The next morning, I drove 40 miles to Las Cruces to purchase the last copy on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. I urge everyone to buy Harris' book; it is nothing short of phenomenal. The End of Faith is absolutely essential reading regardless of your religious and political beliefs, and is written in a captivating, page-turning style that is rarely found in such a fastidiously researched and scholarly work.  Harris' fearless, razor-sharp dissection of religion and its untenable foundation - faith – represent a long overdue, almost unheard of viewpoint – one that is seemingly proscribed in nearly every sphere of discussion in our world. But, as the author eloquently points out, if we do not firmly and unequivocally reject faith and embrace reason as the sole method of evaluating the validity of ideas, it is only a matter of time before we witness mushroom clouds rising over what once were cities.

I am now convinced that those of us who cherish reason, freedom and civilization must take an active role in eliminating faith as an accepted epistemological choice for mankind. Prior to reading Mr. Harris' book, I regarded myself as an "epicurean", non-"evangelical" atheist. I felt little compulsion to challenge the religious beliefs of others unless they initiated the conversation. There seemed to be little point in standing on a soapbox and spraying about the folly of belief in anything unsubstantiated, whether it be God, astrology, alchemy, homeopathy or Elvis' immortality. Why incur the potential derision or wrath of billions of fellow human beings, 90% of whom still argue over which book was written by the Creator of the Universe – disputes as bizarre and tragic as would be coming to blows over the question of whether Yoda or Obi-Wan-Kenobi is the True Master of the Force?

The problem is, in a world where Muslim Jehadists will soon get their hands on thermonuclear devices, religious moderation and tolerance stops us from taking the steps needed to prevent the fall of civilization. Proponents of reason can no longer maintain the luxury of silence.

Harris' book does not focus solely on the absurdity of any particular religion, or the atrocities perpetrated by practitioners of any particular faith.  From the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, through Hitler's massacres in WWII,  to the butchery of millions from the Hindu-Muslim conflicts in India and Pakistan, Harris shows that religious faith has been  the underlying cause of most of wholesale death and destruction in the world since the beginning of recorded history.

Many of the "faithful" proclaim that only belief in God can provide the moral foundation for living a good life. Quite the opposite is true: when one builds his morality and ethics on a foundation of fantasy – a foundation that is inherently rotten because it must be accepted on faith that by definition cannot be challenged by any evidence of the senses or process of reason – one has no defense against the flawed morality and ethics that led nineteen devout, faithful and God-fearing Muslims to incinerate ~3000 of our neighbors on September 11, 2001. They had absolute faith that they were doing  good, not evil. Only by using reason, logic and science as the foundation for one's philosophy can we live truly moral and ethical lives.

When my daughter was born in 1994, the issue of her religious training surfaced. Prior to becoming a father, I had not fully accepted my atheism, but when my wife (who is an ex-Catholic but not an atheist) presumed that we would provide her with a non-denominational theological education, I realized that I simply could not lie to my precious little bean and tell her that the nonsense of faith was anything but, as is aptly described by Harris, something that "belongs on the same shelf as Batman". Although this at first caused arguments with my wife, I prevailed and we have raised our kid as an atheist - as a corollary of the basic tenets of objectivism; atheism per se is NOT a philosophy unto itself. 

The results have been phenomenal. She has never had a single nightmare, despite the death of her grandmother in 1997 and being present when her great-grandmother "Mutti" died, while we held her hand, in 2002.  My wife and I were quite surprised (and pleased) that Julie does not have bad dreams, but I have a hypothesis that might explain it. Most children are told on the one hand that monsters and ghosts are just pretend, but on the other hand that there is this mysterious, inexplicable entity called God that is invisible, all-powerful, might visit you in the middle of the night ("… and if I die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take"), battles another evil god (Satan), etc. They are told that God is all goodness and light, knows everything and is all-powerful - but when the kids ask why God allows Satan to live and permits death, disease, war and the rest of the bad stuff, the best parents can offer is the canard "God is mysterious and mere humans can never fully understand his reasons or methods". No wonder the poor kids have nightmares!

From the very earliest times when she was a toddler and asked about god, I would tell her that "god was just pretend", the same as monsters and ghosts and Santa Claus; that the world was real and wonderful and she had the power to fully understand everything in it if she just read and studied hard enough. As she has grown and become more sophisticated, we have provided more details regarding the various religions and why they are silly and unreasonable. Raising her in this fashion has been particularly challenging at times. My Dad, sister, her husband and kids are all Jehovah's Witnesses (my parents were Methodists until they were converted when I was ~ 14), and all my wife's relatives are devout Catholics. My kid does not challenge the religious beliefs of her friends or relatives, all of whom are theists - but she also does not allow them to try to convert her or pity her. We have never lied to her about anything, never spanked her, and always used reason and logic to justify all family rules and regulations.

As a result, she has been a straight-A student since the 1st grade, reads at a 9th grade level, recently had a perfect score on the Texas Academic Knowledge and Skills test, and took top honors in the 5th grade District science fair, beating 1739 other students. She has never thrown a tantrum, and is as close to perfect as one could ask. When teachers and others learn that this happy, well-adjusted and brilliant kid is an atheist, they are shocked and befuddled - but it is precisely because she has never been asked to integrate the impossible and the ridiculous into her world view that she has turned out so well.

