Sam Harris: OnFaith

Sam Harris is increasingly becoming one of my favorite people when it comes to the subject of faith and belief. This article is another in his series over at the Washington Post that deals with faith. This week’s is a transcript of sorts from a speech he made at the Atheist Alliance meeting. It's probably one of the better things I've read recently on the philosophies of non-belief.

He basically argues that atheist should not be calling themselves atheists because it pigeonholes them into a category that can be argued against. A lot like Nathan I where talking about with science as a category. In fact there seems to be a trend here to make this site science vs. religion. When it is anything but. Perhaps that is mostly my fault. I have my own prejudices and I’m unfairly using this site as a forum to air some grievances. But in an effort to correct that I think that this article is a good read for both sides of the fence. He argues that it is foolish of “atheist” to discredit the experiences many claim to have that they would otherwise write off as non-scientific.

Something however it does bring up is this fundamental need to label ourselves. How can one possible be nothing! Its possible to avoid a category but it seems like that is just a slow spiral until you finally settle like a bird on a branch. It’s trivial I know, but I find this struggle coming up every time I look at the facebook/myspace profile option asking what your religious orientation is. Sure there is the Atheist, Agnostic or Other option, but do I fit into any of those? I mean to be honest my state of belief is constantly in flux! How could I ever settle on just one? Well, Sam brings up a good point, and it’s a point well addressed in the first part of Jonathan Miller’s A Brief History of Disbelief. How is the absence of a belief, a belief?

Attaching a label to something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are naming isn’t really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as “non-racism” is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and by even naming ourselves.

I think that is some root of a lot of the issues people have with reasonable people (as Sam insist we call them). And a lot of what Nathan is getting at when he talks about God and science being separate. But to me the only reason they are separate is because one is not true. (I’ll let you guess which one I’m talking about). But that doesn’t discount the people who have had “religious” experiences. It just means that those experiences aren’t what they thought.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

Pretty good stuff check it out.