Where Sam leads us astray

Re: What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say
by Sam Harris
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/what-barack
-obama-could-n_b_92771.html

There is much to like in this essay by Sam Harris, and in many ways it is spot on. My favorite line is "Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography." As usual though, I believe he goes a bit too far.

His emotional appeal to reason seams most reasonable until one pauses to consider that those who have trod the path of “The Enlightenment” believed (and still do if our current foreign policy is an example) that their ‘superior’ outlook entitles them to enslave the majority of the world, the better to relieve them from their ‘darkness’ (and their resources)!

Setting up the straw man of false religion, he feels justified to ignore by lack of mention the mystical. Then knocking it down he establishes his new religion, in effect: “Behold, no reality exists but that revealed by the light of our reason!”

By that he means his own of course, though the allusion is universal. Alas, as always, the devil resides in the details. By this same measure we should abandon all science, since time after time as our knowledge expands our previous understandings are shown to be false—but of course we do not, we keep on perfecting our knowledge of the external world by new application of the same method.

While I would no more recommend throwing away the tools of science than would Sam, unlike him I have no trouble positing the existence of an internal knowledge, uniquely accessible only through following the philosopher’s dictum “know thyself.”

There is a doorway within human beings that reason, at least some forms of reason, finds abhorrent, because it cannot penetrate therein. We are nonetheless drawn to it perhaps, find it vaguely familiar, for from whence we have come and must one day return, willing or no.

Contrary to many proscriptions from the pulpit, we needn’t wait till we die to go there, but its shape is such that there is no room to bring along any of our favorite beliefs about ourselves or others, let alone possessions — nothing, in fact. There is no room for these things because in the realm beyond the door they are unnecessary, for it already is, and being complete has no need of them.

So we skirt along the periphery with our reason and our science, casting aspersions, pretending it doesn’t exist, debating whether light is a wave or a particle or something that can resemble both, while agreeing without the need for discussion that whatever it is it certainly is not self-aware.

Or, at times we prefer to erect a solid barrier in front of the door as an altar, on which we pile all our favorite descriptions as offerings (such as this poor one), until it is entirely blocked by the ‘light of our reason,’ and we feel secure to proceed in our lives in the knowledge that it doesn’t exist, and if perchance it does, our offerings have covered our bases and our ticket in is assured. Now on to the real business of life, the car payment, the mortgage, or if you’re a bit beyond all that, conquering the world.

This entrance was never made in a place that could be blocked by such efforts however, and can easily be accessed at any moment by any heart willing to pay the price of admission—everything, and nothing.

Few of us feel we can afford this, at least not until we have sampled everything else the bazaar of life has to offer. Lacking this primordial reference point, many strange things happen in “the marketplace of ideas.”

The ‘science’ of Eugenics was not unique to Hitler’s Nazis, nor did it die with him. How else do we explain a war that has stayed beyond its exposed lack of justification to kill one million people.

Though not apparent from this essay, Harris’ appeal to the light of reason belies his equally passionate fear of “Islamo-fascists,” and the lumping together of all the followers of Mohammed into this tent. While he expresses dislike of religious fanatics of all stripes, it is the “Islamo-fascists” that worry him the most.

Why, I wonder?

For myself, while I consider it a distortion of the term, using it I’ll say I dislike all “religious fascists,” those of the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim variety being the ones I’m familiar with, but no less do I fear the atheist, corporate, and agnostic technocrats who use their mastery of science to threaten the world with destruction rather than be forced to bow (in their view) to the false god of communism.

While there is much fear to go around here, personally I find the atheist, corporate, agnostic, Christian and Jewish varieties more threatening to our continued mutual existence for the reasons that they are closest to home (mine), have access to the most powerful weapons by far, and have demonstrated little self restraint in using them.

While my faith may be small as a mustard seed and the love in my heart even less, some grace has allowed me to sample the nectar from beyond my own doorway. I am thus inoculated, spoiled forever I hope, from being seduced by such seemingly reasonable beliefs as Mr. Harris puts forth, which would confirm a third of the world’s people as my enemy, that I must actively fear and arm myself against.

Instead I stand with Martin Luther King Jr. in proclaiming my belief that my own government is the greatest perpetrator of misery and destruction in the world today, though in this it acts as a puppet controlled not by its own people. I fear most my compatriots reasonable beliefs and my government's rationalizations that find it seemly to kill hundreds of thousands of innocents to get the people they label ‘the bad guys,’ relieving them of their resources in the bargain.

This game is old as empire, the theocratic ones as well as the ‘democratic’ ones of the ‘enlightened’ nations; Spain, France, Britain and the United States, to name a few.

I have no problem harboring these fears alongside the recognition that lacking the referential orientation of contact with our inner source of being, we are all wandering around in the dark. This darkness is not to be condemned but alleviated. Reason alone will not do, for one person’s reason leads to another’s holocaust. “I think therefore I am” works only so long as we think the same.

Unfortunately no two human beings do, but we can remove ourselves from the game long enough to see we are all projected from the same source, unique but similar, and in fact connected. This knowledge requires no offerings, no tithing to build mega-churches or mega-missiles, but carries with it the burden that we act in the awareness of that knowledge, in a world that seems content to destroy itself rather than acknowledge this simple fact.