Thoughts on Sam Harris as a writer?

Thoughts on Sam Harris as a writer?

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Hack pseud with chafed nips

He's a complete brainlet. There's nothing worth commenting about.

This, and in addition he suffers from the same faults as Gibbon (although none of the gifts), such as an inability to conceive of sincere faith and religious experience and a willingness to delve into areas where his lack of experience is obvious.

On the plus side he has the capacity to get interesting guests and let them talk without butting in, so that is something.

But he created the Moral Landscape which is the only scientifically proven moral philosophy? Isn't that an achievement in and of itself? Frankly I think that alone deserves a Nobel Prize for Literature. If people abandoned stone age superstitions and belief in invisible sky men, and instead followed Harris' proposal for a fully rational, scientific worldview, we'd be living in a perfect utopia. So he also deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in that regard.

FAIL

On numerous occasions he has brought moderate Christians/secularists to task for failing/refusing to accept that radicalized actors actually truly believe their doctrines, and are not simply propping up religious ideology as trojan means for a purely political ends.

Moderates aren't "sincere", they're inauthentic triangulators, dribbling piss everywhere else but pot.

tip of the fedora to you too sir

The very nature of his overarching argument, that reason conquers faith, fails to regard very real religious experience and ecstasy, which has been with mankind since the beginning. His reaction to faith he hasnt felt is almost like sour grapes.

Taking moderates to task for not recognizing that bad actors in their faith community is not even close to what I was talking about.

I know you're trolling, but The Moral Landscape is like the worst example of his writing. Meandering and vague garbage. Compare The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris to The Problems of Philosophy by Bertrand Russell and you'll see what I mean. Harris is unironically a pseud with nothing novel or interesting to say.

>nothing novel or interesting to say.
I think his discussions on technology and futurism and ethics in tech on his podcasts are solid.

His recent podcasts are NPR-Hyperbole tier though

What does it mean to regard very real religious experience to you?

>Vague impressions of something indefinable have no place in the rationalistic system.... Nevertheless, if we look on man's whole mental life as it exists ..., we have to confess that the part of it of which rationalism can give an account of is relatively superficial. It is the part that has the prestige undoubtedly, for it has the loquacity, it can challenge you for proofs, and chop logic, and put you down with words.... Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.[9]

Anyways you should read the whole book. It changed my perceptions on cults and ecstatic religious truth as felt and perceived.

>tfw you read James after reading phenomenology
>tfw it's the comfiest thing in the world
>tfw James is one of the top 10 smartest people who ever lived

On further consideration, i remembered bellocs return to faith:

>As I was watching that stream against those old stones, my cigar being now half smoked, a bell began tolling, and it seemed as if the whole village were pouring into the church. At this I was very much surprised, not having been used at any time of my life to the unanimous devotion of an entire population, but having always thought of the Faith as something fighting odds, and having seen unanimity only in places where some sham religion or other glozed over our tragedies and excused our sins. Certainly to see all the men, women, and children of a place taking Catholicism for granted was a new sight, and so I put my cigar carefully down under a stone on the top of the wall and went in with them. I then saw that what they were at was vespers.

>All the village sang, knowing the psalms very well, and I noticed that their Latin was nearer German than French; but what was most pleasing of all was to hear from all the men and women together that very noble good-night and salutation to God which begins--

>Te, lucis ante terminum.

>My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by this collective act, and I saw for a moment the Catholic Church quite plain, and I remembered Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me altogether that attitude of difficulty and combat which, for us others, is always associated with the Faith. The cities dwindled in my imagination, and I took less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them into the clear evening and the cool. I found my cigar and lit it again, and musing much more deeply than before, not without tears, I considered the nature of Belief.

The Reddit Atheist attitude of dismissing the faithful as "inauthentic triangulators, dribbling piss everywhere else but pot" is incredibly base and badly argued. It is a real section of the human experience, and Harris barely gives eye-rolling consideration.

What is a practitioner of scientism called?

"Redditor"

>ecstatic somebody else appreciates James
>I suggest Robert Richardson's James biography
>deeply identify with the man's temperament, upbringing, views, etc but probably will never produce nearly as many worthwhile ideas as him
>at least most of James' views I already thought before reading him but that's probably just because I have read people influenced by him and because he's the father of American psychology

Have you read Richardson's Emerson biography?

You might also enjoy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metaphysical_Club

It's added to the list. I think I remember Becker mentioning him quite a bit in Denial of Death.

But has not Harris accepted profundity in religious experience?

I don't understand why something so subjective should have any bearing on me and why should I even believe or accept the phenomenology of your experience as anything other than your brain talking to itself?

So they produce ecstasy sure but what is divined can be wildly discordant from one user to another. Is all experience equal?

I am interested in his Emerson biography (and not his Thoreau biography) but I have plenty of other books piled up

Working on Ulysses atm, I enjoy approaching it as a literary descendant of James' stream of consciousness

Wish we could trade him and Dawkins to get Hitch back. What do ya say, big man other sky? Do we have a deal?

>Tfw if there is a God, he would definitely rather listen to Hitch than them.

