The Problem with Atheism by Sam Harris

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1702,n,n

and see and 300+ comments in the Washington Post

Reposted from:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/sam_harris/2007/10/the_problem_with_atheism.html

(This is an edited transcript of a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007)

To begin, I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge just how strange it is that a meeting like this is even necessary. The year is 2007, and we have all taken time out of our busy lives, and many of us have traveled considerable distance,

so that we can strategize about how best to live in a world in which most people believe in an imaginary God.

America is now a nation of 300 million people, wielding more influence than any people in human history, and yet this influence is being steadily corrupted, and is surely waning, because

240 million of these people apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers.

Of course, we may well wonder whether as many people believe these things as say they do. I know that Christopher [Hitchens] and Richard [Dawkins] are rather optimistic that our opinion polls are out of register with what people actually believe in the privacy of their own minds. But there is no question that most of our neighbors reliably profess that they believe these things, and such professions themselves have had a disastrous affect on our political discourse, on our public policy, on the teaching of science, and on our reputation in the world. And even if only a third or a quarter of our neighbors believe what most profess, it seems to me that we still have a problem worth worrying about.

Now, it is not often that I find myself in a room full of people who are more or less guaranteed to agree with me on the subject of religion. In thinking about what I could say to you all tonight, it seemed to me that I have a choice between throwing red meat to the lions of atheism or moving the conversation into areas where we actually might not agree. I've decided, at some risk to your mood, to take the second approach and to say a few things that might prove controversial in this context.

Given the absence of evidence for God, and the stupidity and suffering that still thrives under the mantle of religion, declaring oneself an "atheist" would seem the only appropriate response. And it is the stance that many of us have proudly and publicly adopted.

Tonight,

I'd like to try to make the case, that our use of this label is a mistake—and a mistake of some consequence.

My concern with the use of the term "atheism" is both philosophical and strategic.

I'm speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being inducted to speak as one. I didn't even use the term in The End of Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And, as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation,

I think that "atheist" is a term that we do not need, in the same way that we don't need a word for someone who rejects astrology.

We simply do not call people "non-astrologers." All we need are words like "reason" and "evidence" and "common sense" and "bullshit" to put astrologers in their place, and so it could be with religion.

If the comparison with astrology seems too facile, consider the problem of racism.

Racism was about as intractable a social problem as we have ever had in this country. We are talking about deeply held convictions.

I'm sure you have all seen the photos of lynchings in the first half of the 20th century—where seemingly whole towns in the South, thousands of men, women and children—bankers, lawyers, doctors, teachers, church elders, newspaper editors, policemen, even the occasional Senator and Congressman—turned out as though for a carnival to watch some young man or woman be tortured to death and then strung up on a tree or lamppost for all to see.

Seeing the pictures of these people in their Sunday best, having arranged themselves for a postcard photo under a dangling, and lacerated, and often partially cremated person, is one thing, but realize that these genteel people, who were otherwise quite normal, we must presume—though unfailing religious—often took souvenirs of the body home to show their friends—teeth, ears, fingers, knee caps, internal organs—and sometimes displayed them at their places of business.

Of course, I'm not saying that racism is no longer a problem in this country, but anyone who thinks that the problem is as bad as it ever was has simply forgotten, or has never learned, how bad, in fact, it was.

So, we can now ask, how have people of good will and common sense gone about combating racism? There was a civil rights movement, of course. The KKK was gradually battered to the fringes of society. There have been important and, I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about race—our major newspapers no longer publish flagrantly racist articles and editorials as they did less than a century ago—but, ask yourself,

how many people have had to identify themselves as "non-racists" to participate in this process? Is there a "non-racist alliance" somewhere for me to join?

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.

Another problem is that

in accepting a label, particularly the label of "atheist," it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky sub-culture.

We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I'm not saying that meetings like this aren't important. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it was important. But I am saying

that as a matter of philosophy we are guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.

While it is an honor to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard [Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single person with four heads,

this whole notion of the "new atheists" or "militant atheists" has been used to keep our criticism of religion at arm's length, and has allowed people to dismiss our arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them.

And while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think

this whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully marginalized under the banner of atheism.

So, let me make my somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves "atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists." We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics," or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or "freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.

