Harris, Part Two -- Chapters 4 and 5, and a Peek at the Rest

In the first three chapters Harris has made a forceful and colorful case that ideas have consequences . . . and bad ideas have bad consequences.  A good many religious ideas by his account are indeed bad ones, leading to horrible consequences for those who hold other religious ideas, or none: the Inquisition, Crusades, the Holocaust, witch hunts, and sadly enough so on and on and on.


He is using “faith” in what he understands to be the “biblical” sense defined in Hebrews – the intellectual acceptance, embrace, of stories and concepts about God and morality based in no empirical evidence at all, but merely on dogma of the past and hope for a fantasy future.


Anticipating objections that people need religion to establish morality/ethics – to know how to live in the world morally – Harris argues that people really don’t need religion to be “compassionate,” to have sympathy for others, to wish their happiness and to alleviate their suffering.  “Our common humanity is reason enough,” he says at the end of Chapter 3.  He repeats this later – noting that everyone we know will suffer loss, sorrow, will die – “Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”


A question I want to raise with him is his optimism about human behavior, reflected above.  Folks have for a very long time found reasons to be lots of things but kind to each other – and their religions have not spurred that on alone.  When the guy next door steals my cow, or my wife, I just may respond in kind, but not kindly.  Harris seems, despite his vast, detaled, and gruesome knowledge of the horrendous acts humankind has and continues to inflict on each other, to envision a time when people will find utopia by being reasonable.


It seems to me that people act most unreasonably, more often than not.  


This is linked in my feeble thinking to his assertion that beliefs drive behavior.   Suicide bombers use their religious belief to steel their nerve – urged on by family, friends, leaders – but a whole bunch of other things, I am guessing, is also going on inside them.


My religious beliefs in a general way guide and motivate my living, but not exclusively.  I am more often motivated by fear, by ambition, by pleasure, anger, jealousy.  


Chapter 4 – Harris understands that there are some good religious beliefs out there, and bad ones – and some really bad ones.  Islam, he says, has more than its share of the latter.  The chapter will not win any converts to Islam.


Christians, at least the moderate ones, are free to keep reading the Sermon on the Mount while ignoring the violence of Revelation (I do – what a nutty book!).  But, he says, Islam will not openly allow that – even though many moderate Muslims do.  


Chapter 5 – Harris argues that laws that condemn certain drugs (marijuana, for example) while allowing others (alcohol) is patently unreasonable.  That does make sense to me - the “war on drugs” is a failure, and will continue to be so – although I don’t blame such silly laws on a God spying on people.  I really don’t think God is “watching” me – He/she has much larger concerns I should think.


Chapter 6 – “A Science of Good and Evil”


IF religion in its best form provides a people a code of ethics (say, the Decalogue, the Sermon on the Mount), and IF religion at its best offers a person meaning beyond him or herself, even a transcendental experience of God, being “one” with the unseen but real spiritual reality – a spiritual or mystical real-life experience that Christians have called communing with God . . . 


And if one, like Harris, rejects all religion . . . where does one – or a society without religion – get its “ethics,” is sense of morality, or right and wrong?  AND Harris would want to add also the experience of “mysticism” and “spirituality” apart from (dreaded) faith.


That seems to me to be the questions he is trying to answer in this chapter.  “Ethics” – “right and wrong” – he says are really questions of “happiness and suffering.”  What brings happiness – to me, and to others – is right; what hinders happiness for me or others – certainly what causes suffering, is wrong.   Again he asserts that humanity doesn’t need anything but reason and self-interest to motivate people to do the right, to not do the wrong: “We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives.”


Harris rejects both Relativism and Pragmatism as sufficient bases for making ethical decisions.  His reason: both deny that there are real, (absolute?) ethical values. Relativism includes tolerance for even wrong behavior (religion-based bad behavior) and Pragmatism says that what is useful is therefore true, at least for the moment.


It is of interest to me that Harris here is on the side of the Evangelical/Orthodox Christians who reject Relativism and Pragmatism too – insisting that there are absolute ethical truths – ideas that are always right (more often always wrong).  They want to find those absolutes in written revelation (the Bible); Harris seeks them through scientific experimentation . . . and/or “intuition” – another term I was surprised to find him using approvingly.


Intuition – that “irreducible leap” necessary from that last bit of factual and experiential reality to another level of deeper or higher reality?    Barrett talked about “intuitve” knowledge, and so will the next book, Is Nature Enough?  


Chapter 7 – “Experiments in Consciousness”


Religious folk – from Christian mystics to the “whirling dervishes” of Sufi Islam to, I suppose, peyote smokers of Native American religion – have always talked about experiencing God directly – communing with God, feeling God’s presence, “knowing” God within, “talking” to and with God, being one with God.   Harris wants that experience, minus the religious language.


“There is a form of well-being that supercedes all others, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself.”    . . .  “Investigating the nature of consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply another name for spiritual practice.” 
This “spiritual” experience – sought after for millennia by religionists, often in vain (one thinks of Mother Teresa whose letters revealed that she spent most of her life seeking but never finding an experience of God!) – this same experience, says Harris, is simple – or at least teachable: “Mysticism, to be viable, requires explicit instructions, which need suffer no more ambiguity or artifice in their exposition than we find in a manual for operating a lawn mower.”


Really?   This brings up an overall objection of mine to Harris – that he would reduce spiritual experience – even he says, I think, that this is the highest experience available to humankind – to mere methodology, technique, practice.  It sounds so very artificial to me . . . 


Bottom line on the book for me:  


YES people use their religions to do awful things. Christian have burned witches, subjugated women, allowed slavery, promoted wars . . .   Islam, if Harris is even half correct in his description, is worse.  


Christianity at least has the last 200 years allowed, even promoted at times, thoughtful challenge to its most cherished articles of faith – and have sought to let growing knowledge inform it, and change it.  Progressive Christians – like FCC – have turned away from dogmas in light of new information – we say that God is “still speaking” and that’s why we as a church are “open and affirming” of GLBT people.  We have far to go, but our faith allows it – insists on an openness to the future, to God in the future.


Ideas have consequence.  But most of us are ruled more by other, less clear things – fears, hatred not related to religion, tribalism, etc etc.  


A sense of our morality coming from someplace “beyond” us – say, from God’s Spirit within and speaking over the aeon through many prophets, for us as Christians pre-eminently through Jesus as we understand him – is a higher motivator toward not mere ethical behavior but virtues like self-sacrifice, love for even the enemy than rationality.


If one seeks a mystical experience like Harris describes, when one loses the self – and not everyone wants that, do they? – but if I want such an experience beyond the unspeakable beauty of a sunrise, a flower, a Bach Intermezzo, then I would not want one that could be produced by following a prescribed routine.  That seems so predictable, so merely human.   God, I expect, is far more interested in me loving my neighbor than me being caught up in ecstasy, especially an ecstasy I produced myself.