DIGITIG:
"Militant atheist Sam Harris, according to "The End of Faith" apparently wants to see humanity exterminated"
www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controversy2/
'Apparently' implies you haven't read the book for yourself. If you really have read the book then you have clearly, wilfully and disingenuously misinterpreted what Sam wrote.
DIGITIG:
"...in "The End of Faith", Sam Harris insists that his own ethical position is based on assumptions about human nature that are so obvious that it "need not be validated by a controlled study" (p192) -- this in a chapter on "The Science of Good and Evil" (my emphasis), so the "science" on which Harris calls for our extermination -- yours and mine -- is a "science" that needn't bother with study when Harris already "knows" the answer."
Here is the text from the last paragraph of p191 and all of p192.
p191 to 192
"Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by definition. They also inspire behaviour that tends to contribute to the happiness of other human beings. These states of mind not only feel good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shame. These are not sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study. We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive social emotions make us feel good, while negative ones do not, but they would be beside the point. The point is that the disposition to take the happiness of others into account to be ethical seems to be a rational way to augment ones own happiness. As we will see in the next chapter, the linkage here becomes increasingly relevant the more rarefied ones happiness becomes. The connection between spirituality, the cultivation of happiness directly through precise refinements of attention and ethics is well attested. Certain attitudes and behaviours seem to be conducive to contemplative insight, while others are not. This is not a proposition to be merely believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of ones life.
A Loophole for Torquemada?
Casting questions about ethics in terms of happiness and suffering can quickly lead us into unfamiliar territory. Consider the case of judicial torture. It would seem, at first glance, to be unambiguously evil. And yet, for the first time in living memory, reasonable men and women in our country have begun to reconsider it publicly. Interest in the subject appears to have been provoked by an interview given by Alan Dershowitz, an erstwhile champion of the rights of the innocent until proven guilty, on CBS's 60 Minutes. There, before millions who would have thought the concept of torture impossible to rehabilitate, Dershowitz laid out the paradigmatic ticking bomb case."
DIGITIG:
"
>This is a lie! Please cite.
Elsewhere in the thread I have backed this up with direct quotes (page 129 of the edition that I have). Sorry, but it's not a lie; you weren't reading carefully enough.
>DIGITIG, YOU HAVE DELIBERATELY LIED TO THE READERS.
Nope, I just read the book more carefully than you did.
"
p128 (129 in the digitig's)
"...States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self defence be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns.
That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side."
DIGITIG:
"Rather than "wants" it's perhaps fairer to say that he reluctantly considers that we will have to risk it because that's better than allowing religion (Islam specifically) to continue to exist. It's not that he wants most of humanity to be wiped out, it's just that he wants it more than the continued existence of Islam. I've quoted the actual words and page number elsewhere in the thread."
No reasonable thinking person reading Sam's book would come to the interpretation that you have digitig and your quotes are very selective.
So, are you a troll or are you just reading the book through fundamentalist coloured glasses?
