Sam Harris.org Reader Forum

How logic and debates based on logic cannot save a soul, going to hell.

2013-05-21T18:35:41Z

A very big deception of the devil is to get you to logically debate God, Christianity and other religions. This is one of the surest ways to ensure, that you will never experience real salvation and eternal life, and all the wonderful things God has predestined for you.

Let us just suppose (for those who do not have faith), that even if you argue and debate, and finally, even if it is a long shot, and you finally are logically convinced (by the way, there are many books,eg by thomas equinas that logically prove the christian faith) that there is a God, and that He is the christian God. Does it mean you are going to heaven, just because you are mentally or intellectually convinced that Jesus is God??????

Not at all. Not unless you have a spiritual experience called being born again.A logical belief in Christianity will prevent you from experiencing the Real Deal, that is a Spiritual Salvation in Christ in the following ways:

The devil was once a mighty archangel, and presently with billions of demons, evil spirits, unclean spirits, etc with a far superior intelligence than humans.Each human being is assigned to tens, if not hundreds of evil spirits and demon hordes, that would love for you to deny their existence. For if you deny their existence, then surely you will deny God’s existence. It is extremely easy, 1,2,3 steps for Satan to deceive humans in more than a thousand ways.

Don’t even think for a moment, that you can compete with satan intellectually. However, he has no control over your heart, and what you choose to believe.And that is the loophole, which God has opened up for you. The faith route is the only way you can bypass Satan,and his cronies who guard the intellectual gates of the human mind.

When you get in to the logic debate about God, few important things to consider in SPIRITUAL WORLD which is what actually matters:

1) You could be tempted to fall into the dungeon of SPIRITUAL PRIDE, as you are tricked into judging Almighty God, which is a fool’s folly.Spiritual pride was the reason, for satan’s downfall. Also for man’s downfall, in garden of eden, as eve sucumbed to the temptation about being as knowledgeable as God.

This could also result in the person who is logically convinced that Jesus is God, as an intellectual knowledge of the truth, will become a STUMBLING BLOCK for a real SPIRITUAL SALVATION experience.

2) It could also lead to DECEPTION as the person, cannot find God in the intellectual domain, but only in the Spiritual domain. God’s thoughts are far higher than yours, mine and the devil’s, so you have to trust Him at His word. As it is written in the bible:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

God is spirit, only a spiritual born again experience can save the person, and the first thing to do is to humble ourselves. Second, we need deliverance from demonic spirits of unbelief that hold people as captives. This can be done if the person humbles himself/herself and receives Jesus Christ into the heart. Deliverance can be done even online, and specific prayers can set the captives free.

I speak from experience. Not here to argue with anyone.

Simple challenge for those who are sincere: Ask God to open your eyes, and to reveal Himself to you.Ask in JESUS name.Simple. Try it. IT WORKS

Characature of Faith

2013-05-06T01:22:59Z

Do we really think a believer today is similar (in the mind) to one in the first century? You could put me on a horse and dress me up as a cowboy but I will never have the mindset of a man on the prairie in the 1880s working his horse and the steers. Faith is a costume today not a uniform. Our real uniform is consumerism, competition, success, pragmatics, science—-all of which makes our mouthing religious dogma “the trick” we play. We can’t get religion into our sinews as it once was where each moment is seen through it; we have evolved into a new uniform. It is over not due to atheism, but due to a very different psychology.

Newsweek on DMT

2012-10-13T01:34:11Z

Gosh thanks Newsweek for clearing up the heaven issue. An actual Doctor proved it. Now that Newsweek is a scientific journal, I must put it on my reading list.

God as a mental process

2012-09-18T14:13:25Z

Sam you say that: “me” is a mental process that can some times do not happen, Don’t you think that God may be also a mental process, I mean if we observe believers, is like if they organize all the information they receive in a specific order that can fit in their believe of God existence, the same as we have with ” me”, so for example we atheist we don’t have that process some how ( God) but we have the scientific process, so we organize the information in another way than believers, It can be seen as if the believe of God is a reflect or a consequence of a type of mental process, and that why is almost impossible to talk to believers if you do not enter their process , they some how do not have access to the scientific mental process. That’s why they always go back to God even if the study science. So we have different ways to organize and interpret information. Why? that I don’t know do you? I suspect it must have to do with evolution of the brain, because even two brother that were educated in the same way one can be believer and one not, in my family I have those cases, and I come from a atheist family since my grand mother, but I have an uncle he is biologist, and Christian, so creationist, a very interesting case for me, my mother is mathematician and atheist, so they had the same education atheist education, I have to say that to talk with my uncle is very very difficult even if is not about God, so for me is like he has another kind of brain. I know many cases like him.
How can we explain this cases: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5oh1F2UggY “sci,entist” atheist converting to Islam:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IspK651RpY&feature=related

