Sam Harris and The End of Faith: Week 5, Post 1-

Sam Harris brings up extremely good points about how it seems that sometimes people in today's society who are religious are fanatically faithful to their religion. Harris speaks of the fact that if you turn on the news and you hear about any cruel over the top atrocity in the world today that chances are you will find some “scripture spouting nut bar.” They are usually intolerant to anyone with a different opinion or belief then themselves. They cloak their behaviors in the word of faith, they preach love but they practice exclusion. Harris speaks of the “problem” of religious belief. He feels that this has more influence on the maintenance of civilization than anything that is in our power to influence. He defines belief as something that stirs up enough emotion inside of an individual to go out and take action on what that belief entails to represent to that particular individual in the world, which in turn causes massive problems considering the fact that we all have contradicting beliefs from one another.
According to Harris one thing that religious dogma does is that it separates question of morality from questions of real suffering. He uses the example of the Catholic Church condemning the use of condoms, which is a total falsification of morality. People are dying of aids, we have teen pregnancies. He also speaks of the fact that we have politicians putting up roadblocks on stem cell research because of this notion that we are in some way breaking moral laws. It is fundamentally taboo to question someone’s faith, it is a conversation stopper. There is a lot of politically correctness so to speak concerning an individual's belief in God. Harris says that because we cannot criticize religious extremism because it is taboo and politically incorrect and religious moderates say nothing about it. I find this so very true and it should be something that needs to be openly talked about more than it is today.