[Buddha-l] sam harris at the aspen institute

[Richard Hayes]

On Tuesday 14 August 2007 16:03, curt wrote:

> The poor fellow seems to have
> some kind of bug up his arse. It must be very uncomfortable.

Why not ask someone who has had a similar bug about Stephen Batchelor?

Even many of us who agree with quite a bit of what Sam Harris says about the 
institutional evils of religion find him tediously polemical. Thanks for the 
link to his Aspen performance, but I may give it a miss. I'll wait until 
Michael Moore makes a documentary about Harris.

For the past few days I have been enjoying a somewhat light but still 
informative book by Richard Brookhiser called What Would the Founders Do? (I 
ordered it on the mistaken assumption is was a how-to manual on building 
foundries, but I like it anyway.) I learned the context of one of my favorite 
quotes. Everyone knows that Jefferson (Thomas, not Airplane) said "I have 
sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny 
over the mind of man." What I learned from Brookhiser is that Jefferson said 
this in a letter in which he first observed that the mobs of priests were 
afraid of him. He then said something to the effect "The priests SHOULD be 
afraid of me, because I have sworn...." 

Anyone who terrrifies priests, bhikkhus, rabbis, imams, roshis and 
dharmacharis (and recognizes them as forms of tyranny over the mind of man)
can't be all bad, even if he is tediously polemical. Harris is not nearly as 
clever or articulate as Thomas (Jefferson, not Aquinas), but at least he is 
doing the service of reminding a country deeply addicted to religion just 
what a hideous drug religion can be.

Speaking of people who are tediously polemical, I have taken up a new hobby: 
ranting and raving against Republican policies. I've been doing that on 
buddha-l since the days of President George II, of course, but now I'm doing 
it the way adolescents do it: on a blog site. If you get tired of my 
cloyingly sweet Mr Nice persona here on buddha-l, give my blog a whirl.

-- 
Richard
http://dayamati.blogspot.com