The Nightly Words (recited together at bedtime - change plural references to singular for recitation alone)

With these words,
We confirm our respect for life in all its beautiful and mysterious forms,
And renew our appreciation
For another day's existence,
Along with our sadness and fond remembrance
For those who are no longer with us.
With each new day,
We will strive to make the world a better place
To reach for the stars,
And live the lives
Of Ideal Men

Lets Eat (recited before meals; this was lifted from a Jimmy Stewart movie)

We worked hard for this food
We bought it from other men who grew it
They got paid and we put it on the table
We're not thankin' anyone 'cause we done it ourselves -
Lets Eat! (end with a clap of the hands)

The Pledge of Freedom (has the same number of syllables as the Pledge of Allegiance, so it can be said in a group without causing too much suspicion)

I pledge to defend
The Principles of Freedom
Upon which this Nation was founded:
The right to free speech,
The right to bear arms,
And the right to a limited Government
With freedom and justice for all.

Most of Harris' book is brilliantly correct. Rather than take up space with constant "dittos", I will instead focus most of my critique on those portions that I take exception to.

I must gently chastise Mr. Harris for not having studied Objectivism prior to writing his book.  Objectivists, be they of the "little 'o' " (like me) or "big 'O' " variety are important allies in the goal to move mankind toward reason and away from the absurdity of religion. Rand's novels, while not rigorous treatises on metaphysics, epistemology, morality, ethics or politics, are a source of reason-based inspiration to millions; the fact that they are not steeped in technical jargon makes them accessible to the general public and sparks interest in philosophy - I know they had that effect on me! One of the most important foundations of objectivism is the requirement to always be willing to examine and re-examine one's beliefs and conclusions, and toss out anything that cannot survive critical scrutiny.  For an excellent treatment of Rand's strengths and weaknesses, I recommend the late Ron Merrill's The Ideas of Ayn Rand, and also his brilliant and rigorous essay Axioms: the Eightfold Way, which I include at the end of this critique

The passage from Deuteronomy spurred me to dig out a Bible and re-read that chapter and also Leviticus.  Talk about goofy! I showed Jewell the parts about killing gay people and apostate children - her eyes grew wide and she exclaimed, "That's insane".  We also noticed that rabbits are on the list of banned food - she wondered if it applied to chocolate Easter bunnies, hee hee!

Pg. 26

Harris provides an eye-opening list of religion-based conflicts.

Pg. 36 The Surprising and Beautiful World

Beautifully stated!

Pg. 40: Selflessness

I maintain that meditation cannot produce an actual state of selflessness, and moreover, it is not productive to try to achieve such a mental state.

One of Rand's most significant contributions to logic was her notion of the fallacy of the "stolen concept". While not entirely original, I have found this idea to be powerfully beneficial in analyzing and refuting many arguments that belong to the general class of "using reason and logic to show that reason and logic are invalid". The fallacy of the stolen concept applies loosely to Harrris' contention that it is possible (and useful) to attain a state of "selflessness". Think about it - if one really did attain such a state, one would have no "self" that could be aware of anything, including the sensation of being selfless!

Pg. 41: Trusting the Senses, Reason and Logic

Mr. Harris does not actually suggest that the Universe we observe with our senses and instruments, interpreted by our powers of reason, is merely a subjective illusion, but he seems to give credence to those who do.

Granted, we don't directly observe anything, including our own thoughts, but that is not sufficient evidence to claim that the world we inhabit is unreal. That our minds' Points Of Awareness (POA) merely observe the brain's neurological mapping of sensory data is insufficient to defend the mystics' contention that there is no actual external reality, or that external reality is wildly different from what it appears to be. The fact that all of the measurements we make with the myriad of instruments available to us (including the information provided directly by the senses) correlate to such a strong degree is powerful evidence that the Universe really does exist, in the form that it appears to. Yes, I have seen The Matrix and I read a lot of sci-fi; I am familiar with the Hindu concept that the Universe might just be a dream of Brahma, but even in those imaginary tales, there is still an "anchor" of reality behind the illusion. If we peel away enough layers of subjectivity, we eventually discover the "man behind the curtain".

When I stand in my backyard under my almond trees in the spring, I see them and the lovely blossoms; I smell them, hear the wind rustling the leaves, and hear the bees buzzing happily. If I close my eyes and walk toward them, I eventually bump my head on the branches. If I take a video of them, the images and sounds match what my eyes and ears conveyed to my consciousness. Everyone who goes to my backyard agrees with my description, including our cat Max. If those trees are not real, the illusion is so good that it is pointless to fight it.

There is a difference between the unknown and the unknowable. Just because our senses and instruments are not 100% accurate does not prove that that what we see and measure is completely different from what it appears to be, or that we cannot glean a pretty good notion of the actual form of the Universe. Certainty is possible! For example, I am certain, as is Mr. Harris, that faith is a very, very dangerous thing.

Pg. 43: Reason Insufficient?

Harris' statement that "we cannot live by reason alone" is one of the few errors in the book.   It is a classic example of the fallacy of the stolen concept. Please step back and think about what alternatives to reason exist. There is no middle ground between faith and reason. Is Mr. Harris saying that we should have faith that his statement is true? If so, then by what means do we determine that the faith he wishes us to have is any better than the faith of the 911 terrorists?  Faith is not a tool that can be used to distinguish "good faith" from "bad faith" It is always fallacious to use reason to argue that reason is unreasonable or insufficient.

