New Atheism's Curiosity Problem
Figures like Sam Harris have spent decades complaining about religion yet are still uninterested in understanding it.
Sam Harris recently appeared on the podcast of ex-Mumford and Son Winston Marshall and among other things took up a subject dear to his heart: the terribleness of Christianity. After claiming the bible is a poor work of literature that he could personally improve with ease, Sam claimed the Passion to be a horrible crescendo of the history of human sacrifice, a history which he describes as existing because humans lacked knowledge and so thought they were in relationship to invisible others, and that compared to Buddhism, which Sam approves of as containing wisdom easily extractable for the secular West, the Christian story is “mad.” When Marshall objected to Sam’s claim that the bible is an uninspiring story by pointing out that it has likely inspired more people in history than any other story, Sam calls it merely “just a fact of what has happened” rather than evidence that the story is actually inspiring.
Weirdly in a increasingly mad world it’s comfortingly nostalgic to hear Sam moaning about Christianity, like we’re still in 2008, no one has an iphone, no one has heard of Twitter and the public conversation over religion is still Dawkins and co arguing with creationists in debates you watch in 240p on Youtube. The good old days. Yet there were several things that struck me about Sam’s view of religion that as New Atheism has aged have become oddly glaring, firstly his moral complacency, perhaps bordering on arrogance, and secondly his complete lack of intellectual curiosity in regard to understanding what the religious ideas he is talking about are actually doing or where they come from.
