Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "My Message to Sam Harris (THE SAAD TRUTH_1284)" video.
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I've always been skeptical of Sam Harris, because of his low-brow critique of religion. That's why I like Jordan Peterson and follow him and guys like Gad. Peterson's the ONLY guy I haven't really said "Your tribe is showing." Even Gad lets it peek through, occasionally. He's a teensy bit on the conservative side, where I'm more on the pure liberty side.
Peterson is kind of a latterday Blackstone, in that he takes the pure liberty side to task a teensy bit by pointing out that the liberties you enjoy come with a level of responsibility to the collective/whole. Baseball is a competitive game, but to HAVE a game, you and your pals all have to agree that will be the game and what the rules of that game are. There's a matter of balance in all things. There's a certain amount of conformity required in the most free of societies. Even though in the current time, I would argue that the pendulum needs to swing WAY towards the liberty side, it's not an absolute. It's a pole.
Almost like Jesus, with his brilliant parables, that basically wrote themselves for him, from his scholarly work. He KNOWS the behavioral research. As a novice, he seems to me to have an encyclopedic knowledge. "It turns out that the bigger rat lets the smaller rat WIN, sometimes, because otherwise the smaller rat won't want to play at ALL." (or words to that effect).
Sorry to digress like that, but I'm just free-writing as images pop into my head about what's wrong with Sam Harris. He makes a lot of smug and fatuous arguments. He'll straw man some piece of dogma that doesn't make sense that's embedded in Bronze-Age wisdom, and reasons from that to a total rejection of God Principle. Maybe that's why Peterson popped into my head. The God Principle provides us with a notion of the IDEAL. Jesus was the "perfect human." Whether you believe that or NOT, the Jesus archetype has a place prepared for it in ALL our minds, and is part of that God Principle, whereby humans FIRST really showed any signs of deliberate improvement, because the notion of something ideal is what motivates and guides us in making changes to ourselves and the world around us to create a better tomorrow.
I'm saying it poorly, but for all its sins, religion has been an organizing force for human progress. Yes, inevitably, the church hierarchy becomes corrupt or has corrupt individuals in high places, but looking at humanity in the large, there are a lot of people in the congregation who are consciously striving for something BETTER, consciously trying to do some GOOD in this world, and that's a force one shouldn't ignore.
There's more to it than that, and of course, as a mathematician, I don't know the jargon. But Sam Harris doesn't fully understand the dead end of hedonism and nihilism that eventuates in the large when you reject the God Principle. Sam's blithely unaware of how much of his own morality is the result of or follows from embedded Judeo-Christian values. Like Peterson, I would add that this embedding pre-dates much of what we now think of as the Holy Bible or the Torah, some of which being borrowed from earlier civilizations.
Sam might scoff and say "It's silly to believe in Jesus." And I would say, "Well, I don't believe in Jesus, but there's no denying his power!"
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@BridgesOnBikes It's maddening to the left to see a salesman employ many of their own demagogic tricks to appeal to the masses. Instead of offering up your typical 30-minute, highly nuanced, intellectual argument that loses Republicans elections for being correct, Trump will say "These are bad people.... Very bad... They're really bad people who say this and do that other."
remember the run-up to 2016, and I wasn't enamored of either candidate. I knew Hillary was poison, but I consoled myself with the thought that she'd do what they do and "triangulate," and a few good things would slip past her ridiculous policy positions. I knew Trump was a salesman and I consoled myself with the thought that having a salesman on your side could be a very good thing. Someone who understand negotiation, and doesn't come out of the gate with his rock-bottom offer, but is planning on achieving a reasonable compromise. If you want half of the ball of wax, you ask for the whole ball of wax.
The only question I had was what he was actually going to push for and how he was going to push for it. On a surprising number of issues, he played it damn near perfect. And the unanimous scorn for him from media whom I hold in contempt indicated early on that he was going to be better than expected. I just wish his team had gone after CRT and pseudo-intellectuals in academia in January, 2017. That's a huge piece of the current malaise.
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