There can be no marriage between faith and reason - they are mutually exclusive.

Far from being ready for the "formaldehyde", the complete embrace of reason and total rejection of faith and its associate, mysticism, can free us from the fear of death and sense of purposelessness that plague so many people. There is plenty of room within science and cosmology for wonder, mystery and hope.

In May of 2003, Scientific American featured the article Parallel Universes by Max Tegmark.  It convinced me that the Universe has a truly amazing property: there exist an infinite number of duplicates of you and I and the Earth and all that we can see and observe! Go far enough, and you are guaranteed to encounter them. This property does not require esoteric n-dimensional mathematics, or complexities such as string theory; it is not a typical "Art Bell" style fantasy. Particle physics and probabilities combined with the mathematics of infinities guarantee it.

The basic concept is simple and beautiful: Take any volume of space, such as our Milky Way galaxy, or the local group, or even the entire 14 billion light-year observable universe (sometimes referred to as the "Hubble Bubble").  One can calculate the maximum number of possible configurations of all particles in that space - a number that is tremendously large, but not infinite. (A close approximation may be obtained by calculating the number of protons that can be packed into the given space). Take than number, and calculate the volume required to contain that number of copies of the space in consideration. Then, if you consider any space outside that huge volume, simple probability guarantees that "outside" space is an exact duplicate of one of the spaces inside the huge volume. The distances involved are incredibly vast - over 10**100 meters - a distance so huge that it dwarfs the observable universe the way the observable universe dwarfs an atom.

If this terse explanation is not clear, please read the article. Why is this relevant to the discussion at hand? Because I know that somewhere in the Universe, there is another "me", with memories of all my experiences, seeing exactly what I see, typing this letter on an identical laptop.

This certainty led me to pen the following poem written for my precious Jewell. It gives me great comfort in moments of fear and pain:

Somewhere in the Universe
Your smile always shines for me
And we will laugh and dance and sing
Through Love's Eternity.

I am not the only godless person who has not needed faith when facing death, or to find inspiration in the purely real world. One such person is Robert Ingersol. Here is a small excerpt from one of his most beautiful works.

"Love is the only bow on Life's dark cloud. It is the morning and the evening star. It shines upon the babe, and sheds its radiance on the quiet tomb. It is the mother of art, inspirer of poet, patriot and philosopher. It is the air and light of every heart -- builder of every home, kindler of every fire on every hearth. It was the first to dream of immortality. It fills the world with melody -- for music is the voice of love. Love is the magician, the enchanter, that changes worthless things to Joy, and makes royal kings and queens of common clay. It is the perfume of that wondrous flower, the heart, and without that sacred passion, that divine swoon, we are less than beasts; but with it, earth is heaven, and we are gods. "

Pg 57: Logical Contradictions

Although the proof that it is impossible to crosscheck more than a trivial number of beliefs for consistency is compelling at first glance, it leaves me with an uneasy feeling. Is that assertion subject to the same inability to crosscheck? <grin> We should not be so fast to assume that new methods of crosschecking will never be discovered. I also reject the whole notion of "perfect" anything - that concept is rooted in faith and religion; I'm not certain what you mean by perfect in the context of your argument.  In most cases, outside of the narrow confines of mathematics, proofs that things are impossible are fraught with peril. Take the classic example of the "proof" that bees could not fly - it was invalid because it did not take into account aspects of fluid dynamics such as turbulence, eddies and vortices. 

Pg 59: Change Blindness

The author makes some good points here. I'm reminded of the recent "Gorillas in our Midst" experiment, where test subjects are asked to watch a video of a group of people dressed in white or black shirts who are passing a basketball around. The subjects are asked to count the number of times the ball is passed to a while shirt vs a black shirt. In the middle of the video, a man in a gorilla suit enters the room, spends a few seconds there, and then exists. Many people watching the video never notice the gorilla!

Pg 62: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Faith

I only occasionally have the pleasure of debating the question of the existence of God with "the faithful". These debates rarely get very far, as I insist that one of the perquisites for the debate is agreement regarding what is meant by "god"; that term is dependent on understanding three essential metaphysical concepts: Something, Nothing, and Everything. Even though we use these words often in everyday conversation, conceptualizing them is non-trivial - but without a clear understanding, no further conversation about god is possible. My arguments are loosely based on those of Kai Nielsen's.

"Nothing" is a difficult abstraction. "Nothing" is absolute emptiness and by definition contains no object or concept. It is impossible for anything to spring from or be created from "nothing", nor can "nothing" be the source of any causality - it is truly the absence of anything that exists. Physicists and cosmologists talk about things such as virtual particles that spontaneously appear and quickly disappear from what they refer to as nothing (space empty of matter and energy), but that which those particles blink into existence from is not "nothing" - it still part of spacetime and contains the framework of physical laws that allows the virtual-particle soup to exist. When I refer to "nothing", I am talking about a pure, metaphysical "nothing" - the true McCoy of absolute zero, nada, zip!