Now, it just so happens that religion has more than its fair share of bad ideas. And it remains the only system of thought, where the process of maintaining bad ideas in perpetual immunity from criticism is considered a sacred act. This is the act of faith. And I remain convinced that religious faith is one of the most perverse misuses of intelligence we have ever devised. So we will, inevitably, continue to criticize religious thinking. But we should not define ourselves and name ourselves in opposition to such thinking.

So what does this all mean in practical terms, apart from Margaret Downey having to change her letterhead? Well,

rather than declare ourselves "atheists" in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in general.

The problem is that the concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining fixated on people's beliefs about God and remaining even-handed in our treatment of religion. But we shouldn't be fixated, and we shouldn't be even-handed. In fact, we should be quick to point out the differences among religions,

for two reasons:

First,

these differences make all religions look contingent, and therefore silly.

Consider the unique features of Mormonism, which may have some relevance in the next Presidential election. Mormonism, it seems to me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid ideas. For instance, the Mormons think Jesus is going to return to earth and administer his Thousand years of Peace, at least part of the time, from the state of Missouri. Why does this make Mormonism less likely to be true than Christianity? Because whatever probability you assign to Jesus' coming back, you have to assign a lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in Jackson County, Missouri. If Mitt Romney wants to be the next President of the United States, he should be made to feel the burden of our incredulity. We can make common cause with our Christian brothers and sisters on this point. Just what does the man believe? The world should know. And it is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing even to most people who believe in the biblical God.

The second reason to be attentive to the differences among the world's religions is that these differences are actually a matter of life and death.

There are very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is

that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can.

You might remember that Thomas Friedman recently wrote an op-ed from Iraq, reporting that some Sunni militias are now fighting jihadists alongside American troops. When Friedman asked one Sunni militant why he was doing this, he said that he had recently watched a member of al-Qaeda decapitate an 8-year-old girl. This persuaded him that the American Crusader forces were the lesser of two evils.

Okay, so even some Sunni militants can discern the boundary between ordinary crazy Islam, and the utterly crazy, once it is drawn in the spilled blood of little girls. This is a basis for hope, of sorts. But we have to be honest—unremittingly honest—about what is on the other side of that line.

This is what we and the rest of the civilized, and the semi-civilized world, are up against: utter religious lunacy and barbarism in the name of Islam—with, I'm unhappy to say, some mainstream theology to back it up.

To be even-handed when talking about the problem of Islam is to misconstrue the problem. The refrain, "all religions have their extremists," is bullshit—and it is putting the West to sleep. All religions don't have these extremists. Some religions have never had these extremists. And in the Muslim world, support for extremism is not extreme in the sense of being rare.

A recent poll showed that about a third of young British Muslims want to live under sharia law and believe that apostates should be killed for leaving the faith.

These are British Muslims. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should be brought to justice. These people don't have a clue about what constitutes a civil society.

Reports of this kind coming out of the Muslim communities living in the West should worry us, before anything else about religion worries us.

Atheism is too blunt an instrument to use at moments like this. It's as though we have a landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment—with peaks and valleys and local attractors—and the concept of atheism causes us to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic religion, and then just flattens it.

Because to be consistent as atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally.

This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.

I'm not at all suggesting that we leave people's core religious beliefs, or faith itself, unscathed—I'm still the kind of person who writes articles with rather sweeping titles like "Science must destroy religion"—but it seems to me that we should never lose sight of useful and important distinctions.

Another problem with calling ourselves "atheists" is that every religious person thinks he has a knockdown argument against atheism. We've all heard these arguments, and we are going to keep hearing them as long as we insist upon calling ourselves "atheists.

Arguments like: atheists can't prove that God doesn't exist; atheists are claiming to know there is no God, and this is the most arrogant claim of all. As Rick Warren put it, when he and I debated for Newsweek—a reasonable man like himself "doesn't have enough faith to be an atheist." The idea that the universe could arise without a creator is, on his account, the most extravagant faith claim of all.

Of course, as an argument for the truth of any specific religious doctrine, this is a travesty. And we all know what to do in this situation: We have Russell's teapot, and thousands of dead gods, and now a flying spaghetti monster, the nonexistence of which also cannot be proven, and yet belief in these things is acknowledged to be ridiculous by everyone.

The problem is, we have to keep having this same argument, over and over again, and the argument is being generated to a significant degree, if not entirely, over our use of the term "atheism."

