Petros Agapetos' favorite books

[Petros Agapetos]

Sam Harris is an American author and atheist. He has written several atheist advocacy books, including The End of Faith (2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation. In 2009, Harris was awarded a Ph.D. degree in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an author in the new atheism movement.

[Petros Agapetos]

Sam Harris' Arguments against Religion

Sam Harris considers religion's harmful qualities, such as terrorism, territorial claims and sexual anxiety, outweigh its positive aspects. "Can anyone seriously argue that it is a good thing that millions of Muslims currently believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom?" Religious believers give "tacit support to the religious differences in our world."
Harris argues that even if religion provides morality or gives our lives meaning does not automatically imply the existence of God.

He suggests that since it is impossible to coexist with Islamic states given the existence of disruptive technology, therefore there is no option by economic and military intervention to depose theocracies and impose western civil society or at least benign dictatorship around the world:

"It appears that one of the most urgent tasks we now face in the developed world is to find some way of facilitating the emergence of civil societies everywhere else. [... Where this is not possible, it] seems all but certain that some form of benign dictatorship will generally be necessary to bridge the gap. But benignity is the key– and if it cannot emerge from within a state, it must be imposed from without. The means of such imposition are necessarily crude: they amount to economic isolation, military intervention (whether open or covert), or some combination of both. While this may seem an exceedingly arrogant doctrine to espouse, it appears we have no alternatives. We cannot wait for weapons of mass destruction to dribble out of the former Soviet Union to pick only one horrible possibility and into the hands of fanatics."

Harris argues that not all religions are equally harmful. He is particularly critical of Islam and commented that "We have to be able to criticize bad ideas, and Islam is the Mother lode of bad ideas." In explaining this statement, he said: "I think that we have an idea here that all of the religious are the same, that they are all equality wise, or equally empty or equally irrelevant. And obviously devout believers of various religions don't believe this but secular liberals believe this and it's just not true. Our religions are quite different and there are many cases in which Christianity is worse than Islam, if you are going to talk about something like opposition to embryonic stem cell research. [...] We have to acknowledge that Islam has doctrines like jihād and martyrdom and death to apostates which are central to the faith in which they aren't in other faiths."

— CNN, Harris: Islam is "mother lode" of bad ideas, 13 Oct 2014

[Root]

Darwin: there is no God
God: there is no Darwin

[Petros Agapetos]

Atheism-is-Unstoppable: Anger translating for Sam Harris.

[Petros Agapetos]

20. Faith vs Fact - Why science and religion are incompatible - by Jerry Coyne.

21. Fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution - Neil Degrasse Tyson

22. Battling the Gods - Atheism in the ancient world - Tim Witmarsh

23. Collection of Essays by Christopher Hitchens, "Arguably"

24. Science Friction - Michael Shermer

25. Islam Unveiled - Robert Spencer

26. The Moral Landscape - How science can determine human values - Sam Harris

27. Our Revolution - Bernie Sanders

[Petros Agapetos]

What do you think about my political positions by judging by these books?

[Petros Agapetos]

Sam Harris does NOT wish to execute a preemptive nuclear attack on the Muslim world

[Petros Agapetos]

[Petros Agapetos]

Which of these books would you pick up and read?

[YashiroNanakase]

You seem obsessed with Abrahamic religions, when did you become an atheist?