Sam Harris and Jonah Goldberg on Atheism, Dogma, and Religion | The Remnant (Clip)
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- Опубліковано 7 жов 2024
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Jonah Goldberg and Sam Harris discuss their differences on religion, atheism, and dogma.
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00:00
Introduction to Sam Harris
00:26
Distinctions in Religion
03:48
The Role of Dogma in Society
07:33
The Limits of Dogmatism
11:27
Ethics and Dogma: A Case Study
13:30
The Need for Settled Questions
#samharris #religion #atheism #faith
Love Sam. Thank you for uploading this clip, Jonah. Looking forward to the full conversation.
I've listened to Sam for decades and he still amazes me with his beautiful logic and his uncanny ability to communicate clearly. I put him in the top 5 wisest men on the planet.
You clearly need to widen your horizon of people to listen to.
I would suggest Dr. Stephen Meyer.
I appreciate intelligent conversations, especially with people whom I disagree. My worldview could not be more different that Mr. Harris' secularism, and Jonah's milder version, but I'm grateful for this sort of content.
Genuinely curious why someone would oppose secularism?
@@shariqkhatri4657 Genuinely curious how someone is so certain about the supremacy of secularism?
@@shariqkhatri4657 Oppose? Well, we'd need to define it. Voltaire did us all a favor by pointing out the intrusion of the RCC into spaces he believed it did not belong--civic affairs, government. Secularism can be helpful (as Jonah employs it in Suicide of the West) to build arguments that do not require religious ideas or presuppositions in order to have conclusions. And to a point, I (as a Christian) agree with this use. The book of Ecclesiastes employs it.
The point I'd make with Voltaire and Jonah would be that (following David Bahnsen's father's thoughts) this is impossible. Humans are anything but logical and consistent, religious or not. We are limited in our ability to imagine a world without God-stuff, without religious presuppositions, and we invariably make other gods in the place of Yahweh every time we try. And we steal, beg and borrow ideas fundamental to Christianity because we can do no other.
The division of religious ideas from civic and government affairs is all well and good when the religion is false or corrupt or causes just as much harm as any other presupposition that is at odds with the realities of human nature.
But what about religious ideas that are harmonious with human nature, human institutions like family, church and state, and harmonious with (and caused, I'd argue) classical liberalism (see Acts 15 for an example of representative government that Scottish Presbyterians took and the Founding Fathers took and here we are).
So opposed is not quite the right word. I'd just say that secularism does not fulfill its rather broad promises. It's a useful scalpel in the right situations for cutting out intrusions of the church into the state and family that are not warranted. But some are warranted. The Christian church, for instance, should prophetically say to the rulers of any and every nation that they are obligated to be fair and equitable and follow their vows and treat all as they would themselves be treated. And that if they do not, not only will the people judge them with the vote, but the courts (hello, Eric Adams) and the church will condemn them.
And we haven't even formally defined secularism yet. If you are near Tampa, maybe we could sit for a chat.
@@4greendeep6 what alternative do you prefer to secularism? I just don't see how having a religion involved in governance would not lead to conflicts.
I suppose we ought to honor one another's delusions.......... Sam's too!
My karma ran over my dogma…
Good pun ! Maybe all in good pun.
Dogma subverts a human mind against rational and natural thought and behavior. It defends a canonic worldview against critically thinking toward a certain cultural structure. It is a defense against honestly evaluating irrational or exploitive systems (idiomatic or real) within a society to conserve them.
Beautiful words.
Thanks for your interest and contribution.
Yeah that is a good thing. Your first issue is that you think all people are rational. They are not. I would say people like Saddam, Kim Jung Un, Putin are very much acting through natural thought and behavior.
Atheism is a dogma too. We have seen how rational people act under that system. There are hundreds of millions of dead bodies laying around.
Fear of death will usually lead you to Seeking or Believing.
Seeking is Dharma, Believing is Religion. Seeking requires Inquiry and Intellect, Religion requires Submission and Blind Faith. Atheism is conceited Anger response against both.
Religion is an insult to human dignity - with or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things, but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg
Sam Harris, you complete me.
