Sam Harris Brilliantly Explains How Cults And Religion Both Make You Want To Die Comments

Miriam English

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 00:36:26 +0000

Benjamin McClintic, I half-agree that belief comes from a kind of stunted sense of wonder, however I have met people totally wound up in awe and wonder at their entirely imagined mystical worldview, so I think it is only part of the answer. Their wonder at the real world has become truncated somehow and been somehow diverted to their imaginary one.

drongohalfwit, I've met plenty of happy, well-off religious people who lead entirely comfortable lives free of any despair. What you say about people seeking solace in a comforting illusion may be true of some people, but certainly isn't true of all of them.

Ian MacMillan, I think you are close to the truth of how people are indoctrinated into belief, but it still doesn't get at what belief actually is.

I think it is simply a self-sustaining mind-loop. People believe what they believe simply because they do. Some memes die away, but some survive by having self-protecting features. Most religious memes are sticky, in that they have self-preserving mechanisms that prevent them being dropped -- it is a sin to question the belief, believe unconditionally and unreservedly, treat those who would challenge your belief as if they are personally attacking you, and so on. Religious memes tend also to be parasitic upon your feelings of joy in being with like-minded fellows, and fear at being faced with either oblivion or eternal punishment, it often also feeds on hate.

You can see the way religious belief works like a simple mind-loop when you discuss it with religious people. There is never anything solid behind their belief. They think there is, but when it is carefully inspected it always comes back to believing because they believe -- usually expressed as "I know it's true" or "I have faith".

Ian MacMillan

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 20:31:25 +0000

My impression is that religious affiliation is primarily a social phenomenon; and we sometimes drift into a strong sense of beliefs that help us to feel like a more legitimate member of the group. People born and raised by Islamic parents in an Islamic society tend to be Islamic, whether or not they are devout. The same can be said of Christians, Hindus, and so on.

drongohalfwit

Wed, 18 Nov 2015 15:53:59 +0000

Whilst the beliefs that justify suicide in the case of the Heaven's Gate cult or suicide bombing in the case of ISIS clearly play a critical role in the subsequent actions of those who adhere to them, are they really of themselves a sufficient cause? What is it that makes some people vulnerable to adopting these sorts of beliefs, and is it belief alone that manages to override the natural instinct for self-preservation? People with adequate self-esteem who lead happy and fulfilling lives are simply not susceptible to beliefs that negate the value inherent in this life. Because they experience life as worthwhile they are in no danger of giving a mere unsubstantiated belief a higher reality status than their lived experience. So a precondition of seriously entertaining a belief in an afterlife being a better alternative than a lived experience, to the extent that one is willing to swap one for the other, is that this lived experience is pretty dismal. Only when one's lived experience is miserable, hopeless, full of despair and acute suffering does a desire to die, albeit unconscious, arise. And under these circumstances, then if the afterlife is painted as extremely desirable, then an instinctive fear of death can be overcome. The people in the Heaven's Gate exit video may appear to be calm and even happy with their upcoming choice but this is really no more than parroting the brainwashing to which they have been subjected for months or in many cases years. We do not glimpse the underlying psychopathology that made them vulnerable to joining and remaining within this cult and they of course are equally unconscious of the factors that lie beneath the surface. Whilst ideologies and the beliefs they encompass are of course an integral part of trying to understand these strange phenomena, Harris places too much emphasis on these beliefs and fails to probe the underlying psychological conditions that permit such beliefs to gain such ascendancy.

John

Tue, 31 Mar 2015 15:20:25 +0000

A belief is a mental state that represents the world as being a certain way. I can believe the moon is a goddess. I'd be wrong. I'd be unjustified, but I can still believe it. I can have totally unjustified beliefs. Racists can't refute the charge by saying that they don't "really believe" other races are inferior. It's not only true beliefs that count as beliefs. As Harris points out, beliefs are inputs to decisions, so what one believes is implicated in what one does, which makes actions a better guide to what one believes, ie., how one represents the world as being, than what one says.

Benjamin McClintic

Fri, 27 Mar 2015 15:23:35 +0000

Sam, as someone who has given 20-odd years to the study of philosophy and religion (I have also been the member of a cult), I think your concept of belief could use some tweaking. The notion of "belief" which many people attribute to religious ideals has never been a comfortable one for me, and this is even including that time of more than five years, when I was a full-time religious volunteer (brahmacari). I have come through that experience, and through a long study of epistemology to regard that term (belief) as a rather poor substitute for the actual phenomenon of how religious thinking works. But to cut to the chase: what we are prone to call "belief", when associated with ideals which lay beyond all investigation and possibility of existential confirmation, is nothing but the atrophic wasting away of wonder. Religious types say that they "believe" such and such when their youthful wonder has been led to stop itself at a certain answer which they can neither affirm nor deny. And as this dogmatic paradox is neither proven by their own apophatic experiences, nor dismissed by some critical method, they actually are in a state of hermeneutical suspension; to wit, they are "stuck" in a view they neither know how to make evident to others, nor how to dismiss as untrue. This to me cannot be equated with belief, at least if my primary sense of belief is just something like the fact that gravity keeps me from flying off the face of the Earth, or that the Sun-Earth relation is the primary cause of Spring coming round about now. If I am right, "belief" has gotten mixed up with "stagnation of wonder", or perhaps even with "the distortion of wonder".