Transcription
Like every other poster boy for the new atheism, Sam Harris is all about intellectual honesty. If you don't believe me, just ask him. There's one algorithm I'm running more than most, which is, you know, what I would call intellectual honesty.
See, I told you Sam Harris is the Moses of the new atheists. He led his generation of budding narcissists from the captivity of religion, through the Red Sea of superstition, across the desert of blind faith, and into the Promised Land of science, reason, and logic.
Of course, there may be some skeptics out there. Some of you skeptics may be thinking to yourselves, "But David, literally the moment people started listening to the new atheists and turning away from Christianity, the entire world suddenly went completely insane." So maybe, just maybe, these guys have absolutely no clue what they're doing and therefore shouldn't be trusted with the future of humanity. But that's heresy, my friends.
True, we have zero empirical evidence that Sam Harris and his perpetually enraged apostles actually know how to improve the world in any relevant way, but that's why we need to have faith. The atheist utopia is on its way—just believe, no matter how many times reality smacks you in the mouth.
Now, apart from that heartless monster we call reality, what's preventing us from getting the glorious atheist utopia we've all been longing for, like the Titanic longed for that iceberg? The main obstacle standing in the way of the new dawn of science and rationality is that some people have the nerve to disagree with Sam Harris. If we all simply agreed with Sam Harris, we'd get an atheist utopia. So why doesn't everyone just agree with him?
Well, people have different personalities, different levels of intelligence, different information, and so on. But the most important factor here is that people have different methodologies. So, if we want to fix the world's problems, we all need to adopt the methodology of Sam Harris.
But what is Sam's methodology exactly? It took me a while to figure out, mainly because people don't always understand what their methodologies are. You have to wait for them to reveal the way they think, and they usually do this by accident. Sam recently let his methodological cat out of the bag totally by accident, and as far as I can tell, I'm the only one who caught it. I have no idea how I'm the only one who caught it because it seemed glaringly obvious to me.
Now, I could just tell you what Sam's methodology is, but I'm not going to because I'm legitimately disturbed by the fact that I'm the only one who noticed this. I've therefore decided to put what I watched—two old clips and then a recent clip—right in front of your face until you see it for yourself so that you all know how to do this on your own next time.
Let's start with two old clips. We have to go way back for this. The first time I ever saw Sam Harris was on an episode of the "C-Bear Rapport." Sam was promoting his book "The End of Faith" and he brought up the Virgin birth.
"If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin or that Muhammad went to heaven on a winged horse, that would be part of our rational worldview. And it's only when people lose their purchase on evidence and argument, when they have bad reasons, that they talk about faith."
Sam then blurted out what Islam teaches about the Virgin birth, and I thought to myself, "This guy doesn't know that Muslims believe in the Virgin birth." He thinks believing in the Virgin birth is a one-way ticket to an eternity in hell according to Islam.
I pointed this out in a video several years ago, and Sam responded. He said that he simply misspoke. I have no problem with that response; I misspeak all the time. Like when I say that the new atheists have powerful and persuasive arguments. Oh, did I say powerful and persuasive? I meant half-baked and moronic. I misspoke.
But it is easy to make a mistake when you're speaking off the cuff on a talk show, so there's no reason to hold that against Sam. Imagine my surprise, however, when I saw Sam's prepared remarks about Jesus at City. "You can take Jesus in half his moods and get some really beautiful ethical precepts, like the Golden Rule. But Jesus also said things like in Luke 19, 'Anyone who doesn't want me to reign over him, bring him before me and slay him before me.'"
So Jesus in Luke 19 orders Peter, and James, and John to bring his enemies before him and to slaughter them. That's weird. I don't recall the apostles doing anything like that. Maybe I should look that one up—Luke 19:27. "But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and kill them in front of me."
Wow, Sam Harris is right—Jesus did say that! But wait a minute; there's an extra quotation mark here. What's going on? Let me back up a bit. Oh, it's a parable; it's a story Jesus is telling. Jesus tells a story about a king, and the king in the story orders his subjects in his kingdom to execute people.
This parable is actually based on a true story. Archelaus was the son of Herod the Great. After Herod died, Archelaus went to Rome to be granted part of his father's kingdom by Caesar, but his subjects rebelled against him. After receiving his kingdom, he returned and had his enemies executed.
But according to Sam Harris, Luke 19:27 is Jesus commanding his disciples to slaughter his enemies. Now how many people in that audience were familiar with that parable in Luke 19? Maybe one or two. Even people who had read it before probably didn't even know what Sam was quoting. How many people in that audience do you think bothered to look up Luke 19:27 after Sam quoted it? Maybe one or two, if any.
