Okay, there are a few claims that we have to shelve. You just claimed that I got my morality from a religious tradition. Ask yourself: when you pick up the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, or any holy book, and find ethical wisdom in there - what is that process like? I mean, you pick up Leviticus or Deuteronomy, and you find 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. Presumably you choose to reject that pearl of ancient wisdom. And then you find another line (this is also in Leviticus) – ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. The golden rule, as preached in the New Testament. And this resonates with you as a good operating premise to generate further moral intuitions. If nothing else, it’s a good ideal to live toward. Now, the guarantor of your morality in that case is not the book. It’s in your brain. And this kind of truth-testing is something that we bring to religion. Religion does a lot of work on people, and you can get good people to believe some very terrible things in the name of God, and this is what worries me about religion. I think we waste time talking about Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot, frankly, because these were political religions. These were dogmatisms through and through, and when anyone started to make too much sense in opposition to these dogmatisms they were carted off and killed. They were not contexts in which rational discourse prevailed and the best ideal won. So to call them science is just a misuse of the term. In the case of Hitler it’s just a total non-sequitur, because Hitler never really repudiated Jesus; he used Jesus in his speech, and he was facilitated by a thousand years of religious fulminating against the Jews in the name of Christianity.
— Sam Harris (via atheos)
(via cocknbull)