"Something" is only a bit less difficult to understand.  "Somethings" can be physical objects, forces, the structure of spacetime, subjective feelings, concepts, thoughts, etc. This definition can lead to ontological-related paradoxes, but they are of no real importance to the discussion. For example, the concept of "nothing" is "something", but just because a concept exists in the sense that it can be described and believed does not mean that what is described by the concept has a real physical existence - in the same way that the concept of having a huge diamond buried in the yard means that there actually is a diamond there.

The definition of "Everything" follows from the definitions of "something" and "nothing". Everything is just the totality of all possible somethings. Again, there are ontological conundrums here that turn out to be inconsequential, Goedel's and Russell's paradoxes notwithstanding. "Everything" simply is everything - all of Existence. It cannot be looked at from the "outside"; it by definition contains all points of view that are outside, before, after, etc. It contains all possible universes (little u), all Cantorian levels of infinity, etc. As shorthand, I use the symbol U for "everything" - the Universe with a capital U, distinct from the universe (small "u"), which merely describes that portion of the U that can be observed and measured.

Armed with these three concepts, we are ready to see why the standard definition of God is illogical. People of faith regard God as being "greater than everything", or "greater than anything that can be conceived". They claim that God created everything, but that is clearly a contradiction - if God exists, then God is real - is something - any by definition, is part of everything. The U cannot have been created any more than it could "spring from nothing" - there is, by definition, nothing outside of the U for it spring from! The "uncaused first cause" argument for the existence of God can be shown to be fallacious in the light of this definition; if the U needs a cause (it doesn't), and God is posited to be that cause, then what caused God? If the rejoinder is that "God is infinite, has always existed and does not need a cause", I respond that they are describing the U and calling it "God", along with the assumption that the U is somehow alive.  They have also implicitly acknowledged that it is possible for something to have always existed that did not need to be created, and therefore cannot claim that it is impossible for the Universe to have always existed sans creation. It remains to be seen if the Universe as a whole is alive and intelligent (in a manner that is detectable and understandable by Humans), but there is no object or concept, regardless of what one wishes to name it, that can exist outside of the U or "before" the U.

BTW, the above does not contradict or conflict with the Big Bang theory. (I use the term theory and not hypothesis because there is a huge body of testable evidence supporting the theory, similar to the huge body of evidence supporting the theory (not hypothesis) of Evolution.) The Big Bang makes no claims about what happened "before" the structure of spacetime, matter and energy that we inhabit today was "created" by it. (For an excellent summary of current understanding of the Big Bang, please see Misconceptions about the Big Bang, by Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M Davis, in the March 2005 issue of Scientific American.)

Pg 67: Epistemology re: Good vs Evil

Sam Harris' analysis in this section is tremendously accurate and deserves specific congratulations. When I discuss 9/11 with typical Christians and explain that the hijackers, far from being cowards, were courageous in that they had perfect faith that what they were doing was correct and divinely ordained - and worth dying for - I am greeted with reactions of horror, disbelief and anger. They exclaim that the hijackers faith was wrong, it was not a "true" faith, etc. I then ask the essential epistemological question: "How do you know?" The ensuing exchange invariably leads to the inescapable conclusion that only reason, not "my faith is better than yours because my God says it is better", tells us that it is wrong to fly airplanes into buildings. It is reason - not faith in a Bible that admonishes us to kill gay people and burn you, your wife and her mother alive should you have sex with both of them - that lets us know that it is immoral to kill innocent people who have never directly attacked or harmed you.

Pg. 73: Tragic Absurdity

Pg. 75: The Nightly News

Although I agree with Mr. Harris' news story analysis, the recent case of CBS and Dan Rather is thought provoking.

Pg. 78: Missionaries - Bane or Menace?

It can be argued that the actions of missionaries, albeit producing short-term good - namely the relief of poverty and disease, are actually harmful because in the long run, the missionaries increase the number of people who believe in god, with all the attendant problems that faith brings. I have little praise for missionaries who tempt people with food, medicine and money as bait for the ulterior motive of injecting them with irrationality.

Pg. 92

Sadly, the USA is now rationalizing torture as a legitimate tool of warfare. I will have more to say about this later.

Pg. 104: The worldwide PopeGasm

During all the breathless, nauseating news coverage of the April 2005 death of Pope John Paul II and the selection of Pope Benedict XVI, never once did I hear mentioned the atrocities of previous papacies or the Church's failure to renounce same. I did have to hear endless replays of the Cardinals' bashings of atheism.

Pg. 141: Is it Moral to Enjoy our Food While the Needy Starve?

Unger and others who advance the argument that we should not enjoy our lives while so many suffer are incorrect. One of fundamental tenets of objectivism is: "Reject unearned guilt". Although there is nothing wrong with helping others, if one freely chooses to do so and derives some kind of benefit thereof (even in the intangible form of feeling happy by assisting), there is no moral obligation to be charitable. The world will be a better place if each of us practices the virtue of selfishness, as described in Ayn Rand's eponymous book. (In "emergencies", a slightly different form of the virtue of selfishness is warranted, until the emergency is resolved and things return to normal.)

Pg. 143: Shed no Tears for the Evil Ones

Killing evil people is a good thing - the trick is to kill only the evil and not the innocent. I refuse to sit on any jury in a death-penalty case, because I might not be able to be absolutely certain that the person charged with the crime is truly guilty. Confessions are not 100% reliable - The Inquisition provides an obvious example - and there are data that suggest that over 100 innocent people have been executed in the U.S.A. since 1776. However, were I to encounter someone being raped or assaulted, and there was no doubt that I was witnessing an actual crime (similar to your encounter), I would feel not the slightest remorse in using my firearm to kill the perpetrator.

