I have my doubts about Sam Harris. The Raving Atheist links to his latest essay.

He seems to get a fair amount of play as one of those outspoken atheists, but then everything I read by him turns out to have some bizarre twist that has me wondering what the heck he's been smoking. He writes weird stuff like this peculiar defense of "rational mysticism".

As a worldview, secularism has defined itself in opposition to the whirling absurdity of religion. Like atheism (with which it is more or less interchangeable), secularism is a negative dispensation. Being secular is not a positive virtue like being reasonable, wise, or loving. To be secular, one need do nothing more than live in perpetual opposition to the unsubstantiated claims of religious dogmatists. Consequently, secularism has negligible appeal to the culture at large (a practical concern) and negligible content (an intellectual concern). There is, in fact, not much to secularism that should be of interest to anyone, apart from the fact that it is all that stands between sensible people like ourselves and the mad hordes of religious imbeciles who have balkanized our world, impeded the progress of science, and now place civilization itself in jeopardy. Criticizing religious irrationality is absolutely essential. But secularism, being nothing more than the totality of such criticism, can lead its practitioners to reject important features of human experience simply because they have been traditionally associated with religious practice.

Hold it. He has just criticized secularism for being 'negative'…by being negative about secularism. How ironic of him.

His criticisms are completely off the mark, however. Why isn't secular a positive virtue? I certainly think of it as a very good thing; it's part of being reasonable and wise, and is not at all in contradiction to being loving. I hear the word "religious" as non-virtuous and in opposition to wisdom and reason…is my negative response sufficient argument?

He also sets up secularism as nothing but "perpetual opposition" to religion. That's complete nonsense, an unthinking acceptance of the definition used by the religious. Secularism is about reality. We accept our day-to-day existence, the empirical, observable, measurable, physical world as a worthy and important and all-encompassing feature of our lives, without reference to invisible, imaginary, immaterial, and inconsequential confabulations by the irrational. That's a very positive thing to do.

Negligible appeal? Since when are sex, food, conversation, books, entertainment, football, science, and fashion under the purview of religion? When these things are put under the control of the religious, that's when they lose their appeal. The ways of the flesh are always popular.

Negligible content? Harris has divided the domains of human concern into the religious (mumbo-jumbo, old books, strange and arbitrary rules, and bizarre beliefs about things no one has ever seen) and the secular (the whole freaking universe and all that dwells within it, science, history, literature, the seen and sensuous) and decided that all of the intellectual content is in the former.

What???

Up there at the top, I said I had my doubts about Harris. I was wrong. I have no doubts at all.

He's a dingbat.