And the one or two who looked it up, unless they were reading the passage carefully, would have just skimmed the text and saw the words and said, "Oh my goodness, that is Jesus talking; it's red letter. Jesus ordered Christians to slaughter his enemies." So the entire audience, along with countless other people who watched the video later, walked away thinking that Luke 19 is a command to Christians to slaughter people in the name of Jesus.
And from presentations like this, where people think they're receiving accurate information from experts in religious studies, we get the standard new atheist position: that when Christians say, "Hey, Jesus commanded us to love our neighbors and to love our enemies," we're just picking and choosing because he also commanded us to slaughter non-Christians. We're just going with the teachings we prefer at the moment.
Now, here's the interesting part. You can line up 100 Sam Harris fans and show them what Sam Harris says about Jesus in Luke 19. You can then read Luke 19 with them and show them that it's a king in a story who orders his followers to execute his enemies. And you can then ask these fans if it bothers them even slightly that Sam completely misrepresented the passage and misled thousands, if not millions, of people.
100 out of 100 Sam Harris fans won't be bothered even slightly by the fact that he completely misrepresented the passage. Christianity is so evil, it's so bad for the world, that there's no obligation to be honest about it.
You should find this fascinating because these are the people who brag about their intellectual honesty when it comes to Jesus. Intellectual honesty goes out the window. But you can go to these exact same Sam Harris fans and tell them what Sam says about gay sex. "Gay sex is an abomination." What did Sam just say? "Gay sex is an abomination?" Oh my goodness! But what if someone disagrees with Sam?
What does Sam want his followers to do to people who disagree with him? "Anyone who doesn't want me to reign over him, bring him before me and slay him before me." Kind of easy to completely misrepresent someone like this, isn't it?
But if you were to go around shouting, "Look at what Sam Harris says about gay sex," and he even says that anyone who doesn't agree with him has to be executed, suddenly Sam's fans would think that it's really important to clarify context, and they would say that misrepresenting someone is wrong.
So if you're misrepresenting what Jesus says, it's fine. If you're misrepresenting what Sam Harris says, it's immoral. Hold that thought.
I haven't watched many Sam Harris clips over the years. I'm guessing I've only seen half a dozen or so clips of Sam. This is just me, but once I realize that you're talking about Christianity and Islam, and that either you don't know what you're talking about or you do know what you're talking about and you're deliberately deceiving people, I'm just not that interested in what you have to say.
Although Sam's discussion with Ben Affleck was epic, but think about this: I haven't watched much from Sam Harris, but in the little bit that I've seen, even though I'm impressed by his courage in the face of opposition, I'm certainly not impressed by his knowledge of religions. Because in the few clips I've watched, he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about, and yet he's propped up as an expert by his fans. What's going on here? Well, we're about to find out because Sam recently did an interview with Trigonometry.
Tons of people criticized what Sam said in that interview because he defended conspiracies to control elections in certain circumstances. People flipped out about that, and yet everyone somehow missed a much bigger issue. But let's look at the part people got mad about.
Sam is discussing the social media cover-up of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election, and he says that there was a left-wing conspiracy to cover up the story and that the conspiracy was warranted. "That's just a conspiracy; that's a left-wing conspiracy to deny the presidency to Donald Trump." Absolutely, it was absolutely right. "But I think it was warranted."
Sam was heavily criticized for this because it sounds like he's suggesting that it's okay to rig elections. But in context—weird how context keeps coming up—he's claiming that when a society is facing an existential threat, a threat to the existence of the society or to the existence of an essential feature of the society, certain rules about fair play just aren't that important.
And I think that most people would agree with him to an extent. Suppose you're a German journalist in the 1930s, and you see this guy with a little mustache rising to power. Suppose you're somehow the only person who knows that if this guy rises to power, he's going to get millions and millions of people killed. And you know that you can keep him out of power by covering up a story, telling a few lies, accusing some people of Russian disinformation, and so on. You can save millions of lives with a little conspiracy behind the scenes.
I think most people here would say, "You're going to save millions of lives with a little conspiracy? Yeah, I can see that." But what does this have to do with Sam claiming that a conspiracy to cover up a story that could influence a US election is warranted?
Well, Sam is convinced that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our democracy. "We have a massive problem. We have an existential threat. Right, politically speaking, I consider Trump an existential threat to our democracy."
And Sam clarifies that this isn't about left versus right, Democrat versus Republican. "This is not the same thing as not liking George Bush, you know, or not liking John McCain, or not liking Mitt Romney for their politics. Donald Trump is a special kind of dangerous—a kind of dangerous that transcends political affiliations. Here’s a guy who is capable of anything, right? He’s not ideological, but again, he’s a black hole of selfishness, right? He’s just… and so there’s no telling what he’s going to do, and we cannot afford to have four more years with this guy."
