
Philosopher: Why we should ditch religion - CNN.com - andrewbadera
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/25/ted.sam.harris/index.html?hpt=P1
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maxharris
Sam Harris is saying some important things, namely that there is an _objective
morality_. (See his TED talk: "Science can answer moral questions.")

Sam Harris is not an Objectivist, and he most likely did not come to his
conclusion about morality via Objectivism. However, if you agree with him, I
think you'll find that Objectivism develops these ideas much more completely.

Objectivists are atheists - we know that the supernatural (God, werewolves,
ghosts, gnomes, etc.) do not and cannot exist, and what is good for man stems
from his physical and mental requirements for survival (therefore it is
objective.)

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andrewbadera
I couldn't agree more! '"We should be talking about real problems, like
nuclear proliferation and genocide and poverty and the crisis in education,"
Harris said in a recent interview at the TED Conference in Long Beach,
California. TED is a nonprofit group dedicated to "ideas worth spreading."'

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hga
Serious question: why are "nuclear proliferation", genocide, poverty and bad
education bad things?

On what basis do you declare them to be bad? (Vs., say, the inevitable state
of nature?)

How is the whatever that brings you to these conclusions not a "religion" in
function if not style?

~~~
applicative
A religion attempts to relate a human being to the Eternal, to the Highest
Things, to God, whatever. If there is anything to be called the Eternal, The
Highest, God, etc, then true religion will get you right with it.

An ethics, or the most important part of one, relates a human being to _other
human beings._ If there are other human beings (there are!), then a true
ethics will get you right with them.

This definition, which is more or less traditional, is broad enough to allow
egoism, Hobbesianism, etc. as forms of ethics - so that it would be
intelligible to say that one gets right with others by taking adequate
advantage of them.

Your suggestion that ethics (or the part of it that relates people to each
other) must be some form of religion is in fact a reductive claim about
religion. But it also threatens to destroy the specific character of the
ethical.

It entails, for example, that one person does not wrong another by, say,
killing her or lying to him, but only ever wrongs God, or the Eternal or the
Most High. Killing someone on your account (supposing Christianity as the
background religion) would not be formally different from, say, not going to
church on Sunday; they're all just cases of going wrong by God.

Every human experience of grievance and anger at someone is a rejection of
this nonsensical idea. The content of these passions is "He done me wrong",
not "He done God wrong". The distinction was always been maintained in
classical theology. The reduction of ethics to religion is a specifically
American phenomenon, though it has precursors and echoes elsewhere.

