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Ear to the Ground

Sam Harris, Disbeliever

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Posted on Jul 7, 2006

The frequent Truthdig contributor and interviewee tells Salon.com that Martin Luther King Jr. performed his admirable works in spite of his religious beliefs, not because of them. (Link - reg req’d)

Sam Harris in Salon.com:

... King was an incredible person who did heroic and necessary work. A couple of answers here. There’s no evidence that those things can only be done in the name of faith, whereas there is considerable evidence that really terrible acts of violence are being done only because of what people believe about God. For instance, while there are Christian missionaries working in sub-Saharan Africa doing heroic work to relieve famine, there are also secular people, like Doctors Without Borders, who work alongside them, doing the same kind of work and not doing it because they think Jesus was born of a virgin. They’re not preaching the sinfulness of condom use the way Catholics and Christian ministers tend to do. So while Christian missionaries are helping people, they’re also helping to spread AIDS with their sexual taboos and their prudery. So that’s one issue.

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By Alan Richard, January 16, 2007 at 6:31 am #
(Unregistered commenter)

I agree with lots that Harris has to say, but he is completely wrong about this one, and the above diatribe actually contradicts what he has written elsewhere.  You can’t have it both ways, Sam: either religion causes extreme and apparently suicidal behavior or it does not.  King took risks that were not rational when you begin from the assumption that indifferent chance and necessity are all there is to it.  What King was able to do cannot be separated from his confidence that unmerited suffering would win out over both brute force and propaganda because love and not malevolance or indifference is at the heart of the world. 

The confidence that enables one to throw one’s body in front of a gun or a fire hose for an apparently irrational hope that an apparently intransigent injustice is not different from the confidence that enables one to blow oneself up for the same kind of hope.  King was not a fundamentalist and may not have believed in life after death, but he DID trust Reality to ultimately support the downtrodden and his behavior cannot be separated from that trust, which he himself (with a theology informed by Christian existentialism) would have acknowledged to be a leap of faith.

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