legacy of faith . . . that is a legacy of Christian religion, in this case.  And so it’s something that I feel that public intellectuals really have to be moved to speak honestly about.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

 What is religion? 

Harris:  Well I think we are misled by this very term “religion”.  We use that word “religion” as though it meant a distinct thing . . . as though it meant one phenomenon in human discourse.  And there’s really a range of infatuations and practices that go by the name of religion.  And therefore many points on this continuum don’t have much in common with others.  So if you take a religion like “Jainism” – a religion in India – its core principle is non-violence.  Now there is where Gandhi got his conception of non-violence.  And the Jains are vegetarian.  They have no doctrine of holy war.  In fact, they don’t even have a doctrine – a proper doctrine of self-defense.  I mean they’re pacifists.  They don’t want to hurt a fly.  And then on the other end of the continuum, you have something like Islam where it has explicitly a doctrine of holy war, and a notion of . . .  Combat and death, in certain contexts, is actually the highest obligation a religious person can fulfill.  So these are both religions.  And so religion is a word like “sport”.  You have a sport like badminton, and you have a sport like, you know, boxing.  They’re not . . .  they’re both sports that, you know, one is much more dangerous.  So I’m concerned . . .  I’m obviously more concerned about religions like Islam that . . . wherein you have this marriage of a variety of spiritual and ethical concerns; but also certain kinds of metaphysical certainties that inspire people to not only die, but to kill others in the process.  And you don’t have that in other religions.  So I think that we have to be clear about how this term religion can mislead us. 

 Why do we need religion?

I view religions as essentially failed sciences.  I mean religion was the discourse that we had when all causes in the universe were opaque.  We didn’t know . . .  We didn’t know the basis of anything.  We didn’t know why we were here.  We didn’t know how diseases spread, or what disease was.  We didn’t know how people . . . why people died early, and why others flourished.  We don’t know what’s causing thunderstorms, or what’s causing crops to fail.  And we very naturally . . .  As a cognitive and behavioral imperative, we formed descriptions of the world, and we tried to figure out what’s going on.  We tell ourselves stories about our origins, and about where we’re going, and about causes in the world.  And those stories, given our just pervasive ignorance and our disposition to see agency in the world . . . to see, you know . . . to feel ourselves in relationship to the world, these stories entail being in relation to invisible friends and enemies.  And so we have this parent figure in the sky who’s gonna take care of things if you live rightly.  And we have other demonic presences that we should be really worried about.  And gradually, what you see happening is that religion . . .  As rationality and dozens of specific sciences were birthed in the human conversation, you see religion on a hundred fronts losing the argument with science.  And then we see it on the front of human health and disease.  Religion . . .  You know, it used to be that you could get a diagnosis of demonic possession.  That was a, you know, a reasonable thing to believe you had if you were having seizures.  You know, but now we have a science of neurology, and we have a science of epilepsy.  And so when your kid has seizures, you know, you don’t go to the church to get him diagnosed and treated by exorcism.  And so that’s a good thing.  I’m saying that religion is losing the argument on every other front.  It’s losing the argument ethically.  It will lose the argument spiritually.  I mean we will understand spiritual experience so well at some point at the level of the brain; at the level of the way in which using attention in certain ways can change human experience.  We’ll understand it in a way that makes a mockery of this kind of denominational, religion talk about Jesus and grace; or about Buddha and magic powers.  And that will break down in the same way that it has broken down in medicine . . . in medicine.  That’s a process I think we just have to be honest about and let unfold.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

What do you believe?

Harris:  Well I believe in the power of conversation to get human beings to converge on a common project in which people can collaborate in an open-ended way, and in a non-divisive way, and in a way that never requires an appeal to violence.  And we have that in science.  We have that in much of intellectual discourse.  We very much don’t have that in religion.  I mean it’s just . . .  There’s nothing that a fundamentalist Christian and a fundamentalist Muslim can say to one another to put their beliefs on the table for revision.  I mean this is what dogmatism is.  It is a willingness to believe things for bad reasons, and an unwillingness to have your rather tenuous reasons challenged.  I mean it’s . . .  You’re saying, “I believe this no matter what you or anyone else says.”  So that’s the antithesis of conversation.  It really is a conversation stopper.  So that’s . . . that’s why I paint a very stark difference between faith and reason.  I mean reason . . . if you’re reasonable, if you’re interested in how the world works and what is true altogether, you are open.  You are, by definition, open to further conversation; to more argument; to more evidence.  And you’re in fact interested to find out if you’re mistaken about anything.  If you are not predisposed to that open-ended conversation, you really have . . . you have rendered yourself immune to influence from the world.  Influence apart from having someone, you know, pull out the guns on you.  So there are certain people, because of their dogmatism, who have made themselves impossible to talk to.  I mean there’s nothing that you’re gonna say to get Osama Bin Laden to reconsider his view of the world.  And it’s a unique feature of religion that we defend this mode of being in a religious context in a way that we would never tolerate it in another context.  I mean if you’re . . .  If somebody has medical beliefs . . .  If your doctor says, “I know that this cures cancer, but I’m not gonna tell you how, or why.  Or I’m not gonna have my data challenged . . .”  I mean that’s a mode of talk, within a medical context, that . . .  You would never get through medical school appealing to those kinds of intuitions.  That really is the core of faith-based religion . . . this idea that there are certain things – like that the Bible is the perfect word of God, or that the Koran is the perfect word of God – that just have to be accepted, cannot be challenged.  And in certain context – certainly within the Muslim world – you can die for calling those certainties into question.  I mean it literally is a capital offense to wonder whether the Koran may not be the perfect word of the creator of the universe.  I mean there’s just . . .  And it used to be a killing offense in Christianity.  It’s just . . . we have moderated the western religion – Judaism and Christianity – to a remarkable degree because of the last 200 years of scientific and political progress.

