This should probably go in Cafe but the topic is more GD than anything else. Mods move if you must.
Has anyone read this book? Do you recommend it??
Well, I just read the first paragraph of Newsweek’s article you linked to, and I’m already offended:
An unlikely atheist? WTF are they saying?
To be fair, I think they are more ragging on the perception of infidel rather than seriously supporting it. The problem is that the author is too smug to realize that most people don’t share his views, and so won’t immediately realize it.
I haven’t read it but I’m looking forward to doing so. I recommend his “The End of Faith” and according to the article this book was prompted by Emails he recieved about that book.
I’ll betcha he got more than one
YOU’LL BURN IN HELL HARRIS!!!
The author of the book, or the author of the article?
Americans as a group depsise and distrust atheists. For, example, lhere :
I read it, enjoyed it, bought a copy for my local library. But it really doesn’t make any points he hadn’t made in his previous book.
I think they’re saying that he’s well-mannered, friendly, and engaging, which is not the impression you might take from his book, in which he appears combative and ornery. Here’s the article’s second paragraph:
I read it and liked it. It rehashed familiar arguments. Harris can be blunt, but he thinks that too much tolerance and respect for religious beliefs allows the belivers to run everyone else over. …a ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a mile’ attitude, which he, argues is harmful.
I too am offended, but for a different reason. Why do they use the word “infidel”? With the current Islamic mess we have going on “infidel” has taken on another meaning entirely; in my opinion at least. I would be more than happy if they had used “atheist” as you did.
I’ll also agree with you about the “unlikely” part. And I don’t buy the theory that they were saying that it’s “unlikely” b/c his book is “angry”. If that were the case then they would have said something like, “The unlikely author of this book.”
Entertainingly, his next book is going to ‘prove’ we have no free will. I feel inclined to punch him in the face, as my genetic and cultural programming robs me of any ability to do otherwise.
Seriously, that should be worth reading, and his arguments will most probably be fascinating to dissect. Clearly, he has complete assurance about something that, as of recently, the rest of the scientific community had been unable to prove, one way or another.
Well, it appears the title is a complete misnomer. It’s supposed to be addressed to a Christian nation, but the only people reading it are resolute NON-Christians.
I know you’re trying to be funny, but you do realize that such an act would neither prove nor disprove anything about free will, right? If somebody did such an act, it would say something about their character, but hardly anything about free will.
As to the OP, I haven’t read the book in question. I suspect it will be like Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell”. The people who the author wants to read it won’t read it. The people who don’t need any convincing will read it. It will get press as being provocative or edgy, but nothing will really come of it.
There’s a fundamental imbalance between the religious and the non-religious. In general, the religious can push their beliefs as much as they want and people only think badly of them when they get woken up on a Saturday morning by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even then, people will be annoyed but will consider the proselytizers to be generally motivated by good intentions, if perhaps a little confused or misled. But as soon as a non-religious person starts to proselytize, they’re seen as being vicious attackers of all that is good and just, and are obviously sad pathetic people to have to try to tear down cherished beliefs like that.
That’s one reason the non-religious have trouble spreading their beliefs - the very act of trying marks them as evil to a great many people.
FWIW, I vaguely recall Stephen Hawking making a similar claim in A Brief History of Time – something along the lines that everything that happens in the universe can only happen in a preordained manner, and our current existence is merely the Nth iteration of the same event loop.
Actually, that was entirely the point. If I performed such an act, and had no free will, then I could not be held accountable for it, as I would have no character, as such, but rather a set of preprogrammed reflexes.
At least, that’s the argument I’d make in a pub setting. That said, I am still quite interested in his writings on the subject, he should have something valuable to say. Though from what little I’ve read, he seems to be a hard skeptic, and falls prey to some argumentative flaws that I’ve seen James Randi escape. Namely, that it is impossible for any one time event to violate the ‘laws of physics’. It is impossible to say anything about an event that happened in the past and was not sufficiently observed. Things that have happened, happened. We can deduce to a high probability they were misinterpreted, but we can’t entirely rule anything out, provided the rest of the evidence provided does not firmly contradict it. This includes bodily resurrection, for example, or any of a number of faith-based events. It does not include evolution, because that is not a one time event, but rather an ongoing process which leaves firm markers. Disproving evolution requires ‘last thursdayism’, which while acceptable as a theory, explains nothing. The same goes for the various ‘flat earth’ theories. Either the change from a flat to a spherical earth would be noticable in various ways, or a miracle happened and the earth was retroactively always that way.
(Personal stance: We may or may not have free will, but we certainly have something exceptionally close to it.)
I missed where the atheists in the name of atheism declared war on anybody.Non aggresive thoughtful people. Clearly not to be trusted.
I just started reading Richard Dawkins “The God Delusion” and he establishes the same essential point early on - that because we’ve all been told over and over again that we must ‘respect’ each other’s religious beliefs, lest we offend, we’re culturally conditioned from pointing out how irrational they are.
But holding you accountable would require free will, no? We could simply say that it’s our pre-determined fate to put you in jail for doing so.
Seems to me like we either do or we don’t. I think it would be more accurate to say we at least have the illusion of free will.
Good book, with familiar arguments. I hope the book will help religious people change the way they view their faith rather than to give it up. There is a section about how religion doesn’t care as much about human suffering as it should. I tend to agree with that, and I hope more religious people would start to evaluate their actions using that standard.
I don’t think that’s a reasonable interpretation. The author of the article says that he comes across as a nice guy, then immediately follows that with “an unlikely infidel.” She’s clearly saying that those traits don’t go with atheism.
Also, the word “infidel” here doesn’t bother me, but I think “atheist” would have been a better choice. “Infidel” conveys that someone doesn’t believe in the god of a particular religion, so that a Christian is an infidel to a Muslim, and a Jew is an infidel to a Hindu. It’s a relative term in my experience. But atheists are infidels to every religion.