Video of Sam Harris at La Ciudad de las Ideas in 2009
Above is a great video of a talk delivered by Sam Harris about the reliability of religion, of Christianity in particular.
He introduces the audience to Satya Sai Baba, an Indian mystic current alive and with millions of followers, said to perform miracles, be of a virgin birth, along with numerous other divine criteria. Harris points out the strangeness of not acknowledging this man, yet clinging to similar yet far less reliable accounts of Jesus thousands of years ago, ending with this fantastic quote which summarizes his speech rather well:
Christianity is predicated on the claim that miracle stories exactly of the kind that today surround a person like Satya Sai Baba become especially credible when you place them in the pre-scientific religious context of the 1st century Roman empire decades after their supposed occurance, as attested to by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek and largely discrepant manuscript. We have Satya Sai Baba’s miracle stories attested to by thousand upon thousands of living eyewitnesses, and they don’t even merit an hour on cable television. And yet you put a few miracle stories in an ancient book, and half the people on Earth think it a legitimate project to organize their lives around it. Does anyone else see a problem with that?
This claim touches on a variety of problems with the Biblical account, and brings it back to a style of atheist argumentation that can be applied in numerous contexts. Given how similar so many religions are while still being fundamentally different, what are the odds that you happen to have stumbled across the one that is uniquely right as the other competing religions are completely wrong? Even on equal terms, a significant leap is required. In this video, Harris extends the point further to show that there is much better evidence for competing prophetic accounts.
Here is a related great atheist quote by Stephen Roberts:
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
It takes either remarkable arrogance or remarkable faith to make this kind of exclusionary dismissal. Harris’ example of modern miracles, in this otherwise Jesus appearing in toast world, adds a new dimension to this great way of looking at one religion in the context of others.
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