So too with the "greatest crimes of the 20th century" argument. How many times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I've got news for you, this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith, and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as though I had never mentioned it.

So I tackled it again in the afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is Not Great.

I can assure you that this bogus argument will be with us for as long as people label themselves "atheists."

And it really convinces religious people. It convinces moderates and liberals. It even convinces the occasional atheist.

Why should we fall into this trap? Why should we stand obediently in the space provided, in the space carved out by the conceptual scheme of theistic religion? It's as though, before the debate even begins, our opponents draw the chalk-outline of a dead man on the sidewalk, and we just walk up and lie down in it.

Instead of doing this, consider what would happen if we simply used words like "reason" and "evidence." What is the argument against reason? It's true that a few people will bite the bullet here and argue that reason is itself a problem, that the Enlightenment was a failed project, etc. But the truth is that there are very few people, even among religious fundamentalists, who will happily admit to being enemies of reason.

In fact, fundamentalists tend to think they are champions of reason and that they have very good reasons for believing in God. Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence.

The desire to know what is actually going on in world is very difficult to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become difficult to argue with. And this desire is not reducible to an interest group. It's not a club or an affiliation, and I think trying to make it one diminishes its power.

The last problem with atheism I'd like to talk about relates to the some of the experiences that lie at the core of many religious traditions, though perhaps not all, and which are testified to, with greater or lesser clarity in the world's "spiritual" and "mystical" literature.

Those of you who have read The End of Faith, know that I don't entirely line up with Dan, Richard, and Christopher in my treatment of these things. So I think I should take a little time to discuss this.

While I always use terms like "spiritual" and "mystical" in scare quotes, and take some pains to denude them of metaphysics, the email I receive from my brothers and sisters in arms suggests that many of you find my interest in these topics problematic.

First, let me describe the general phenomenon I'm referring to. Here's what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he's healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things are as good as they can be,

he notices that at the level of his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from his search.

We've all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of art and music and film—but

our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able.

If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us "So, what are you going to do next? Don't you have anything else in the pipeline?" Steve Jobs releases the IPhone, and I'm sure it wasn't twenty minutes before someone asked, "when are you going to make this thing smaller?" Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they've accomplished, say, "I'm done. I've met all my goals. Now I'm just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you."

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain

people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains.

Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one's favorite food always available to be placed on one's tongue or having all one's friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend?

Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one's desires get gratified, in spite of life's inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone's consciousness.

We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is "no." No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual.

Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But

certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called "meditation" or "contemplation"—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here's the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn't contingent upon merely repeating one's pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years,

contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation.

It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise.

Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that

there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he's probably mentally ill.

But

if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn't say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity.

This is know as 'circling thoughts in SES teaching (this is a useful part of School of Economic Science philosophy - most of their other concepts, I disagree with)

Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function

.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—

our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering.

And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone else's contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them.

But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways.

We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

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.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection.

And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I'd like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person's life.

Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle.

I don't know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, "not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose." But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as "atheists," tend to represent while advocating atheism. As "atheists" we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery.

As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others.

We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales.

I don't think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.

Finally,

I think it's useful to envision what victory will look like. Again, the analogy with racism seems instructive to me. What will victory against racism look like, should that happy day ever dawn? It certainly won't be a world in which a majority of people profess that they are "nonracist." Most likely, it will be a world in which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning.

We will have won this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know things they do not know.

This is certainly a future worth fighting for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term survival as a species.

But the only path between now and then, that I can see, is for us to be rigorously honest in the present.

It seems to me that intellectual honesty is now, and will always be, deeper and more durable, and more easily spread, than "atheism."

I've reposted most of the (very thoughtful) comments at http://richarddawkins.net/article,1702,n,n

1. Comment #75508 by BAEOZ on October 2, 2007 at 9:59 pm

First comment!
I agree about calling ourselves atheists just opens up the same old arguments that believers throw at atheists. After all, believer coined the term as a negative or at the very least non affirmative of their positive belief. So, start negative, stay negative.........Better terms....Humanist, reasonableist....
Sam still hasn't convinced me that transcendence is anymore useful or real than snorting cocaine and going "wow, the universe is so huge". But then what do I know?