Sam 🐐 Harris
Waiting for the full episode to be uploaded now.. ❤
The pro-life movement demands that the state codify the "life begins at conception" dogma into law and enforce it without exception as part of a total ban on abortion. This refutes the comment Jonah made at 14:06.
Exactly. If you take religion out of the equation, it is clear that there is no scientific answer to the question of when does a pregnancy become a person? It's a matter of faith.
"The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal."
G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils
@@Zoomo2697 Unlike those highly sane Medieval theocracies/sarcasm
@@MrTheLuckyshot There is a scientific answer as to when it becomes a life .
Through willful ignorance or by deceptive design, DHARMA is missing from this discussion.
Nice to hear a Secular Jew discussing with an Atheist Jew. Please carry on.
I May not always agree with Sam, but he sure has a way with words. A precise real-time eloquence that makes potentially fancy words sound simplistic. He effortlessly throws out these words like darts that hit the target. On this issue though I do agree with him.
What specifically do you disagree with?
@@krg021865 I think his distaste for Islam (and even more so Islamism) clouds his judgment and prevents him from applying that same lens of ethical rigor/analysis to Israeli policy. He falls into the same dogmatic pits he cautions against here and confuses that sense of moral supremacy with “moral clarity”.
He has a quality that is glaringly lacking among, the general public as well as commentators on this or other important topics. Sam is "thoughtful".
Important and interesting topic by two great minds. Will hear on Nov. 6 after, hopefully for the Free World, the dangerous clown DT looses.
Hope many dispatchers will add one more courageous step and help more actively in that, probably crucial, effort to keep the Republic.
disagree
Please don't include the other fellow in the same league as Harris.
6:55 If you are so sure about your dogma, if your evidence and reasoning are so sound that you are confident there won't ever be a reason to revisit it again, then there is absolutely no need at all to put it out of reach on the highest shelf. It will withstand any scrutiny quickly and easily, don't you think? I am afraid the dogmas on the highest shelf are the ones that most urgently need revisiting. Why else would they be there?
"You dont want gov't in the business of deciding what is a human life and what is not'" is the most hilariously bad pro-life argument I've ever heard. Turns out it's a great pro-choice argument, though. Got to say, my estimation of Jonah just took a hit there.
Yeah, when you “have to decide which is human”, you err on the side of the… actual human you can see. The one that’s looking at you, speaking, clearly articulating their needs.
If i’m forced to decide which is human, i choose the actual human every time.
@@cuzned1375 So, you’re a materialist. That doesn’t make you the final arbiter of this problem.
@@4greendeep6
That’s weird… I’m looking back at my comment, and i see where i express a humanist opinion, but i don’t see any materialist opinions or assertions that i’m the final arbiter on this question or any other.
@@cuzned1375No, it isn't materialism because it is a material fact that there is a human being in the womb.
The Piscean age was dominated in the West by Abrahamic parental deity religion. And now we are transitioning out of the Piscean age and into the Aquarian age. Which will be here in about 15O years.
The Piscean age was dominated by subjective Doctrinal Revelation and the Aquarian age is going to be based on the objective Scientific Method. Which is a much more reliable method for determining human knowledge.
Unfortunately the more one learns about Parental Deity religion the harder it becomes to "believe" in the always invisible. Which is what is happening all over the world.
Then there is all of the bigotry and racism and sexual abuse. There should be no real surprise that folks are leaving Parental Deity religion behind. As none of it has ever been factual or necessary in any way.
And it has always been based on attachment manipulation and masturbation. Clearly the spiritual symbolism of the early Piscean age is no longer working on the modern rational soon to be Aquarian human psyche.
As the Buddhist's understand the only thing we can ever be certain of is... change. And the past always gives way to the future. And it looks like our Aquarian age is going to be based on fact rather than faith. That is if we actually survive the Piscean age.💙
All human live is sacred ❤
No all Christians believe this.
Not mine.
@@VaughanMcCue God bless you. Stop watching porn.
@@SantiagoEspaillat
I hope you were not paid for that performance, as the man you were with appeared disappointed.
Is all life sacred? If not why not?
First let us define dogma. There are 2 definitions that can fit in a general conversation.