And this puts people who have power over the flow of information in a difficult spot. So what should well-intentioned people do who have a lot of power in these various ways? You know, if you're running the New York Times, you're running CNN, you're running Twitter, what should they conspire to do?
"What should people who control what other people see and hear conspire to do? It was appropriate for Twitter and the heads of big tech and the heads of journalistic organizations to feel that they were in the presence of something like a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency, right? It's a once-in-a-lifetime moral emergency. There's an existential threat to our democracy. Is this a time to be concerned about journalistic integrity? We're going to open up this 'laptop from hell,' and the news cycle for who knows how long is going to be just, just conceivably, just a nuclear bomb of an October surprise, and we're going to get four more years of Trump if we actually give this a fair hearing—four more years of an existential threat to our democracy if we give this a fair hearing. So should you give it a fair hearing? Of course not. Conspiracy time!"
But what about the laptop? What if it's filled with horrible, horrible stuff? "Listen, I don't care what's in Hunter Biden's… I mean, Hunter Biden at that point. Hunter Biden literally could have had the corpses of children in his basement. I would not have cared. Hunter Biden was not on the ballot, so news about corpses of children in his basement would have been a mere distraction—a distraction that could have led to four more years of an existential threat to our democracy."
What then should journalists and tech CEOs do if they find out that Hunter Biden is a serial killer? They should suppress and discredit the story until the election is over. Again, Hunter's not on the ballot, and literally anyone else would be less dangerous than Trump. And you know, Hillary Clinton, for all of her flaws, was not worse than Trump. Joe Biden, we could have known, Joe Biden was going to just be kosher in office—not worse than Trump, right?
So conspiracies are justified, and anyone who joins the fight for our democracy is a hero, even if she's a Republican, right? And I think Liz Cheney is a total hero, right? So, and I don't agree with her politics at all, right? Like, Liz Cheney is a religious maniac by my lights, right? And in that sense, kind of a terrifying political figure.
Liz Cheney was a Republican congresswoman who blasted Trump and voted for his impeachment. Sam calls her a religious maniac, so she's not the sort of person Sam would normally support—a kind of a terrifying political figure.
Like the old me who, you know, was just worried about the Christian theocracy in the United States would have just revolted at everything she would attempt to implement as a politician. The old Sam Harris would have been horrified at the thought of this religious maniac making policies, but the new Sam Harris is focused on Trump, and she's against Trump. So at this moment, she’s, you know, she has no bigger fan than me.
Now, did you catch it? Sam just solved a pretty big mystery for us. I've been wondering for years how people who constantly pat themselves on the back for their intellectual honesty—people who praise themselves for being the champions of science and reason, and logic—can suddenly become so incredibly sloppy and even deceptive when they talk about Christianity.
Sam just solved the mystery. Did you catch it? How did everyone miss this? It was the first thing that stood out to me. Since you missed it, let's recap. I want you to catch this without me telling you: If something is an existential threat to our democracy, do you need to be fair and honest when you fight against this existential threat? No. Do you need to give it a fair hearing? No. Are conspiracies and manipulation, deception, and abuses of power warranted when dealing with an existential threat? Absolutely!
That's how Sam defended conspiracies to keep Trump out of office. But then Sam blurted out that while Trump is the current existential threat, a younger Sam Harris viewed something else as an existential threat: "The old me who, you know, was just worried about the Christian theocracy in the United States."
Did you catch it, this time? Sam views Trump as an existential threat to our democracy. So conspiracies and deception are warranted as a means of keeping Trump from destroying our democracy. But a younger Sam Harris viewed Christianity as an existential threat to our democracy. Christians were going to establish a theocracy in the US unless they were stopped by the new atheists and their allies.
So Christians were going to destroy our democracy and replace it with a theocracy unless they were stopped. According to Sam’s rules, if you're facing an existential threat to democracy, do you need to be fair? Do you need to be honest? Do you need to represent Jesus accurately when you talk about him? Do you need to represent the Bible accurately when you talk about it? Do you need to represent Christian arguments accurately when you respond to them? Of course not!
You're in a battle for the very survival of our democracy. And so, if you’re in a position to shape people's views of Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity, manipulation, deception, and even conspiracies would all be warranted.
That's Sam's methodology, and if you look closely, you'll see that the methodologies of the leaders are always imprinted on their followers—even if their followers don't understand the methodologies and even if the clueless, gullible followers really think they're nature's gift to rationality. And that, my friends, is why the new atheists, who again portray themselves as the champions of science and reason and logic, are absolutely relentless in spouting complete, utter, total nonsense whenever they talk about Jesus.
But if you think Sam Harris's methodology is bad, check out my video about Richard... [Music] Dawkins. [Music]