{"id":73154,"date":"2012-08-09T22:56:51","date_gmt":"2012-08-10T06:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=17714"},"modified":"2012-08-09T22:56:51","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T06:56:51","slug":"the-scourging-of-sam-harris","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/08\/09\/the-scourging-of-sam-harris\/","title":{"rendered":"The scourging of Sam Harris"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A reader pointed me to this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samharris.org\/blog\/item\/wrestling-the-troll\">Sam Harris<\/a> post, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.samharris.org\/blog\/item\/wrestling-the-troll\">Wrestling the Troll<\/a>. <strong>He asked what I thought of the post, and what I thought of Harris<\/strong>. In regards to Harris I don&#8217;t think much. I found <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0393327655\/geneexpressio-20\">The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason<\/a> to be overly simplistic in the model of religion as a phenomenon which he seemed to hold, and I wasn&#8217;t really on board with the normative vision Harris was promoting. To be overly pat Sam Harris strikes me as a traditional liberal universalist. In his imagined future all intelligent men and women will bend the knee to <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Dewey\">John Dewey<\/a>, and espouse liberal individualist values. Perhaps. That may be the most likely path, but it may not be a very likely path. Most of his follow up works have struck me as extended polemics and provocations. This is often necessary, but I don&#8217;t have a large appetite for that sort of material myself. In any case my <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/2012\/05\/reason-the-god-that-fails-but-we-keep-socially-promoting\/\">faith in reason has limits<\/a>. Harris&#8217; brutally clean and crisp modernist vision is one which I can&#8217;t fully support.<\/p>\n<p>\n<strong>But when it comes to the post there was much I recognized<\/strong>. The &#8230;<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/HpTdMHLt9Sk\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A reader pointed me to this Sam Harris post, Wrestling the Troll. He asked what I thought of the post, and what I thought of Harris. In regards to Harris I don&#8217;t think much. I found The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason to &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2092],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-sam-harris"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73154"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73320,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73154\/revisions\/73320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}