Sam Harris Speech

burning time is quite right

who is sam harris and why are both dangers and atheism in quotation marks?

Sam Harris is the author of "the end of faith" and "letter to a christian nation" he's one of the ppl that started the new atheist movement...the quotations around dangers and atheism are explained in the speech which prob no one will watch. It is because he views labling people who are not religious as atheists are dangerous because this leads to no real new arguments or knowledge being introduced to the public and people often view atheists negatively and make the same arguments over and over (prove god doesn't exist blah blah) without actually attacking their reasoning or listening to what they have to say (how unreasonable it is to believe in a god like the one of abrahamic faiths).

it was an interest speech. i have my qualms with the speech mostly pertaining to it's intent/relevancy/necessity, but not actually what was said.

i watched it actually, i was playing a tournament at the same time. he always says a lot to say nothing and his sense of humor/body language is pretty terrible for a public speaker... if you're not going to be informative at least be entertaining. i guess only people who take their atheism seriously find it enjoyable to hear someone talking about it without saying anything really relevant at all. he said some interesting things at the end of the video but the rest was basically just a waste of time which can be almost entirely resumed to "atheism has a bad name so you shouldn't say you're an atheist... you should practice stealth atheism and just be a better human being than others because that's what we are"

I still cant get over the double quotation marks, it should be one or the other, not both, it doesnt make sense...

Since when was atheism a movement?

Old video. There are plenty of good responses to it out there. Personally I think you can introduce critical examination of religious beliefs into conversation without necessarily explicitly spelling out that you're an atheist. Part of the problem, I think, is that people think it's like a religion in that you start with the assumption, and work from there, rather than the reality which is that people tend to revert from religion to atheism through discovering the fact that religious beliefs are not supported, and are falsified, by all the available evidence. If someone asks me "are you an atheist?", I'll say yes. But people usually say "do you believe in god?" which is a poorly defined question, so I ask them to define "god", and we can have a very interesting conversation from there.

I'm not going to respond to religious claims made in response to this. This is aimed at people who are already atheist/agnostic, think the conversation matters, and care about how to approach the dialogue.

On September 11 2010 20:15 Etherone wrote: it was an interest speech. i have my qualms with the speech mostly pertaining to it's intent/relevancy/necessity, but not actually what was said.

It was made to a group of atheists at the Atheist Alliance International convention in 2007.

never seen this, listened to it while i played some sngs

i thought it was pretty interesting