THIS IS NOT A PHILOSOPHY BOARD
GOD
DAMN.

It's not about ecstasy per se, ecstasy is just step one, conversion experience, from a sick soul to a health mind.

It's about the psychologically and societally positive fruits of religious experience. James was never interested in the philosophies or theologies behind religion but rather how religious experience changes the life of the experiencer.

My personal view is that the existence of God is an irrelevant question. I am an atheist, I do not believe in God, but the existence of a subtle God is irrelevant to how humans live their lives, if they are unable to discern what is God and what is not. Rather, religious experience as a phenomenon is psychological and has psychological value; in experience, the divine is real.

This doesn't necessarily need to be tied to any religious tradition. People can have totally irreligious "spiritual" experiences, mystical experiences, revelatory moments. And you can induce these, too, with things like psychedelics. But I think that when people avoid the word "religion" in dealing with such experiences they are being far too fragile. Spirituality is a grotesque word too firmly rooted in New Age Facebook yoga nonsense. Religious experience is the most accurate title to give such an experience, even if the experiencer is irreligious.

>But has not Harris accepted profundity in religious experience?
Listen to his podcast last night, he treats fundamentalist islam as a chosen ideology to be punished rather than unchosen experience that is absolutely justified and outside of reason for a large group of people.

>I don't understand why something so subjective should have any bearing on me and why should I even believe or accept the phenomenology of your experience
You are doing the same thing. This is not a rationally chosen position. This is a shared, intrinsically true experience that is the result of biology and psychology for vast sections of the population, in which you exist. Our society has norms and taboos shaped by shared human experience, a great deal of which was shaped by religious expression sincerely felt 10,000 years ago as it is today. Hence the way Harris thinks that rationality will destroy faith is absolutely flawed, since it is part of the human experience, now as ever.

>So they produce ecstasy sure but what is divined can be wildly discordant from one user to another. Is all experience equal?
Within groups it seems to be. No man is an island, especially not in religious practice.

see

you'd really like husserl and deleuze and derrida if you could stomach getting into them

I'm that reddit atheist. Yes I can agree that Harris is way to dismissive and lately I've come to think of him a prick. Due mostly to his talks, etc. with Peterson.

However, I don't understand how religious experience is separate from art. Discrete and insular, some have more purchase than others.

How am I to accept the truth of one's religious experience. Or more to the matter, should I want to?

*too

>How am I to accept the truth of one's religious experience
see
>the existence of God is an irrelevant question

Ignore the content but understand that what they are experiencing is real and beyond argument. If you cut yourself I cannot feel your pain, but I can understand the substance of your experience and understand it, or the sex urge, is beyond rationality. This is where Harris and reddit atheists fail. Experience of faith does not predict low intelligence, see Belloc, CS Lewis, Ratzinger, Botticelli.

Have you ever read Rudolf Otto's Idea of the Holy, or Martin Buber's I-Thou?

Actually a better point in here.

An atheist is like an asexual or low-libido individual trying to understand lust, and arguing from a point of rationality that such behavior is base and unnecessary and possibly sinful.

no, i am not the phenomenology user, i am sort of approaching this from a historical-anthropological-psychological perspective.

No I know, I'm the phenomenology user, but if you liked James and think in these terms:
>An atheist is like an asexual or low-libido individual trying to understand lust,
you'd really like Otto. He was the first to really present the "numinous" (his term) as an irreducible psychological/phenomenal experience, in Idea of the Holy.

Martin Buber is similar - the experience of the I-Thou that he talks about actually appears in Varieties, I think.

If you like Varieties, you might also like Pragmatism and Essays in Radical Empiricism. James argues for a very interesting "virtual" consciousness that is constantly making predictions, judgments, ratiocinations, and affective investments (hopes, fears, "biases," etc.) in and of the world as the "stuff" of experience, all intertwined in a single temperament.

James is just fucking incredible.

Ill check out the Rudolf Otto

We're talking about Harris as a writer. I don't listen to his podcast so I'll take your word at face value.

Hes a classic example of why reading must preceed writing, preferably at a ratio of 1000 read words to 1 written, assuming you intend to engage that lofty and complex realm of history of philosophy.

Hes a pipsqueak among titanic rovings, a worm cut by giant-driven ploughs, thronging incoherently while the fields are readied for seeding.

A real jackass. Hes even got a list of recommended readings on his website. Im inclined to think it the same list as "books Sam Harris has read."

>scientifically proven moral philosophy

He's a very clear writer and an excellent layman introduction into digestible metaphysics and epistemology. The problem is, most of his readers stop at him, which is why his audience is comprised of a disproportionate amount of fedoras. Despite all of this, I feel like his commentary is still worthy of attention.

Don't mind his new-atheist REEEEing either. It has converted mere idolaters into atheists (rightly so) and invited apologists to refine their arguments (their discourse needed to be challenged anyways) consequently improving believers' relationship with their theology of choice. I think the new-atheist movement did Christianity more good than harm.

It's really rich how the people who complain about fedora atheists are most of the time, fedora Christians themselves. Two sides of the same coin I guess.

I'm looking forward to reading his suicide note.