1. something held as an established opinion
2. a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds
Harris believes in atheist dogma as defined. It is something he holds as an established opinion. He can't prove it as fact so it is simply his opinion. What reasons do I have not to just come over and take someone's stuff under Sam Harris's worldview? Ok Sam where do the foundations of your ethics come from? Let's talk about that.
Talk with a Catholic exorcist. mic drop
I used to ponder that theologians debating about how many angels could fit on the end of a needle was a good illustration of the befuddlement of many of the religious mindset .
After a glimpse of eternity I realise they should have been
debating about how many of the known material universes could fit on the end of a needle
Atheists just don't get it and are ultimately boring and arrogant.
There's an absolutely incredible good , beautiful loving and timeless unseen world.
That's all folks❤
Sam would agree with your last sentence.
It is tough to watch a human allow the words "look... it used to be dogma that slavery was okay" to fall out of his mouth and yet basically be of the mind that dogma is simultaneously important and in effect prescribe that it not be retread analytically for purposes of dismantling it ([at least he recognizes the analog to Chesterton's fence] though it may have come to be ensconced in a society's inner sanctum of meaning by dint of happenstance and we know this if for no other reason than the myriad of dogmas strewn across time and place on the globe) instead there is the soft suggestion to just let dogma collide with ground-level reality enough times over the course of generations until for reasons wholly apart from mere (and frankly, simple) analysis, it proves itself less appetizing and tenable to the population which values it. Yeah, no.
You are taking license with the word dogma. To say that a law is dogmatic is to simply not understand the way the word is commonly used, regardless of what the dictionary says.
Finally someone from the atheist community acknowledges that not all religions are the same.
It’s a shame if you think this is the first time. Most of my favorite atheistic writers and thinkers criticize religion in general while also acknowledging that some religions are better or more harmful than others.
@@robertpotter3578
My -religion- superstition is perfect because I understand my imaginary god's intentions and like a travel agent, know where to tell people to go and where to get off.
Mr. Harris said so much in support of religion. To Harris religion "is a powerful organizing principle" and one "can point to certain benefits, in various contexts, of having religion as opposed to not having it". Also, Mr. Harris stated that religion provides groups and individuals "powerful reasons to do good things". Everything else he said was just a stream of caveats. I noticed that he had some books behind him, I wonder if one was T. S. Eliot's "The Idea of a Christian Society". If not, he could use a copy.
It's not a caveat if, along with the "good things" your special book tells you to do, it also tells you to murder apostates and subordinate women. Calling that a "mere caveat" is absolutely inhumane.
No sam doesn’t say so much in support of religion. “Is a powerful organizing principle”. That speaks nothing to the support of religion. It is simply a fact. Love how host runs away from stem cell research issue. Religious zealots should keep their 1st century beliefs out of our 21st knowledge.
But powerful, beneficial and ethical are different things. Harris has said in the past that he could invent a religion in minutes that would be more moral and beneficial to society than any currently in existence but argues against the idea that the ends of those benefits would justify the means of claiming false divine knowledge to achieve them. This is, ethically, one of the most troubling arguments "for" religion: that it really doesn't matter whether or not it's true, just so long as it makes people think and behave in ways that others want them to. That argument does, however, reveal the primary role that religion has played throughout history: exerting social control through invented authority.
Here, the interviewer doesn't want the state deciding what a human being is, but it is somehow perfectly fine for religions to do so based on claiming to know the mind of God.
And, yet, none of that makes it true.
Respect to Jonah for not being part of the Trump freak show.
Isn't this the guy that makes politics his religion 🤔
What is a religion?
Which guy?
No, politics isn't a religion.
@GWFHegel-ms7gz No it definitely is
@@jordanjmdjmd74 Religion involves the worship of the supernatural. Politics doesn't do that
Sam Harris is pro Marx and anti drugs?
He is most certainly not pro marxist. He is pro psycodelics tho.
@@dustin2215Yeah, so stupid on both fronts.
Well if you’re gonna get Sam Harris on the show you gotta balance it out with some John Lennox.
No, not really
That was a bit funny, but Kent Hovind would be a better choice because he also talks nonsense.
Sufi Chisti of hindustan was one of the biggest bigots if you read his views on non believers and kuffars