Sam Harris speaks truth to Russell Brand's B.S.

I'm a big fan of Sam Harris, the noted atheist who richly deserves his reputation as a rational mystic. For Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and also is deeply experienced in meditation, primarily the Dzogchen variety of Buddhism. 

Whenever I read Harris' books, listen to his guided meditations and conversations with other people, or view his videos, I come away impressed with his ability to clearly reason about difficult issues concerning all sorts of subjects -- notably including consciousness, religion, mindfulness, and social issues.

It takes me about 10 minutes to do my weekly watering of two bonsai plants that I bought at the Salem World Beat Festival about five years ago and have managed to keep alive even though I've never changed the potting soil and never trimmed them. I do fertilize them. So I've mastered the art of growing bonsai through benign neglect.

While I could mindfully do the watering without distraction, I've gotten into the habit of using that time to watch You Tube videos on my iPhone. Lately I've been looking at videos of Sam Harris. I was drawn to view an 86 minute video of Harris being interviewed by Russell Brand even though it took much more time to watch than a single watering session.

Brand is an English comedian and actor. While he occasionally makes sense in his interview with Harris, mostly I found his attitude irritating and his arguments faulty. Of course, my worldview is much closer to that of Harris than of Brand, so that helps explain why I think Harris came away the winner in their lengthy conversation.

Which I've shared below. I've made the video start about 11 minutes from the end. The final part of the interview, which begins a ways before when this video starts, is where Harris and Brand talk about consciousness, meditation, and religion. I really like what Harris says about the Abrahamic religions -- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam -- here.

He cogently argues that there's absolutely no doubt that the holy scriptures of these religions are human made, not divinely inspired. However, Harris neglected to give specific examples of how an omniscient God could have included knowledge in those scriptures that would provide proof of a godly being.

One example that has been cited by other religious skeptics would have been for God to direct a writer of some holy scripture several thousand years ago to include a mention of a scientific fact that would have made no sense to people of that time, yet would be proven true by modern science. Extra credit would go to God if the fact were expressed mathematically.

Anyway, here's the video. Harris's argument about why religions are clearly human made comes a few minutes after where I've made the video start. 

 

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

"for God to direct a writer of some holy scripture several thousand years ago to include a mention of a scientific fact that would have made no sense to people of that time, yet would be proven true by modern science. Extra credit would go to God if the fact were expressed mathematically."

Like Pythagoras (one of the fathers of modern mathematics and mysticsm) claiming to know that the planets revolve around the sun and are spherical? Or that all matter and creation itself are numbers expressed as music (waves and frequency pervasive through all matter and every form of energy)? Or the ancient Hindus claiming our world is one of billions?

Or that the creation is a projection from a single point of light and sound, a single utterance (energy - the big bang), and matter and energy are really two forms of the same thing? That matter is merely a projection and mostly empty space?

Where do we begin?

Or even the claim that time didn't exist before creation (St. Paul).

But what is the point when these personal observations are made by mystics during times when no hard science had developed to confirm these? When no context existed for anyone to understand them?

Instead, we also got fables. The world is held up by a giant God, Atlas, or on the backs of two magnificent turtles. We get the miracle stories. We get what at the time and in that culture we could understand, to get across simple concepts: there is more here than we can know, that the basis to learn begins with humility,

in order to help inspire and motivate an open mind and practice in our own development, these anecdotes and metaphors and stories in the poetry of the time were told. To help us remember, just as making every new word into a bizarre image in the memory palace is how we are taught to remember.

Remember what? The development of the quality of acceptance, forgiveness and brotherhood. These matter to the entire creation. These matter and are the basis for our existence.

And sadly, in human hands, each of these teachings became the basis for the opposite: dogma, corrupted by politics and the need to subjugate, rather than to treat one another as we would wish to be treated: equality.

When we look to others and blame them for thinking differently than we do we are indulging in the very duality we claim to have risen above. But we are only lying to ourselves.

You can debate whether humans have been inspired by God when they made claims no one could prove at the time but which science has lately begun to prove.

. Or you could prove more easily that the basis of many religions was a standard of ethical conduct and kindness, Ahimsa (harmlessness and equality) and a lifestyle and method to develop those qualities within ourselves through a lifetime of self-examination, inner exploration, self-control, temperance, and effort, long before humanity has done so, far, far ahead of the development of society, but pointing the way to a vision of humanity we have yet to fully demonstrate.

Let us prove we don't need God by reaching that standard of conduct ourselves. But sadly humanity has only proven over and over again they can't do it alone.

That we can even think of a benevolent Almighty God is the proof: that we can find inspiration and sanctuary in devotion to that, since these bags of chemicals are far from that. That is proof that keeps proving itself every moment of every day.

That some must deny it over and over and still fail to do so is proof.

[SantMat64]

All the Abrahamic religions are fake and "human-made," but somehow Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen is totally authentic?

