The Magic Wand of World Peace

Oh, no…I have to defend Sam Harris a little bit even while disagreeing with him! There was a strange flare-up, a revival of an old interview with Harris from 6 years ago, in which he said something controversial:

If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.

This is one of those fraught philosophical scenarios loaded with emotional biases against an unrealistic, overly simplified moral dilemma that can never occur in the real world, and all I can say is…I hate those things. And there it was, all over twitter, and people were emailing me about it, and I just wanted the stupid story to go away, but now David Futrelle has highlighted it and John Wilkins has storified it.

So first, let’s put it in context. It’s not a pro-rape comment, or one that dismisses rape as unimportant.

Saltman: Isn’t religion a natural outgrowth of human nature?

Harris: It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think of arguing that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it’s a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.

Traditionally, religion has been the receptacle of some good and ennobling features of our psychology. It’s the arena in which people talk about contemplative experience and ethics. And I do think contemplative experience and ethics are absolutely essential to human happiness. I just think we now have to speak about them without endorsing any divisive mythology.

Saltman: Your analogy between organized religion and rape is pretty inflammatory. Is that intentional?

Harris: I can be even more inflammatory than that. If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion. I think more people are dying as a result of our religious myths than as a result of any other ideology. I would not say that all human conflict is born of religion or religious differences, but for the human community to be fractured on the basis of religious doctrines that are fundamentally incompatible, in an age when nuclear weapons are proliferating, is a terrifying scenario. I think we do the world a disservice when we suggest that religions are generally benign and not fundamentally divisive.

To rephrase it in a more general way: if you could get rid of a chronic, pervasive, causal malignity that afflicted all of humanity, would that be a wiser choice than getting rid of an acute, specific affliction that caused direct harm to a large subset of humanity? In those terms, it’s actually an interesting question (in that philosophical conundrum kind of interesting, which I hate), and the next question ought to be about the magnitude of the chronic malignity vs. the acute affliction. So it’s not an utterly idiotic scenario, but one that might expose legitimate and thoughtful differences in opinion.

And that’s where Harris and I begin to differ.

First, rape is pretty damn horrific, a toxic violence that isn’t just acute, but truly dire, that directly harms or threatens to harm over half the population of the planet, and indirectly causes suffering for the other half. It is an explicit crime against human beings. I am confident that Harris would agree with me, and that he’s not trying to diminish the magnitude of the harm done by rape and violence against women. So, boom, he and I would both throw a great horking weight, dense as osmium, on that side of the harm scale.

But then we go to the other side, carrying world religions in hand. Harris and I would agree that religion is universally malignant (John Wilkins disagrees, but he’s wrong: an idea that is not only incorrect, but encourages disinterest in the truth of ideas, is universally dangerous, and I’m going to come right out and say that all religion is bad), but we’re going to disagree with the magnitude of that harm.

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