2. Comment #75511 by Robert Maynard on October 2, 2007 at 10:20 pm

This is the speech that caused such an upset at the AAI? Harris deserves a hug, or at the very least a handshake, for going out on a limb like this and challenging his audience.
I can completely understand where Harris is coming from in this speech in regards to tactics, and I appreciate his romantic vision of 'guerilla rationalists', a diffuse crack force of individuals who are simply out to "destroy bad ideas" through conversation, one person at a time. This is a vision I admire, and I think it's a good representation of how ideas actually transmit through public consciousness, particularly when they break into mainstream entertainment media.

The negative reaction to his suggestions makes sense though, in that it's a vision completely at odds with the political mobilisation many other atheists are seeking, and it is clearly running right up against the group vibe one is going to find at a convention.

At first glance there are two problems with his suggestions:
- You cannot simply seek to evade usage of certain parts of language. Descriptive terminology is an important part of how we communicate. If you decide you're going to avoid using certain common terms, it's just going to frustrate and obfuscate conversation. It's true: 'Atheist' is a package of information which helps streamline the variables of dialogue, and can impact the potential of conversation in negative ways.
However, in dealing with this obstacle I think it is more effective to influence culture (with political and social visibility), and gradually alter the content of the package that ones brain opens when they hear someone say "I'm an atheist", rather than simply avoid using the term. Bad arguments against atheism will wane because old people die, and generation-to-generation transmission will have to compete with the accelerating transmission of its counter-arguments. To quote Harris, "reasons are contagious". :P

- Not everyone is comfortable with confrontation, and many just want better social standing for atheists. Harris is clearly a confident and articulate conversationalist, and he clearly spends a great deal of time mulling over and preconceiving lines of argument in his head, as I (and I'm sure a lot of us) often do. But it just isn't the case that all atheists can or want to do that.
I have definitely advocated the position here that people should seek to improve themselves intellectually, to become more confident as atheists, and besides scientific literacy this includes becoming good at presenting arguments, but to give some credence to a fellow poster I've clashed with over this, Yorker, not everyone can do that. And they shouldn't have to.
Political and social respectability is the very least the atheist deserves in the twenty-first century, and they should by no means have to spell out refutations for ontological arguments and creation science to get it.

I still respect Harris as much as ever - but he must surely concede that the 'destroyers of bad ideas' are just one flank of atheism as a demographic in the so-called culture wars, and avoiding all manner of self-description could only be considered part of a long-term plan to dismantle categorical discontinuity in language, not a means to benefit the lives of atheists here and now.

3. Comment #75513 by Janus on October 2, 2007 at 10:21 pm

About the use of the word "atheist":

It's true that, as a matter of pure logic, it's a bit silly to identify ourselves by what should be the norm. And I guess that it might be true that religious believers will stop using some of the worst arguments against us if we somehow convince all atheists to stop calling themselves atheists for a few decades. But let's be realistic here: We need _a_ name for ourselves. Partly because we're trying to build a movement, but mostly because that's just the way human languages work. How else are we supposed to talk and write about
people-who-favor-rationality-and-need-evidence-to-believe-something-and-therefore-do-not-believe-in-deities?
We need a label whether it's atheist or sceptic or bright or something else.


About meditation and "spiritual" experiences:

Okay, so we can have new experiences that bring long(er)-lasting happiness thanks to meditation, and meditation isn't necessarily linked to religious beliefs. Great, I might give it a try one day. Is that the admission Harris wants from us? Meditation can help humans achieve a different state of consciousness; so can LSD for that matter. I can't say this revelation makes me feel a lot of respect for the monks and mystics who spend their lives "feeling happy" in their caves and monasteries. There's more to life than the search for happiness. There is also achieving our goals and making a difference in the world (however small). Doing research might make scientists feel happy, and raising children might do the same for parents, but that's not why most people do it. It's a sad thought, but mystics who dedicate their lives to "observing their consciousnesses" and "living moment-to-moment" have to a large extent wasted their lives.

5. Comment #75516 by kraut on October 2, 2007 at 10:25 pm

Transcendence without snorting - whats wrong with that? Not that I am actively engaged, but I have spent month in the wilderness of BC with just my wife, myself and some horses and I found an apppreciation of nature, a feeling as part of the natural world, a sharpening of senses that is simply incomparable to any other experience we as a couple ever had.

I find the pursuit of happiness very much overrated, I prefer a feeling of contentment, of living in the present as much as possible, of appreciating my being alive.

