The Menace of Faith-Based Unreason

Sam Harris is at it again


He opens in characteristic Harris fashion, with a jab to the guts:

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe—at this very moment—that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this? No. The entirety of atheism is contained in this response

But this piece, while less of an emotional brick to the head than “There Is No God and You Know It” is a bit fuller on the proposal that atheism is not only the good way to go, it may be the only way to go, if we are not all to be joining up with Vehement(thank you, Supergirl!).

When we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; when we have no reasons, or bad ones, we have lost our connection to the world and to one another. Atheism is nothing more than a commitment to the most basic standard of intellectual honesty: One’s convictions should be proportional to one’s evidence. Pretending to be certain when one isn’t—indeed, pretending to be certain about propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable—is both an intellectual and a moral failing. Only the atheist has realized this. The atheist is simply a person who has perceived the lies of religion and refused to make them his own.

Just a small nitpick, Sam and Richard Dawkins: More people than you think actually do believe in the existance of Zeus and Thor.

No, I can’t do anything about them.


Sam Harris has kicked me out of the dire depression I was in yesterday.

From my obviously biased viewpoint, that alone is reason enough for his existance.