Pg.146-147: Noam Chomsky - How Can so Brilliant a Researcher be so Philosophically Ignorant?

Objectivism has already provided the framework for deriving a valid system of morality and ethics from basic axioms such as "I exist", the "U exists", "Life as Man qua Man requires choices, the most fundamental of which is to think", etc.

The author's statement on pg. 147 that  "Where ethics are concerned, intentions are everything" warrants discussion. I'm surprised he arrived at this conclusion, given that he offers many examples where people with misguided intentions - the Inquisitors, the hijackers and others - had convinced themselves that they were doing the right thing, yet the result was evil. There is no doubt in my mind that the 911 terrorists had the best interests of Allah and the greater good of mankind in mind when they attacked us. It is not intentions that count, it is results, reality and the truth that matters.

I would be willing to personally act as executioner if I witnessed a crime of rape or murder in progress.  Killing a truly evil person is moral and ethical. If however, acting with good intentions, I mistakenly killed an innocent person, then my act would not be ethical - it would be a horrible crime warranting punishment.

I am not on Chomsky's side in this debate, but I would urge extreme caution when we are tempted to dismiss collateral damage as inevitable, and ethical, just because we have "good intentions".

I was more inclined to think as Mr. Harris does before I became a father. It sounds trite, but I never appreciated the true horror of what it would be like to have one's child killed until I held my little girl in my arms for the first time. If she should ever be killed as the result of "collateral damage" inflicted by someone convinced that they were pursuing the "greater good", the rest of my life would be spent avenging her death - not by hunting down those indirectly responsible - I would look for the pilot of the plane that dropped the bomb. We are all responsible for our own direct actions. The guards in the Nazi death camps tried to justify the atrocities they committed by claiming they were just following orders, but they were just as guilty, on a smaller scale, as was Hitler.

I'll discourse further when I get to pages 192...196, re: the ethics of torture.

Pg. 148: Jainists and Microbes

I need to learn more about Jainism - but I wonder - do they freak-out when they catch a cold, knowing that their immune system is offing millions of Rhinoviruses? (hee hee).

Pg. 149: Wasting Precious Time and Resources on Religion

Consider the Pyramids. Beautiful, but think of the great things that could have been accomplished if the resources devoted to building them could have been directed toward science or math or art. Think of the time the author "wasted" researching and writing his book, or the time I spent (about 100 hours so far) reading it and writing this critique!

Pg. 153: Idiots in High Places

At Wal-mart earlier this week, my daughter and I passed by a rack of videotapes, and the "Left Behind" video inspired by Tim LaHaye caught my eye. I back-pedaled and showed it to her, explaining to her what the story was about, how stupid it was, and to be cautious if any of her religious friends wanted her to watch it. (Her best friend's father is a Methodist minister and had tried in the past to get her to watch the "Veggie Tales" Christian cartoons for children.) My kid  knows that until she is older and well versed in fending off the arguments of the theists, she is not allowed to let adults try to prostheletize to her without my wife or myself being present.) A couple of other Wal-Mart shoppers overheard us talking and realized that I was raising her as an atheist - it is hard to describe the venomous looks of disgust and hate that were directed at me.

Pg. 158-164: The War on Sin

I can't thank the author enough for these pages.

Pg. 168-169: Stand Up for Reason

Reading the book convinced me that I have an obligation to speak up when confronted with religiosity in public. Those of us who cherish reason, logic and freedom must start challenging, with polite firmness, religious dogma when we encounter it. Voicing opposition to faith can be scary and embarrassing - no one likes to be unpopular - but it is our solemn obligation. When we hear phrases such as "God willing" or "God bless you", we must speak up and say "which god? Do you mean Shiva, Thlaloc or Apollo?"  We must cease being afraid to tell people " Sorry, but God is just pretend, and the foolish belief in the supernatural has been directly responsible for untold misery and mayhem throughout the history of the human race."

Pg. 171: The Foundations of Morality and Ethics

Pg. 179 - 181

Harris offers excellent refutations of pragmatism and moral relativism, refuted via the fallacy of the stolen concept. The author's description of realism seems very close to objectivism.

Pg. 183: Math is Cool!

See note for Pg. 273.

Pg. 186: Treat Others the Way You Want to be Treated

"Should the Golden Rule apply to masochists?" Heh heh.

Pg. 187 - 189: What is Love?

Robert Heinlein offered an interesting definition of love:

"I'll give you an exact definition. When the happiness of another person becomes as essential to yourself as your own, then the state of love exists."
-- Jubal Harshaw to Ben Caxton, Stranger in a Strange Land

 Although this definition does not capture the more subtle metaphysical manifestations of love, it is still very compelling.

Also worth noting is Rand's definition of love, alluded to in Atlas Shrugged by John Galt's in the context of the "virtue of selfishness". He is love with Dagny, and describes how he is willing to commit suicide to save her from torture, because if she is tortured and killed in an attempt to break his will, he would have "no values to live for" afterward.

Pg. 189: When Love is Effective

Still more brilliance on the part of Mr. Harris!

