More wisdom from Sam Harris. This time in defense of torture.

[Crunchy Frog]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html

It's nice to see Sam Harris providing unequivocal evidence that you don't need religion to come up with justifications for atrocities. Imagine "logical" and "rational" processes leading to this sort of thinking.

If our intuition about the wrongness of torture is born of an aversion to how people generally behave while being tortured, we should note that this particular infelicity could be circumvented pharmacologically, because paralytic drugs make it unnecessary for screaming ever to be heard or writhing seen.

I wouldn't normally bring this up in the R/T forum, except that so many here seem to regard him as a hero and a font of wisdom and morality.

I'm not a great fan of religion myself, but I've always been singularly unimpressed by Harris's wholesale condemnation of it, even in its most liberal and tolerant forms.

I'd be interested to know if any of the liberal religious people on this board feel an inclination to "be convinced of the 'danger and illegitimacy' of their core beliefs" by someone whose worldview allows him to advocate the use of torture.

I'd be interested in hearing what Sam Harris's admirers think about this particular line of reasoning of his. Why should I think that rejection of religion confers some sort of moral authority? Can anybody here tell me why I should regard him as morally superior to someone like Martin Luther King Jr.?

As I've said, I'm not a religious person, but I do object to the wholesale condemnation and scapegoating of religion that Sam Harris seems to engage in. It's true that religion is often used to justify atrocities, but they clearly can be just as easily justified without recourse to religion.