Recrorded on: July 4 2007 

Is there certainty in science?

Harris:  Certainty is, I think, a false goal.  I mean we’re not achieving . . .  We’re achieving functional certainties in science and in just . . . in our day-to-day lives.  I mean it’s a functional certainty that I’m sitting here talking to you, though it’s possible I could be dreaming or, you know, deceived by an evil demon.  Those kinds of philosophical, ______ worries don’t really relate too much to the ordinary practice of science, the very useful practice of science, and our ordinary task of just negotiating our lives and finding happiness in this world.  We recognize that there’s a range . . . that there’s a continuum of, “I’m not sure, there’s a coin toss, fifty-fifty” understanding of a circumstance to being functionally certain about what is so.  And many people are pretending to be functionally certain, or believe themselves to be functionally certain about things like Jesus is gonna come back and judge the world in their lifetime.  Twenty percent of the American population claims to be functionally certain that that is gonna come to pass, and 78% think that Jesus is gonna come back sometime – not necessarily in their lifetime.  And these certainties do real work for us.  I mean the person who is certain that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception is the person who wants to veto stem cell research, despite the fact that tens of millions of people are suffering from conditions for which stem cell research is the best line of research to generate therapies.  So these are ideas that are not just of academic interest, or person, private, or spiritual relevance.  I mean these are shaping policy.  They’re shaping a national conversation.  And then when you look to the Muslim world, they are causing people to blow themselves up on street corners.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

 How do you define faith?

Harris: Well we use the word “faith” in a variety of ways.  And there are certain senses of the term that I think are unobjectionable.  I mean you tell someone to have faith in themselves, for instance.  That is not to recommend a kind of delusional certainty.  It is to recommend a kind of positive attitude in the face of uncertainty.  I think that’s totally healthy and necessary, and we should have that kind of faith.  We shouldn’t confuse that kind of faith with the faith that really is the permission that religious people give one another to believe things strongly on bad evidence.  It’s very explicit things about the nature of the cosmos, what happens after death, the moral structure to this universe.  So you have people believing that they’re gonna get 72 virgins in paradise if they die in the right circumstances – in defense of Islam, in this case.  That is a proposition about metaphysics, about what happens after death, and about what this almighty sadist in the sky wants human beings to do while alive.  And it’s a proposition for which there really is no good evidence.  And so that kind of faith – the faith that says, “It’s okay to believe that,” despite the fact that there’s no good reason to believe it . . . that there’s no good justification to believe that . . . that’s the kind of faith I’m criticizing.

Recorded on: July 4 2007 

Who are you?

Harris: Sam Harris  Title?  I guess “Infidel”.

Harris: I’m from Southern California, and I was raised in a totally secular home. So I’m not reacting . . . In my criticism of religion, I’m not reacting against any kind of fundamentalist upbringing; but nor was I told that there was no God. It really was not a subject of conversation. So my rather strident criticism of religion is really a product of very recent events. In my case, it’s September 11, 2001. So my upbringing isn’t so informative of my views at the moment.

Why did 9/11 spark your interest in religion?

Harris: Well it was two things. One, just the rather obvious liability of religious certainty was made extraordinarily clear on that day. We were having people flying planes into our buildings for explicitly religious reasons. Nut what was also made clear was that we were going to deny the religious rationale because of our own attachment to our own religious myths. The only language we could find as a culture to comfort ourselves was to endorse our own God-talk. So I suddenly found faith playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game where we as a nation, in prosecuting our war on terror, which was obviously the necessary thing to do, though calling it “The War on Terror” I think is rather silly . . . But we were consoling ourselves with our own religious certainties, you know, very much in the language of Christian fundamentalism. The president comes before Congress and talks about God not being indifferent to freedom and fear. As an atheist, I hear that exactly the way I would hear someone saying, “Zeus is not indifferent to freedom and fear.” It is an uncannily strange and empty utterance. And yet, our culture is now programmed not to notice how strange and empty it is. And it does really significant work. And so we see things like stem cell research and other causes that . . . upon which the lives and happiness of millions of people really turn get subverted by religious thinking . . . explicitly religious thinking.

Was faith ever an option?

Harris: Well I spent a lot of time thinking about and exploring spiritual experience and our contemplative traditions, mostly in an Eastern context of Buddhism and Hinduism; but I’ve also read much of the contemplative literature of Christianity, and Judaism, and Islam. So I’ve been interested in religion for at least 20 years, and interested in spiritual experience, and have spent a lot of time practicing meditations, and studying with various meditation masters in India and Nepal, and spending months and weeks on retreat just practicing meditation very much the way a Monastic would in the Buddhist tradition. So I’m . . . The concerns of religious people . . . the ethical, and the spiritual concerns of religious people are something that I think I understand and I take very seriously. I take very seriously the possibility of experiencing the world the way Buddha, and Jesus, and other famous patriarchs or matriarchs seemed to have experienced the world. And I think we wanna actualize that kind of experience. I mean if it’s possible to love your neighbor as yourself, I’m interested in learning how to do that. I just don’t think we have to believe we have to learn anything on insufficient evidence in order to do that.

Recorded on: July 4 2007