Week 5 Post 1

You can sum up the reason for Sam Harris being so critical of religion in the first few minutes of the lecture. He essentially says that we are fighting a 19th century religious war with deadly technology. He does not think that religion has any boundaries. The religious leaders make their rules about certain things and no one questions it. No one can question it because everyone would be afraid to challenge the Vatican or Muslim religious leaders. He makes a good point about the Catholic church saying that using contraception is a sin when there are millions of people dying in Africa from AIDS. He is critical of religion because it goes too far sometimes and is not always looking out for the best situation for its believers.

I think that the strongest part of his argument is when he talks about religious moderation. He says, "Either you have good reasons for what you believe or you don't." Harris points out that we do not see any Tibetan suicide bombers because they are religiously moderate. They are under just as bad if not worse control through the Chinese. He goes on to say that religiously moderate people are somewhat okay because they aren't the ones doing the killing. However, he says that they give cover to fundamentalism and they try to protect faith. The weakest part of his argument were his comparisons. He compares religious tolerance to people who would come out and worship Poseidon, or those that believe that we can't do Stem Cell research because we have to kill a three day old embryo. These are arguments that won't get him to convince others to convert to his ideas. I think that they are slightly offensive and useless in his argument. Overall, he does make valid points.