Question for Sam Harris

2012-03-30T17:37:45Z

Hello Sam Harris

Very few, if any, appreciated the natural beneficial relationship relationship between the atheist and believer. Probably just this suggestion gives the impression of my being deranged. However Simone Weil, in her usal laconic fashion, allows one to experience the potential for this relationship.

Simone Weil was a celebrated French Marxist and social activist who died a Christian mystic. Leon Trotsky admired her intelligence and she became an intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1.

Albert Camus wrotein 1951:

Simone Weil, I still know this now, is the only great mind of our times and I hope that those who realize this have enough modesty to not try to appropriate her overwhelming witnessing.

For my part, I would be satisfied if one could say that in my place, with the humble means at my disposal, I served to make known and disseminate her work whose full impact we have yet to measure.

She wrote:

Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417

Do you have the humility to admit the possibility that you have a supernatural part that has not yet opened? This part if it exists is unnecessary for our daily lives described as within Plato’s cave but yet is what makes human conscious evolution into the “New Man” as described in the Gospels, a human potential?

Separating Religion and Culture in “The End of Faith”

2011-08-29T15:30:25Z

Reading through the book the giant elephant in the room seemed to be the ties between many religions and the cultures they’ve co-evolved with. Islam is the most obvious example of this, but the issue rises up with the discussion about Christianity as well. Cultures use religion as an excuse to carry out certain cultural traditions - but that’s the thing.

They’re cultural traditions, not really religious ones.

In the same way we refer to a Judeo-Christian civilization, the Arab element to Arab-Islamic seems to be where most of the trouble arises from. Practices like wearing the hijab and stoning adulterers aren’t Islamic by definition, they’re cultural - but they’ve come to be associated with Islam because Arab culture is so intertwined with the religion.

Harris seems to admit that personal spirituality only becomes troublesome when it’s organized by hierarchical religion structures, structures which are inevitably going to have a strong cultural influence. But personal faith isn’t the same as “Faith” as in the dogma of religious belief, something the book seems to gloss over or miss for the most part.

I’m not sure whether it was intentional or not, but Harris seems to be using “Faith” as a more acceptable and politically-correct way to say “Multiculturalism.” Personal spirituality, that kind of of faith, only becomes troublesome when it begins to become part of an organized religion - which the world over have always been about consolidating power and group behavior, about establishing a certain shared culture.

On the individual level, at the core of the every major world religion is simply empathy for your fellow man. When spirituality gets organized into Religions, that’s when all the wacky stuff comes in. But the wacky stuff doesn’t occur because of something inherent the spirituality or faith in and of itself, it arises because of the nature of the culture that’s using organized religion as a guise for accomplishing cultural goals. This article talks about that phenomenon pretty well.

Faith isn’t the problem, cultural practices are. And many cultures use religion as a reason to carry on their backwards practices. Cultures use the religions they’ve adopted as a carte blanche to do all sorts of asinine shit, the “organized” part of religion is the issue, not the spirituality and faith that religions originally get founded on.

Lumping Sufi Muslims in together with the Wahabbis doesn’t make sense and discussing “Muslim faith” doesn’t make sense, in the same way lumping Evangelicals together with Universalist Christians and discussing “Christian faith” doesn’t make sense. Despite a nominally shared religion, those groups have developed inside different cultures, which is what sets them apart.

Reading ‘End of Faith’ and having some questions…

2011-05-15T11:46:07Z

Heya,

I’m new to these boards, and I’m currently reading the book ‘End of Faith’. Two questions on the front of my mind:

1.) How do you avoid being paranoid when reading it?!? I find the chapter ‘Problems with Islam’ to be deeply unsettling. To the point of paranoia ! I guess I have a tendency to be a bit naïve and gullible, so the chapter is quite unsettling for me. It is not made any less unsettling by the fact that there are two muslims in my study group. (Which by the way seem like really nice people).