Pg. 191 - 192: The True Meaning of Selfishness

Although Mr. Harris may not be aware of it, his analysis on these pages puts him in agreement with much of Ayn Rand's work. The word "selfish" is commonly misused; look it up in a dictionary (one published prior to ~1930). Selfish simply means: "concern with one's own interests" - it does not mean concern only with one's own interests, nor does it address what those interests are or ought to be; it does not mean that one is entitled to trample the rights of others in pursuit of one's own interests, or sacrifice one's long-term interests while reaching for a temporary pleasure.

The following is an excerpt from the Rational Review on-line:

Selfishness, or rational self-interest, is the ethics of the Objectivist Philosophy. To be "selfish," according to the Oxford Modern English Dictionary, means to be "concerned chiefly with one's own interest." Notice that the definition contains no ethical evaluation, either positive or negative.

Ayn Rand chose the word "selfish" because it most closely denotes the concept of living for one's own sake rather than living primarily for the sake of others. No other word quite captures that idea.

The fact that most people think that being selfish means harming one's fellow man, that pursuing one's own self-interest equates to behaving brutally or irrationally, is, as Ms. Rand noted, a "psychological confession" on their part. In fact it is against one's own long-term self-interest to behave irrationally or trample others. Such actions are the exact opposite of selfish--they're self-destructive.

Pg. 192 - 203: Never Initiate the use of Force or Fraud

The ethical questions posed in this section of the book are among the most ancient, difficult and troubling that face Mankind. I do not pretend to have an easy solution.

When it is justified to kill innocents - not just during warfare or to prevent an attack, but in the pursuit of any goal? This age-old question formed a major portion of the plot in Larry Niven's epic and highly recommended Ringworld series. In book two, The Ringworld Engineers, Louis Wu is faced with an apparent bifurcation: he can save the ~ 10 quadrillion inhabitants of the Ringworld from certain death when the Ringworld grazes it's sun, but in order to accomplish the task he will doom 5% of them to death from radiation poisoning. He chooses to save the Ringworld (and himself), but derives no happiness from the act and is troubled by it for the rest of his very long life. In book three, he learns to his horror that a solution that would have resulted in far fewer deaths had been within his grasp had he only tried a bit harder to discover it.

The present situation in Iraq has certain parallels with Ringworld.  (BTW, I am not a "liberal" and was not opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the same reasons that the Democrats and Bush-haters enunciated). We now know with reasonable certainty that the threat of attack from WMDs obtained via or through Iraq was not as imminent as we were led to believe, and if we had tried a little harder, we might have discovered a means of deposing Saddam Hussein that would not have killed the estimated > 50,000 innocents. The money spent on the war could have been put to far better use in hardening our border, protecting our ports and equipping and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents to infiltrate and destroy terrorists cells that could eventually get their hands on nuclear devices and set them off in western cities.

As I mentioned before, I have no objections to killing or torturing truly evil people.  In this I am guided by one of the fundamental principles of objectivism: "Never initiate the use of force or fraud". If someone else starts a fight, there is nothing wrong with finishing it - quite the opposite; it is one's moral obligation to fight back. In Dershowitz' time-bomb scenario, as long as the terrorist freely admitted his guilt prior to any torture or coercion (as is the case with Bin Ladin or Kahlid Sheik Mohammed), torture is clearly appropriate. They already deserve death, and if we can save people through information gleaned via torture, so much the better.

As Sam Harris correctly points out, the true ethical problem is the danger of accidentally targeting innocents, and he is also correct in concluding that collateral damage from bombs and other instruments of war inflict far more horrific harm on innocent people than would scientific methods of torture. However, that argument cannot be used to justify the accidental torture of innocents - quite the opposite - it drives home the point that collateral damage is inherently evil and must not be tolerated!  Although collateral damage might be justified as unavoidable when striking certain targets (more on this later), that same justification cannot be extended to torture in cases where there is any doubt - i.e. in the absence of an unforced confession - of guilt; torture, by definition, is directed at individuals with deliberation and forethought and is not analogous to a stray bullet or bomb.

Let's stretch the ticking-time-bomb analogy a bit farther, and consider the ethics of torturing the (fully innocent, non-supportive) wife and children of the confessed terrorist who planted the bomb. Suppose he does not crack at the sights and sounds of his family being disemboweled, and the H-bomb still goes off in San Diego harbor. At that point, all we have accomplished is to add to the numbers of innocents who have been harmed by the bastard - at the cost of our own moral fiber.

Consider the book's example of the grandfather's actions as a bomber pilot over Dresden vs killing little girls with a shovel; it is not consistent with your earlier assertion that "when it comes to ethics, intentions are everything". Suppose he believed that killing the little girls with a shovel would benefit Mankind (perhaps he concluded they were witches and would grow up to cast spells). Or, suppose he was a sadist who happened to be a bomber pilot, and greatly enjoyed firebombing people? It's not the intentions that count, it is the result. When you kill evil people, it is a good thing, even if you did it by accident, and when you kill innocent people, it is a bad thing, even if you did it by accident.  The dilemma posed has nothing to do with the intent; we must gauge if the firebombing, in the long run, resulted in less human suffering than if it had not occurred - and not just less suffering to Americans and the Allies, but to all humans, both now and in the future.