You might call this transcendental or not, it is an experience not to be found in the regular 9 -5 world, and lead you back to dealing with essentials, between you and your partner, you and nature.
I have to agree - we cannot throw the experiences of a solitary meditating mind out by just labelling them religious. It is just another way to experience yourself - and your surroundings - without the disturbance of the ordinary.

Otherwise - yes, I agree with Sam, and that why I always felt reluctant to use the "term" for myself, although I have for myself abandondend the believe in anything "supernatural" since my 16th year.
A label flattens the discussion, makes you identifiable and boxes you in. Why point out that I as a reasonable being have to be "against" theos?
I am not against god - I just do not see a shred of evidence for his existence.
What I am against, are the idiocies contemplated and actively persued in the name of religion.

6. Comment #75517 by 82abhilash on October 2, 2007 at 10:51 pm

You know people there are a lot of good ideas expressed here by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and the like. The arguments are themselves extremely sound, even though they may not give one the sense of transcendental bliss that most ordinary people seek. Although I must add that Richard Dawkins did well with his book 'Unweaving the rainbow' and Carl Sagan's documentary 'Cosmos' is brilliant.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is, these are new arguments, plus some old arguments repackaged for a new generation. They are not going away, especially since religion is showing its ugly face too often these days. And while projects like the 'Blasphemy Challenge' can make important people take notice of the changing times, it is reason that makes the change endure regardless of any label or lack there of - atheist, new atheist, anti-theist, non-theist, skeptic, skepchick, agnostics, secular humanist, 'no label at all', naturalist, darwinian,, etc.,. So to that extent I agree with Sam Harris.

But I understand the need of the label in bringing people together. But as a member of the mainstream society, I prefer not to use my label, unless pressed upon. I would rather use reason at every turn whenever and wherever I confront irrationality.

It is something about the way the human brain works - forever handicapped by the sequence in which you feed in the information. If you bring forth a sound argument, people may listen to you, even accept your reasoning and most may not care too much if they later find you to be a 'new atheist'. However if they find that out first, then they will lock out of anything you have to say immediately.

7. Comment #75518 by Russell Blackford on October 2, 2007 at 10:55 pm

I just can't see the relevance of Harris' comments about meditation etcetera. The article would be better if it focused on the tactical points, and I think it's really stretching things to believe that this point has much tactical relevance. Few people will reject atheism primarily because of concerns that it cuts across their meditative practices or whatever.

Maybe someone else can explain what Harris has in mind here, but I think it just muddies the waters.

With the rest, maybe he has a point about tactics and perceptions.

8. Comment #75519 by Downunder on October 2, 2007 at 11:06 pm

Sam Harris's point that the label "atheist" should be avoided makes sense. In addition to his extensive reasoning, that label has collected an unpleasant image and more to the point, it is a 'negative'. We need a positive image against religious fanatics. Let us do some brainstorming to find a better name and to start the ball rolling: VITALIST?

10. Comment #75521 by ChrisMcL on October 2, 2007 at 11:24 pm

Why don't we just do with the "A" word what African-Americans have done with the "N" word. Let's "take back" the "A" word.

The negative connotations to the label are from stereotype, not reality. By showing the world who we really are, atheists can, in time, redefine the ideas associated with the word "atheist".

12. Comment #75523 by Hypoluxa on October 2, 2007 at 11:31 pm

I think I understand what Harris has said and agree. The label of atheist has for in its entirety to the unbeknownst has been predominately negative. His example of just being "responsible people who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them", makes sense to me. That way we remove ourselves of this negative connotation, and are just somebody who makes a valid reasonable argument and thought to a bad idea/illogical belief etc.

While having experimented with meditation and LSD in the past I personally did not have any life changing thoughts or experiences, that I considered profound. I found it more relaxing than anything in my personal opinion. I still revert back to rational thought and reality.

So, again what to call ourselves instead of "atheists" etc? I do not know, even though like a poster mentioned before me, that humans like to feel and be a part of a group dynamic, as it is in our nature to do so, we should just continue to think freely, rationally, and of course question everything.

13. Comment #75525 by Theocrapcy on October 2, 2007 at 11:43 pm

I hear and understand what Sam is saying, and I quite like his warning to us that we may be missing something more meditative on principle. And no, we shouldn't be satisfied as being portrayed as a negative force.