How do you guys handle this?

2.) The notes ! Aaarrgh, the notes ! I constantly move back and forth in the book to read the notes as I come across them. This is actually disturbing my reading experience. Are the notes of substantial importance to understand the book, or can I happily ignore them without loosing anything in the book?

Best regards,

Jacob

Sam Harris Should Not Regret or Apologize For His Rational Position On Torture

2011-04-29T19:46:07Z

From SH’s recent article OnTorture:

And so, I am now a bit wiser and can offer a piece of advice to others: not everything worth saying is worth saying oneself. I am sure that the world needs someone to think out loud about the ethics of torture, and to point out the discrepancies in how we weight various harms for which we hold one another morally culpable, but that someone did not need to be me. The subject has done nothing but distract and sicken readers who might have otherwise found my work useful.

That paragraph bothers me. If a respected person of his intellectual status should not write on this subject as he did, then who should? Yes it does need to be SH, among others, who should so write. I do not buy Sam’s implication that intelligent & thoughtful people cannot disagree with his views on this touchy subject without Sam’s informed views on other subjects being discredited in their minds as a result. I cant even understand how grown ups can rationally disagree with his position - I’ve certainly heard no cogent argument against SH’s position (just emotings). I suspect most governments are responsibly grown up about it, if only silently. In Alan Dershowitz’s essay “Tortured Reasoning” in the book Torture (edited by S. Levinson) he points out (p 257) that “All forms of torture are widespread among nations that have signed treaties prohibiting all torture.” SH just needs some thicker skin and he shouldn’t worry that he will lose any worthwhile fans.

I think the only problem is that too many people have just not grown up and allowed themselves to be realistic or even honest with themselves. When some one says or implies (often self-righteously) that he or she would rather have his family and other innocents blown to pieces rather than have a knowledgeable terrorist waterboarded to save them, I think his or her only excuse for such gross moral negligence is that he or she is still morally only a child who cannot discern a true lesser evil here.

Evolutionary Origins of Morality

2011-02-05T20:00:48Z

I’ve become interested in the Evolutionary Origins of Morality ever since I heard of the story (in Sagan’s Cosmos) of the monkey that starved itself rather than push the lever to get food which also gave a painful electric shock to his conspecific neighbor.

Does anyone know if Dr. Harris’ book confronts this issue, or should I look elsewhere?

TIA

torture is the intentional infliction of harm

2011-01-09T07:01:38Z

Everyone and his cousin seems to think that Sam is wrong about torture, and I don’t have the will to read every thread on the subject, but after reading four or five, I’m surprised (especially considering the high quality of discussion on the subject) that no one seems to have landed on this idea:

Sam’s own argument about The Perfect Weapon is a great response to his argument about torture.

When we drop bombs on cities, our object (hopefully) is not to maim children or otherwise harm any innocent. We understand that is going to happen, but we would be all the happier if it didn’t. If there was some way for us to move every innocent person out of the way before destroying the enemy’s infrastructure, we would. If we had a Perfect Weapon, children wouldn’t get maimed.

That’s not what we’re doing with torture. When people torture, they take a helpless person and intentionally inflict huge suffering directly on that person. It’s not an unintended and undesired side-effect.

In the ethical dilemma about the train, if you’re inside, you have to switch tracks and kill one person to save five; if you’re outside, you can’t accomplish the same end by pushing a person in front of the train. In the second case, the way you’re using another human being (as a stopping block) is unacceptable, and you couldn’t do that even if it were a million people you were saving instead of five.

The torture situation is similar. It doesn’t matter what your end is; you’re not allowed to use another person that way. That’s why that argument leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. It’s not an illusion; the moral equivalence of the two is the illusion.

Now, if a person thinks he can torture someone (or throw an innocent person under a train) to save a million lives and still live with himself, that’s one thing, but saying it’s morally white is something else. A person who does that has put himself in a situation where he is obligated to admit wrong-doing, perhaps for a greater good, but an argument like this from such a person is a weak attempt to escape a responsibility that he has taken himself.

I hope one day in the future science will solve this one for us. The TV show “Lie to Me” is all about an alternative to “24”. Some combination of interrogation techniques (not torture), drugs, and medical monitoring systems may be able to reliably get information out of unwilling subjects. It’s certainly worth putting some R&D money into, don’t you think?