Mr. Harris and Glover are correct in pointing out that evolution has not equipped humans with the emotional skills to discern the difference between the death of a million people or the death of one person. It does not seem as salient as it should. Again, this is one of the most powerful arguments for abandoning faith and mysticism in favor of reason, logic and science - i.e., objectivism. Reason must prevail over instincts if the human race is to survive.

The author mentions the disbelief that many people felt when watching the towers fall. There is a simple reason for that disbelief, and that reason also explains why I personally felt absolutely zero incredulity when I heard of the attack on the radio and turned on the television to watch. The reason? The woeful absence of objectivism in modern society. As an objectivist, I know that I am real, the universe is real and that my senses and mind provide me with an accurate depiction of the facts of existence.  I reject traditional mysticism and any philosophy tells me that the universe is unknowable or that axiomatic knowledge is impossible. Therefore, when I see images of disaster and horror on all TV stations, and hear similar eyewitness accounts on multiple radio stations, I do not doubt the facts of reality.

I am no pacifist, and Sam Harris is 100% correct in concluding that pacifism is immoral. Where we differ is in the justification for collateral damage. Who decides which innocent non-combatants must die "for the greater good"? Consider how one would you feel if one's wife and children were "accidentally" killed by the bombs of another nation, who reasoned that Bush was a war-monger and had to be stopped, even if it caused collateral damage? Or consider the problem of capital punishment and the >100 innocents who have been executed in the US since 1776. If one's innocent son was about to receive a lethal injection for a crime he had not committed, would one be able to tell him, "its OK, the benefit that capital punishment affords society is worth the deaths of a few innocent people?"

The author and I concur that it would be wrong to not kill the knife-wielding murderer loose in the city of pacifists. But, if the maniac killed dozens and then disguised himself as a pacifist and hid in the city, should we firebomb it to take him out before he kills again?

Our challenge is to live our lives, enforce our laws, and wage war in a fashion that never results in the death of innocents. Just because it is difficult if not impossible to do so does not mean we should use our failure to achieve this goal as justification for collateral damage.

To our credit, the US went to great lengths to warn Iraq that attack was imminent, allowing those with the means an opportunity to leave Iraq and escape injury. In many ways, those who remained against their will were the equivalent of hostages. That having been said, the Bush administration could have done far more to minimize innocent casualties. I find it morbidly telling that many Christians are willing to die, and also risk civilian casualties, because they believe in the fairy-tale of Heaven and life-after-death. Life is far more precious to atheists, who know that this one shot at life is all we have.

If faced with the choice of saving your child at the cost of killing someone else's, in a one-one trade – we must have the courage to let our child die. If one kills an innocent person by mistake, no matter how lofty the goal, one must be prepared to pay the price for the mistake.

Many people have speculated about what would have happened if the Allies had lost WWII. Instead of the SS being on trial, the bomber pilots who torched Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would probably have been convicted and executed for their actions; the defense of "it was war and I was following orders" would have carried as much weight as when it was offered by the Nazis at Nuremberg. Again, I am not trying to equate our actions with those of the Japanese and the Germans. We did not start the fight - we finished it, and history has shown that our actions, in the long run, resulted in far less death and misery than if the Axis had prevailed.

About 3000 innocent people died on 9/11. Only time will tell if the > 50,000 non-combatants killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were a fair price paid - the only measure of success that I can think of will be to never see a terrorist-caused mushroom cloud rising over a city. Should we ever witness that horror, it will be a powerful argument that our actions were wrong and evil.

Even after several pages of discourse, I am no closer to a conclusion. I am terribly afraid that there is no solution, no answer to the dilemma. The only hope I have is for the human race to somehow survive long enough to colonize other worlds, and when we do so, take steps to insure that WMDs are never brought to them nor the means with which to build them.

The nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be put back.

Pg. 200: The Mean Streets of Prague

The author should not be so hard on himself! There is nothing wrong with lying to evil people. "Reject unearned guilt".  Who cares if it might be possible to "rehabilitate" them? What he did solved the immediate problem, and he escaped injury, living to write his book. Kudos to Mr. Harris for a brilliant solution!

Honesty is a virtue because it is a subset of the virtue of selfishness. When we lie to moral, ethical persons, we only hurt ourselves, because we must then live in fear that other virtuous people will learn of the lie, and as a result can we become a slave to their ignorance; we fear their enlightenment. But, we need not fear that an evil person will learn of a lie told in response to the use of force or fraud – they would only be discovering that we had defeated their evil.

Pg. 205 - 207: Causality and Happiness

If there were no conscious beings in the Universe, capable of perceiving reality, there would be no point to the Universe. It might as well not exist at all. I summarize this concept as follows: "One of the purposes of conscious life is to live and be a aware of as much of the Universe as possible, and thereby lend meaning to Existence". The Universe, in that it has produced at least one planet with life forms capable of observations and self-awareness, has provided meaning for all of Existence.

Think of the Universe as a beautiful child, that wants to show Daddy a pretty picture it has drawn.

States of non-contradictory joy can be attained in a variety of ways. They often occur when one is engaged in purposeful activity towards the attainment of a reachable, worthy yet challenging goal. Another common factor is observing something and translating the observation into a description; the act of modeling a portion of the Universe.  Some personal examples include rock-climbing, writing, painting, teaching, photography, pondering philosophy, memorizing poetry (I recently, after years of trying, finally committed The Raven to memory), mastering crosswind landings, amateur astronomy and gardening.

