Sam Harris is a brilliant speaker, I hope many others find the time to watch this video and learn something. rated for pure genius!

Sam.Harris,ftw.
Thanks,Tim.

On Mexican dial-up, there is no video.

The better question is can religion teach morality? So far, it doesn't seem to be working.

I agree with him on some but not all of his points.

For one thing, I think it's important to the notion of pluralism that there can be several acceptable answers and I thought he didn't lean hard enough on that. A lot of his examples seemed to suggest the answers to these questions were obvious, and I think the obviousness of things he cited revealed something about his politics. Without advocating the alternative positions, I'll just note that there are other positions and while I might not even agree with all of those positions, I'll say that some of those positions have an ethical basis.

Even denying people healthcare has an ethical basis. I don't happen to subscribe to it, but the notion that people should be self-reliant is not based on a theory of weakening society, but a theory that if you just offer health care for free, all of society suffers for the sake of the individual. There is a legitimate debate to have here, even if I take sides when it comes to preferring a particular outcome.

I do think he's right that one must not treat ethical matters as ones where the answer doesn't matter. I think where he goes astray is in seeming to suppose an answer, which seems to imply a single answer.

Points for talking about a tough issue, though. Most people don't even try to engage such matters openly.

Thanks for checking this out. I know its a tad long for many people's "instantaneous" tastes, but worth the watch.
Tom - that is a really good question. Certainly worth exploring.
ONL - I'll see if I can find a link and send you the transcript by PM.
Kent - well reasoned, as always. I think that you have to accept that he was working in a fixed time frame to get his points across, so they had to be short and sweet. And I would agree that by adhering to the short and fixed time that he was perhaps a bit simplistic in approach. But these are absolutely ideas that need public discussion, because when we only discuss religious frameworks for ethical issues we are not using the full spectrum of our human experience to answer the hardest questions we have.

I myself prefer reptiles to monkeys. Personality is the product of the brain. no soul, no Ka ,no Ba ? No dark energy , no dark matter even his science is faulty and speaking of science is science not a religion itself ? Well I guess its just like he said he knows nothing about string theory. This man just like his philosophical mentor Depak Chopra , the swami right out of a Frank Zappa song , talks in circles and has no answers “ round and round and round we go where we stop nobody knows “ talk about the preacher. I think TED is full of sanctimonious elitists who are suffering from delusions of intellectual adequacy.I wonder what Aliester Crowley would have said about TED.

To answer your question Jack, no science is not a religion. Science is a process of testing the world to understand it as it is, not as we want it to be.

Firestorm, I've scanned a couple of them myself. Didnt see the one you refer to, but I'd certainly agree that anyone speaking about "facts" regarding the "post-life period" of ones existence is factually challenged, at least.
My purpose in posting this one was just to get some discussion on why for the most part we believe our religious systems produce our moral ones. That sort of confined thinking sets the religous experience above everything else, and yet religion has, as you pointed out, very few "facts" and a great deal of hopeful speculation.

Firestorm,

Have you stopped for a moment to think about the morals that are actually taught by the majority religions? Where killing your son because god says so is moral, where killing entire cities down to the infants is moral because god says so, where killing unbelievers is moral because a prophet says so, where raping a woman and forcing her to marry you is moral because your holy book says so. Stoning, burning, enslaving, killing and raping are all moral if you aren't a member of the tribe that is focused around a religion. Each has been applied differently at different times in history as our societies have developed and evolved. What it really meant is that the holy books were being selectively applied and the understanding of them has evolved as well.

What science can teach us is that we are all a member of a single community and that our morals need to be molded around that. Not only can we begin to understand why we are basically moral beings without religion. After all, chimps prefer to take care of each other over cheating each other. Are we to assume they have a holy book? We can be better when we stop looking to religions developed in a tribal age for our idea of what is moral and what is not.