Sam Harris is my new God. Okay, so maybe that misses his point entirely, but I do have to say that I’m completely blown away by this guy. Forget about all that shit I said about my future rants against ignorance and fundamentalism. Sam Harris has already said everything I wanted to say on the matter, and he said it better than I ever could.
Thanks to my buddy Sean for giving me a heads-up about Harris via his blog. I’ve spent half the day reading Harris’s various online articles, and I’ll be reading his two books as soon as I can get hold of them. It’s weird that the day after declaring my intention to express my views with a greater sense of urgency, I would happen upon Harris, who expresses so clearly every nascent idea and argument I’ve ever considered regarding the scourge of religious dogmatism. Discovering this guy feels almost like divine intervention, but of course that notion is really fucking stupid.
Sam rocks. He was on NPR a few days ago providing clean, tight arguments to everything that was thrown at him – he has thought about this issue from every angle. Unfortunately, this was a two part series and they had an some idiot representing the faithful on Tuesday. This guy’s lack of rational arguments, straw man arguments and faith-induced ignorance was infuriating. It’s good they didn’t have this fellow debating Harris head-to-head. His tactics would have amounted to talking over Harris’s responses and complaining about the “arrogance.” Oh well. Just another reminder of why faith is literally defined as “Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence.”