She had been disputing an earlier statistic that I had advanced where Sam Harris had cited 38% of British Muslims as advocating the death penalty for any apostate. It may be heard here at 3:03 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZVYfADAnw8&list=PL45FAA00C0F2F490E
I had sent her one link to Harris on Youtube where he gave a high % and was now moved to e mail her across (she was in an adjacent room!) another one where he gave a still higher figure.
She slagged Harris off saying that she had heard he was a rabid Islamophobe and that what people like him were doing was akin to anti-Semitic talk in Germany in the 1930s.
To prove her point she sent me across this link - http://www.loonwatch.com/tag/sam-harris/
I began reading it, and did not find it very supportive of her accusations.
Whilst I did so I had a Youtube link continuing to play in the background.
When I reached this point in the loonwatch piece -
There is no vice in having once been religious, for we all of us inherit our mythologies from our parents, but Harris did not inherit his Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. He was bred in a secular home, granted a secular education and lived in a secular state. Instead he chose to abandon his secular upbringing and voluntarily convert to a foreign religious system.
He claims to have shed his former dogmatism, but telling by the loving chapter on mysticism in The End of Faith, it is clear that he sets much stock by some articles of those creeds. It also clarifies why he studiously will not say, as any materialist should have no problem affirming, that there is no afterlife. In numerous occasions when the subject has arisen either in his book or when he’s been asked if he believes that consciousness lives on beyond the death of the brain in interviews like this Salon appearance , he has chosen to either declare his belief in reincarnation or, if the audience is a sceptical lot, preferred the evasive formulation of “I just don’t know” because “If we were living in a universe where consciousness survived death, or transcended the brain so that single neurons were conscious – or subatomic particles had an interior (subjective) dimension – we would not expect to see it by our present techniques of neuro-imaging or cellular neuroscience.”
When he’s reminded by Salon that, in spite of his claim to be driven by data, that on the contrary “Most evolutionary biologists would say consciousness is rooted in the brain. It will not survive death.” He responds “I just don’t know”.
There was a crystallising display of his Buddhist convictions some years ago at the Salk Institute. He was asked point blank by the physicist Lawrence Krauss if he thinks reincarnation is true and Harris shrugged ”Who knows?” Alluding to the case studies of past-life regressions by Ian Stevenson cited in The End of Faith, he explained “There are these spooky stories.” When the assembled congregation of scientists erupted in astonished laughter at his religious credulity, he grew visibly nervous and, keen to skate past the embarrassing moment, shot back with “Okay, you are on firm ground being sceptical about reincarnation … I have published a few spooky things about telepathy and reincarnation which amount to not an endorsement of these beliefs, but just, you know, I hear there is all this data and someone like Dean Radin writes a book about it, and Brian Josephson, a Nobel Laureate in physics, blurbs it. I don’t have the time to do the meta-analyses and statistical expertise. So, I’m awaiting the evidence. Listen (with rising chagrin) I don’t want to talk about reincarnation. It may be.”
where this link occurs -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lXdIuxATtQ#t=1h47m52s
- and as I read Krauss´ questioning and Harris´ response on the subject of reincarnation I also got to hear it, because the Youtube link - which was not actually quite the same one as that supplied in the loonwatch link - reached precisely the same point.
Even though I see little in the above piece to affirm Fiona´s statements re Harris´ supposed Islamophobia, it did, to me, lend even more weight to the supposition that he was, quite possibly, not being 100% truthful about his beliefs concerning life, the universe and everything.
Harris is CEO of Project Reason (which I also followed on Twitter) and he and I had exchanged a few tweets a few days earlier, e.g.
@SamHarrisOrg Well, what were you trying to contact during your long meditative exercises with spiritual teachers?@JamesPlaskett The soul's absence...
Sam Harris
James PlaskettI tweeted