Buddhism is 2500 years old, but Dzogchen only came to be in the 9th century. That's quite a span of time between the Nikayas and the obvious evolution of concepts that resulted in Dzogchen. But somehow there's nothing human-made about the Dzogchen scriptures?

By the way, what scientific facts can we find in the Dzogchen scriptures? There are none unless Harris has photos of a rainbow body.

All of the above points to the obvious duplicity of Harris' atheist argument that an authentic scripture must be chock full of facts about advanced physics and the like.

As for the Abrahamic scriptures, they are all founded upon the most obvious scientific fact: a first cause.

[Spence Tepper]

Hi SantMat64
You wrote:
"All the Abrahamic religions are fake and "human-made," but somehow Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen is totally authentic?"

I burst out laughing at that. Excellent.

It was the spiritual mystics who gave humanity the first principles of rational thinking, mathematics, logic and scientific inquiry, even the principle of independent and dependent variables, and the isolation of independent variables from their dependent effects used in every scientific experiment: Socrates, Plato, St. Aquinas, Pythagoras, and others from the far east.

You wrote:
"As for the Abrahamic scriptures, they are all founded upon the most obvious scientific fact: a first cause."

Yes, and throughout the Bible, however flawed it is, are the principles of cause and effect, even the very principle of inclusion:

"1 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

"2 Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.
Genesis 5:1-2, King James Version

We were all "They" and "Them" in the beginning, all in the likeness of God regardless of Gender. At that time the word "Man" meant humankind.

I love how the highest ethics that we have yet to reach can be found in the writings of spiritual literature, here and there, though among their Bibles, more culture-bound entries as well that have long since past their time. It is a spotty picture of humanity, but with many fine teachings pointing forward and upward.

[umami]

I never knew what a flower child Russell Brand was! Why would he admire a square like Trump? Answer: both are magical thinkers. Neither appreciates that it takes more than words to make things happen.

Sam Harris, on the other hand, uses words like 'incentives,' 'trade-offs' and 'sacrifice.' He's clear-headed and practical.

[Ron E.]

Dear oh dear! Brand would make an excellent evangelical, good that Harris was able to stay cool and answer sensibly and rationally. Russel Brand has a somewhat chequered history and mental health issues but that does not necessarily demean what he has to say – after all, Harris and many more would say that he has no choice, no free will but to enact out who he is – this also applies to Sam Harris!

Not that this post addresses this issue particularly, but it is one of Harris’s themes. I have just come across another book on the fallacy of free will: - Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will - Robert Sapolsky. He states: - Shedding the concept “completely strikes at our sense of identity and autonomy,” the Stanford biologist and neurologist argues. It might also be liberating.

Spence again – as usual – attempts to undermine this latest post by bringing in the religious element and mysticism assigning it to Pythagoras’s work – which was more to do with Pythagoras’s own intellect and philosophy. And SantMat64 confuses Dzogchen and Buddhism’s teachings (particularly Zen and Chan Buddhism) which do not offer the Abrahamic theories of earths origins but stick with its core message of: “What really matters is the here and now: not God, not the afterlife, but the present moment and the practice of meditation (zazen). Moreover, Zen firmly believes that nobody knows the answers to those questions and that they are impossible to answer because of our limited condition.”

But, no matter, as what any of us ‘chooses’ to believe and espouse is all down to our own particular cultural background, our upbringing and countless other influences that decide our everyday actions, thinking and behavior.

[Appreciative Reader]

Entertaining video, that. (I only watched the short earmarked portion, though.)

Sam Harris is bang on target, as far as what he says about the Abrahamic religions. The fact that there's not a shard of truth not then known slipped in, that's proof enough that it's a bag of bull. Not to mention the fact that it's full of claims about factuality that have subsequently been shown to be nonsense, like the age of the earth, and the chronology of "creation" (first the earth, then light), and so forth.

And Russel Brand is completely hilarious. He's a comedian, isn't he? Was that just an act, or was his ...performance, real? Sam Harris did seem to respond to him deadpan, as if it was all real; but maybe he was just playing along with a comedian's act?

Brand --- or his act, as the case may be --- actually reminded me of a certain frequent commenter here! That endless parade of non sequiturs, that frequent lapse into incoherence, that complete refusal to see the point being made no matter how obvious, that obstinate refusal to acknowledge what plain fact, and the complete absence of any desire to actually seek out the truth but instead babbling on in order to simply perpetuate some weirdness already inscribed inside of his head no matter what. Oh, and the apparent inability to ever STFU. But of course, he was way more flamboyant, was Brand; and nor did he make any at-this-point-and-given-everything-completely-unbelievable claims of seeing beatific visions within or of conversing with angels.

In any case, it might just be a comedian basically putting on a show, I don't know about whether it's that or in earnest, this conversation thing. Either way, and like I said, it was entertaining, that short bit.