Pg. 208: Physicality of Consciousness: "Life After Death"

In the absence of evidence or a testable hypothesis regarding anything that is unknown, logic requires that we presume nothing. The absence of information about, or evidence of, life after death is insufficient reason to claim that life after death is possible, any more than the absence of information about giant purple gorillas living in underground cities on the far side of the moon means we should consider the possibility they are actually there, munching on giant bananas! Negative proofs are not required to refute fantastic claims in the absence of evidence of same.

Pg. 210 - 212: Self

Years of pondering this question have left me, if anything, more confused than ever. It may not be possible to reach a definitive answer, due to the apparent impossibility of observing one's own consciousness, because by definition, the self is the sink, not the source, of observations – including the observation of thoughts.

 Interestingly, it seems easier to arrive at conclusions about the point of consciousness of another person than my own point of consciousness, notwithstanding that consciousness seems to be a subjective sensation.  When observing other entities similar to me and seemingly self-aware - i.e., other humans and mammals - it is apparent that they make decisions based on sensory input and memories of same. This has lead me, and others, to conclude that  "the I" is that which models the Universe and makes decisions based on that model.

Although the sensation of consciousness is subjective, the experience of consciousness is an axiom (Ron Merrill, Axioms: the Eightfold Way).  David J. Chalmers' suggestion that consciousness can be modeled by postulating it as a fundamental property of existence (in the same manner that we regard mass or charge) is fascinating and holds great promise.  For more information, please read The Puzzle of Consciousness by David Chalmers, December 1995 Scientific American.

Pg. 215: Are We Real?

Is the author certain he really want to convince us that self is an illusion? Because if he really believes it, then either an automaton or an illusion wrote the book -  and then why should we be interested in it?

We ARE real, we DO exist, and our sensations of self-awareness, although subjective by definition, are not an illusion! We must not  fall into the trap that can result from paying attention to many philosophers, who seem, for some unfathomable reason, intent on "proving" that nothing is provable, nothing is real (including themselves), and nothing is knowable. That way lies madness and contradiction! Just relax to the beauty of axiomatic knowledge. It truly is the key to the "spiritual" happiness we all seek.

Although western civilization is far from ideal, neither is eastern. Mystical introspection is pleasant and has produced some useful insights, but has resulted in far fewer useful, tangible advances than has science.

Pg. 218: No Instrument can Directly Observe Itself

The exact nature of consciousness and self-awareness represent one of the most challenging problems of philosophy and science.

Pg. 221: Rational Mysticism?

I must gently take exception to Mr. Harris' assertion that mysticism is a rational enterprise. Words mean things, and for communication to occur, accepted definitions, with rare exceptions, must be adhered to:

mys·ti·cism

The above doesn't leave much room for logic, reason or science.

We do agree that the use of certain meditative techniques can be employed as a kind of instrumentation for obtaining information about the subjective sensations that arise from the experience of consciousness. Simply because those techniques are also employed in irrational, mystical endeavors does not mean that mysticism itself is rational or scientific. A typical "mystical" revelation is not testable or falsifiable as required by science and reason.

Pg. 264 (notes to page 174): Free Will

Excellent analysis by Sam Harris, re: "free will does not even correspond to any subjective fact about us." Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem suggests that it is not possible for us to observe our own "self" directly. A possible solution might lie with Chalmers' positing that there exists a fundamental unit of consciousness combined with the idea that "consciousness" is "that which decides."

Gregory Benford, Larry Niven and others offer the interesting concept that a perfectly intelligent, 100% knowledgeable being would have little free will – the correct path to a solution would always be apparent. Perhaps free will means the freedom to make an incorrect choice?

An idea occurred to me while pondering the books sections on mysticism. Could it be possible through TM to cause a portion of one's mind to act as a kind of recording device that would "take notes" about the subjective sensation of consciousness, free will and the process of generating new thoughts, so that one could go back and access those notes at a later time to gain insight on free will? Language is not well-suited to describing these kinds of concepts.

Pg. 269 (notes to pg 181): Objective Reality is Naive and Unfashionable?

The refutation of the argument in footnote 21 is trivial: fallacy of the stolen concept. As mentioned several times previously, implicit in any argument or statement that one utters, in any words one pens or even in any thoughts that one thinks, is the presumption that logic is valid and  that we and the Universe exist in a form very similar to that which we perceive with our senses and measure with our instruments. It is irrational to accept the ideas you presented in the book as  true and real if there is no underlying reality to the Universe as a whole, or to the author and his book in particular.

The "good" is that which maximizes a life as Man qua Man. Transient, short-term pleasures, such as stuffing one's face with ice-cream or raunchy sex with prostitutes, are not good because in the long-term they are harmful to you. For an in-depth discussion, please read Ron Merrill's The Ideas of Ayn Rand.

Pg. 277 (notes to pages 199-202): Confront Evil!

Footnote 40 is very good. I suggest extending it to apply whenever people foolishly proclaim that only faith can provide a foundation for morality and ethics. Don't just sit idly by and let unchallenged religion do harm to Mankind!

Conclusion:

Ron Merrill was a brilliant, clear-thinking post-Randian Objectivist. Here's his excellent essay on Axiomatic foundations.

The Interdependence of Axioms

Axioms as Foundations of Knowledge