However, this is idealistic and the world is always going to partition people and cultures into groups. At the moment the Atheism label is being thrown at us, and it is sticking. The best we can hope to do to overcome this is to turn the label around (and the N word is a terrible but comparable example). Once the word is diffused it can then be more easily shed, once it no longer is a derogatory term, then we will have something by which to measure progress.

It is unfortunate, but the label will continue to be applied. We have a choice to do nothing and keep taking the flak, or stand up and reclaim the word.

Win the semantic battle first.

14. Comment #75526 by monkey74 on October 2, 2007 at 11:57 pm

I'm 100% for advocating reason and intellectual honesty. In my opinion, it is the best way for every one to get equal rights and treatment. The term atheism arises only because of the need of such a description. Religion still has a very strong hold on the world. To me, atheism and its movement is necessary in order to make a very pronounced mark on the timeline at this moment. It is a common term that tells the non-believer that it is ok not to believe and that one is not alone.

When I became completely free of all superstition on my own some years ago, I felt a real sense of relief and enjoyed a really different world view. I never announced my point of view because I felt it wasn't necessary. But then I after some time, I became tired of the constant bombardment of nonsense pushed at me and found no people who even remotely shared my view. I started doing research into the subject of non-faith and came across names like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Jonathan Miller, and other great people. It seemed that the same conclusions that I had made were also shared by many others.

There is still a vast amount of religiosity being pushed in our face and the only thing to do is push back. It is present in our public offices, in movies, in daily comments, and even asked in all sorts of work, hospital, scholarship applications, and just about anywhere else. The religion question in applications bothers me just as much as the race/ethnicity question. These differences and focus points that form excuses for discrimination should not have a place in our society anymore. One can only hope that the religion and race issue will soon disappear. But yet, they still are present.

The thing that I absolutely dislike of this whole movement is the way that atheism is being broadcast by many in the form of a religion and being used as a way to make money out of it. It is starting to gain the unwanted qualities of organized religion. If we are to become united, let it be for the fight for reason and hope to be able contribute towards the future of humanity as a whole.

I really think that the word atheist is not ready to go away yet. The word atheist is a heavy one and we are the one common 'bad guy' of all religions. We just have to take the demonization of it away and show it for what it really is. We are here and have the right to have a voice. Hopefully the need for such a word will soon fade away.

16. Comment #75530 by suffolkthinker on October 3, 2007 at 12:09 am

I have always instinctively disliked labeling myself with something that I do not believe in, however in recent years I have strongly come round to Richard Dawkin's view that we do need to come "out" and stand up, and for now the label Athiest is useful as it is at least well known.

Think of it as labelling yourself as anti-apatheid in South Africa 1970. Hopefully it will not always be necessary, but for now let's stand up and up and be counted.

17. Comment #75531 by MartinSGill on October 3, 2007 at 12:12 am

I both agree and disagree with Sam (does that make me an agnostic? :P ).

I think the term atheist is not overly helpful. The problem as I see it though is that we've tried reason and reasoning. It's called the enlightenment and for the past 200 years we opposed ignorance with reason and see where that got us.

19. Comment #75535 by Quine on October 3, 2007 at 12:33 am

It is fine for some to hang back an take some kind of rationalist position, but also, some need to be an advanced guard that will take the heat for standing up and saying they do not believe in gods. Those folks are going to be called Atheists, anyway, so they might as well take it on and wear the Big Scarlett Letter A. Those who take the heat, are also in a position to keep the heat on the absurdities of religion.

Exploring what is going on in your own head need have no more to do with religion than crawling around exploring caves. Sam or others can go have these experiences, but I wish he would spend more time relating the way religion has traditionally hijacked these mental states to con folks into believing in the supernatural.

20. Comment #75536 by hakija on October 3, 2007 at 12:35 am

I have preferred the title "rationalist" over all others. Haven't we arrived at our views on religion, science and morality through the rational process?

I disagree with Quine. Rationalism is not a concession. Who's hanging back? Most who hold negative stereotypes of those who rejects the existence of a deity think of themselves as basically rational, even if they believe in a god. We won't get so far by calling their long cherished beliefs absurd.

Appeal to their reason, and invite them to take it a few steps further, and question the value of these long held beliefs.

