What did he mean by this?

what did he mean by this?

What's hilarious is that Thomas Aquinas says very nearly the exact same thing, but about heretics.

And it even manages to make more sense coming from Aquinas, because Aquinas is worried that heretics will lead people into incorrect beliefs and practices, and thereby endanger their immortal souls after death. Aquinas is worried that heretical ideas, and the people who espouse them, will cause people to be damned to Hell for all eternity.

Meanwhile, Harris is just upset that "dangerous beliefs" will make people miserable only for this life.

Memes are cancer and bullets are chemo.

Harris always based his arguement on the idea that these things lead to suffering.

So they are the same even there. Between the idiots Harris is a little smarter in that he is concerned with suffering in the real world while the world Thomas cares about only seems real to people with their head up their ass.

The reason both are nenderthals and ultimatly cowards is that what they are really saying is "I want to kill people that disagree with me". There isn't any more profound statement going on. All the moral meandering is just a way for them to hide their true intentions from others and ultimately them-self.

ding ding ding

>real world
No such thing exists

Aquinas' heaven is no less real than Harris' vision of a utopian world.

Lets say that a group like ISIS got hold of nuclear weapons. This is worse than if Russians got them or China. Why? Because of the difference in beliefs. In general, Russians and Chinese are rational actors who don't want to die and will avoid having the world end in a nuclear apocalypse if there is any way to avoid it, thus the doctrine of MAD let us survive the cold war. What makes groups like ISIS different? Their beliefs. For a jihadi, dying as a martyr while fighting infidels is the ultimate goal. Also, ISIS do not care about collateral damage, eg the death of innocent muslims, because according to their beliefs good muslims will be rewarded in the afterlife anyway, so being destroyed in a nuclear blast just sends them on the express lift to paradise.

So groups like ISIS hold beliefs that are so dangerous, that if we thought they were about to acquire WMDs then it would be ethical for us to do everything in our power to kill them.

/thread

>[T]he very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.
-Same Harris