In the face of God's obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This arg… - Sam Harris
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In the face of God's obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions — jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow — capricious, petulant, and cruel — and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness. If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far more in his image than we ever could have hoped.
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About
Sam Harris
Samuel Benjamin Harris (born April 9, 1967) is an American author, philosopher, public intellectual, and neuroscientist, as well as the co-founder and CEO of Project Reason. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005 and appeared on The New York Times best seller list for 33 weeks, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), The Moral Landscape (2010), Lying (2011), Free Will (2012), and most recently Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (2014).
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I talk a lot about this in the book. Why is it that our universe gets gradually more complex? Once you get into biology, the fundamental reason is that if you’re living in a complex environment, then the smarter you are the more successful you’ll be, because you can exploit regularities in the environment to your advantage. Eventually all the other organisms are motivated, in turn, to get smarter. As organisms get smarter and smarter, they keep creating an ever more complex environment for one another, and they all get smarter.
It makes no sense at all to have the most important features of our lives anchored to divisive claims about the unique sanctity of ancient books or to rumors of ancient miracles.
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The sense, therefore, that we are unified subjects — the unchanging thinkers of thoughts and experiencers of experience — is an illusion. The conventional self is a transitory appearance among transitory appearances, and it vanishes when looked for.
