Free Republic

One of the biggest obstacles facing what’s called the “New Atheism” is the issue of morality. Writers like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens have to convince people that morals and values are possible in a society that does not believe in God. It’s important to understand what is not in doubt: whether an individual atheist or agnostic can be a “good” person. Of course they can, just as a professing Christian can do bad things. The issue is whether the secular worldview can provide a basis for a good society. Can it motivate and inspire people to be...

A national weekly news magazine recently featured a debate between atheist/author Sam Harris and author/pastor Rick Warren ("The Purpose Driven Life"). As part of his debate, Mr. Harris threw down a challenge to prove God's existence by finding a deserving amputee and having 1 billion people pray for God to grow the leg back. In trying to disprove the existence of God, it's unclear why Mr. Harris chooses to focus on amputees growing limbs back rather than looking for a sea to split open or fish and loaves to multiply, and it's equally unclear why Harris specifically asked that it...

As you read this, Ayaan Hirsi Ali sits in a safe house with armed men guarding her door. She is one of the most poised, intelligent and compassionate advocates of freedom of speech and conscience alive today, and for this she is despised in Muslim communities throughout the world. The details of her story have been widely reported, but bear repeating, as they illustrate how poorly equipped we are to deal with the threat of Muslim extremism in the West. Hirsi Ali first fled to the Netherlands as a refugee from Somalia in 1992 after declining to submit to a...

When atheist Sam Harris wrote his 2004 bestseller The End of Faith, a radical attack on religious belief in any form, he was prepared for strong rebuttals from Christians. Related articles and links What may have surprised him was the vitriol in which many of the emails and letters were couched. The most hostile messages came from Christians (not Muslims or Hindus). "The truth is," he explained in the forward to his latest bestseller, Letter to a Christian Nation, "that many who claim to be transformed by God's love are deeply, even murderously, intolerant of criticism.""How do I know this?"...

Sam Harris, author of the books, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation, was given a forum at the Aspen Ideas Festival. I'm not sure how I ended up finding the video, "Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World," but I believe I was referred by one of the Science Blog forums. I can't remember which one, and, as far as I can tell, only one of these blogs is owned by a believer. Which is probably how I got lost. There's a bit...

What in heaven's name has gotten into Sam Harris? The Los Angeles Times regularly lends its op-ed page to the atheist activist. In God's Dupes, Harris took advantage of the opportunity today to make a bizarre and slanderous accusation against American Christians. He began by equating conservative Christians with Jihadist murderers: "Within every faith one can see people arranged along a spectrum of belief. Picture concentric circles of diminishing reasonableness: At the center, one finds the truest of true believers — the Muslim jihadis, for instance, who not only support suicidal terrorism but who are the first to turn...

Day 1 (Sam Harris): Why Are Atheists So Angry? Zeus, Thor, Poseidon—and Hashem. by Sam Harris, November 16, 2006 ENTRIES: Day 1 (Sam Harris): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 1 (Dennis Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 2 (Harris): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 2 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 3 (Harris): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 3 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 4 (Harris): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | Day 4 (Prager): Why Are Atheists So Angry? | TAGS: Atheism God Hashem Poseidon Religion...

In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as "End of Faith" author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present." Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three centuries." In his bestseller "The God Delusion," Richard Dawkins contends that most of the world's recent conflicts - in the Middle East, in the Balkans, in Northern Ireland, in...

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the Earth, more than half the American population believes that the entire cosmos was created 6,000 years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. Those with the power to elect presidents and congressmen?and many who themselves get elected?believe that dinosaurs lived two by two upon Noah's Ark, that light from distant galaxies was created en route to the Earth and that the first members of our species were fashioned out of dirt and divine breath, in...

THE MIDTERM elections are fast approaching, and their outcome could well be determined by the "moral values" of conservative Christians. While this possibility is regularly bemoaned by liberals, the link between religion and morality in our public life is almost never questioned. One of the most common justifications one hears for religious faith, from all points on the political spectrum, is that it provides a necessary framework for moral behavior. Most Americans appear to believe that without faith in God, we would have no durable reasons to treat one another well. [...] The problem, however, is that much of what...

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief. This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is...

It is a set part of Leftwing orthodoxy that the United States is the cause of Muslim terrorism. Therefore, when one of their own liberals questions that core belief, as Sam Harris has done, he sets himself up for a heresy trial as has happened in this DUmmie THREAD titled, "Head-in-the-Sand Liberals by Sam Harris." The evidence against Harris is his recent Los Angeles Times ARTICLE of the same name in which Harris dares to question the LIHOPian and MIHOPian orthodoxies of the left. So let us now analyze the heresy trial of Sam Harris in Bolshevik Red while...

by Mark Finkelstein September 18, 2006 - 10:03 Who would have thought that someone who wrote a book condemning all religions as dangerous hokum and who favors higher taxes, drug decriminalization and gay marriage could become the right's favorite liberal? But in the wake of his LA Times column of today, Head-in-the-Sand Liberals, Sam Harris might be on the way to being celebrated on the right and castigated on the left. The column's subtitle really tells the story: "Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists," and Harris' essential point in that liberals refuse to recognize that fact. Excerpts:...

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition. Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have...

A book fit for the garbage can. A bad, bad book. Sam Harris writes from a condescending, self-centered perspective, casting aspersions left-and-right and jumping to surprising conclusions from flimsy argumentation. The author's analysis of religious experience is simplistic and his anthropology rife with reductionism. His description of the Catholic Eucharist is particularly odious, even more so his assertion that it is a bloody ritual connected to genocide. Toss this ill-conceived clap-trap away and read instead The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God, by Kitty Ferguson, a more intelligent, thought-provoking treatment of the subject.