21. Comment #75537 by banzaib on October 3, 2007 at 12:53 am

As usual, a very thoughtful article which generated some thoughtful responses.
I'm with Sam on his assertations about the word atheist and the downside of aligning oneself with it.
I'm also with him in principle about his thoughts on meditation. My reservation about meditation is that while it may be effective for some, it's my guess that it's not for everyone. I think the really important thing Sam is saying is that we should not close the door on finding healthy, reasonable ways to feed our (for lack of a better term) spiritual selves while trying to diminish superstitious thought in the world.
Dennett has pointed out that religion has always been good at keeping love involved in its orginizational practices. Something that atheism struggles with for completely understandable reasons.
Personally for me I struggle to understand what sort of blend we are of being collective, social beings and to what degree we are individuals.
I think that the lion's share of what we are is actually more collective than many of us care to admit. I think we are afraid to admit that because there are aspects of ourselves that we perceive to be personal/individual. These seem to need some "attention" too.
The atheist in me reawakened and began a thinking jouney back in Febuary. It was so refreshing to hear voices like Richard, Sam, Daniel, and Christopher (I've read and listened to you guys enough that I give myself first name privilges).
Eventually we will have to move away from the God/No God question. I have. It's simply no longer intersting.
What is amazingly interesting is to try to understand why and how we've ended up in the situation we're in, and what should we try to head towards.
For that, I think we need Sam to go back to school and finish his neuroscience degree. More about evoutionary psycology (Pinker), Richard's memes, Dennett's scientific philosphical perspective (with a nice dash of Santa Claus like warmth), and we need to get Christopher to smoke and drink a little less so he can hang around longer to provoke us into using our minds
for more than just agreeing with ourselves.
I look forward to hear more about what comes out of this conference. This is making the times we live in much more interesting than they would be without it.

22. Comment #75539 by Robert Maynard on October 3, 2007 at 1:01 am

Bonzai,

If someone takes it upon himself to speak for "the cause" and goes out of his way to challenge people to debate in public he'd better know what he is talking about.

Well exactly, I was talking about people who don't want to do that, and just want political rights and not have to worry about workplace discrimination, for example. Not every atheist wants to be, nor should be expected to be, the kind of person Harris here says we can all be without calling ourselves atheist. This is because criticism of irrationality is not an activity inextricably bound to atheism.
I agree with Harris that it's a great and even noble position, for everyone to strive for, but that kind of shift is generational, and the position he is advocating really only need form a subset of atheists - who are actively involved in confronting and eroding bad ideas.

23. Comment #75541 by trgregory on October 3, 2007 at 1:07 am

We have to stand up and be counted! If we start making all sorts of excuses as to why we are not loved by religious folk, we have lost all strength in argument.
I take exception to Sam Harris' use of the racist's use of the N word being similar to Atheist A word. There is nothing wrong with Atheist as a description of somebody who doesn't accept the concept of god.

24. Comment #75543 by Dog Boots on October 3, 2007 at 1:14 am

Great read. Don't care as much for the meditation-bits, but I do see his points and their validity.

I suspect it could be a good tactical move for Richard, Christopher and others when being interviewed, to refuse the term "atheist" whenever it's brought up. A very good idea, actually. Bring some public attention to the fact that this word ought not be, and if you're not an atheist, "they" can't attack you as such.

25. Comment #75545 by Conrad on October 3, 2007 at 1:16 am

I do agree with Sam about the issues with using such a term, but I do believe it all boils down what one's goals are. If you're looking for the political clout and freedom of non believers, then you're not only going to retain the title, but you're going to try and strengthen it's stock price, so to speak, in the public forum. If you're out to do away with all and any irrationality, then you're going to see the title as a hinderance, as Sam does. For Sam to do what he does, he has no need of the title.

Personally, I'm fine with the title. I use it when conversations turn to such issues and otherwise I've always taken the path that Sam suggested, trumpeting reason and evidence all the way. But when the conversation does turn to religion and my beliefs are asked about, I gladly state that I'm an atheist and I do my best to be a good ambassador for the public image. All in all, I think that may be the best way to deal with the atheist problem. You're not quite so likely to get everyone to drop it any time soon.

But one day, I hope to have no need of it.

26. Comment #75546 by Caeruleum on October 3, 2007 at 1:22 am

Of all the current anti-religious writers, Sam is my favourite. Consider this comment:

He observes that even in the best of times no-one close to him has died, he's healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from his search.

This is great stuff and certainly rings a bell with me. Surely, even for the non-religious, there no shame in seeking the quiet mind.