The Dish

Here’s Sam Harris’s final contribution to our blog-dialogue on faith and reason. Apologies for the delay in posting because of my vacation. I’ll finish up shortly. Here’s his tough opener:

Well, we have reached the end of our debate, and still we do not agree. We’ll have to leave it there for the time being. I think, however, that our stalemate conceals some important asymmetries. For instance, I feel that you should have been convinced by my side of the argument. Can you say the same? You seem, rather, to have argued in a different mode. In your last essay you admit that your notion of God is "preposterous" and then say that you never suggested I should find it otherwise. You acknowledge the absurdity of faith, only to treat this acknowledgement as a demonstration of faith’s underlying credibility. While I have yet to see you successfully pull yourself up by your bootstraps in this way, I have watched you repeatedly pull yourself down by them.

You want to have things both ways: your faith is reasonable but not in the least bound by reason; it is a matter of utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt; you are still searching for the truth, but your belief in God is immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. I trust you will ascribe these antinomies to the paradox of faith; but, to my eye, they remain mere contradictions, dressed up in velvet.

The rest can be read here.

"The real reason I was there (the main reason I hate Gonzales) is because torture policy is bad for US troops. (It’s also morally reprehensible.) When I was in Fallujah, (Feb-Sep 2004) I was running a checkpoint at a civil affairs facility when the Abu Ghraib story broke, but I still had to go out the next day and face crowds of Iraqi civilians. I also had to hear the reports of Marines dying around the city because of the angst that was a direct result of that.

I just got discharged from the Marines in November after six and a half years as a reservist with two activations. I moved to DC in January to get a Master’s in Political Management at GWU," – Adam Kokesh, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who protested the Gonzales "hearings" last week. More about him here.

The testimony today. A useful primer on what we know.

A debate: here, here and finally here.

A provocative thesis:

If prudes occasionally slept with strangers, it would slow the spread of STDs. Here’s how it works. One such prude walks into a bar, and he’s uninfected. If he takes home an uninfected woman, great – he distracted her from a potential disease carrier. If he gets herpes, that’s also great, because he’s sexually conservative and won’t pass the infection along very often. Better him than someone with less self control.

Either way, society benefits when the chaste open up slightly. "Slightly" is key, because too much "openness" spreads more disease than it diverts. After studying AIDS in England, Harvard’s Michael Kremer put the cutoff at 2.25 partners per year.

Meanwhile, Harvard remains the fleshpot it was when I went there.

Vice President Dick Cheney (L) speaks as Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) looks on at the U.S. Capitol April 24, 2007 in Washington DC. Cheney called Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s call for a pullout of troops in Iraq "unfortunate," "uninformed" and "misleading." By Mark Wilson/Getty.

Longtime readers will know how impressed I was with Pat Tillman’s decision to forgo a lucrative sports career for service to his country. We all were. It is an appropriate but awful coda to this war that his sacrifice was rewarded with goverment mendacity. They lie to the bereaved families of heroes. Can you imagine what they have been telling the rest of us?

"Halberstam was an exceptional and relentless journalist — had more reporters been as questioning early in the Iraq War as Halberstam was in Vietnam, we might not be in our current quagmire — but his strength and beauty, what really set him apart, was that he wrote about everything, absolutely everything. Because everything interested him. He wrote about the Vietnam War, Bobby Kennedy, the Blazers, the media, the Japanese car industry, the 1949 pennant race, Bill Walton, the 1960s civil rights movement, Michael Jordan, 1950s popular culture, Bobby Knight, the 9/11 firefighters, the Korean War, the 1964 World Series … about the only thing he missed was Madonna," – Jim Caple, ESPN.

Here’s a great interview with a friend whom I also greatly admire as a writer and thinker: Jon Rauch. This exchange helps explain why he’s been on my favorites’ list for a very long time:

Reason: Let’s talk about your politics. At various points, you’ve described yourself as libertarianish but not libertarian. A few years back in an essay for reason, you called yourself "a soft communitarian." How do identify yourself or characterize yourself politically and how does that guide or affect or influence or get in the way of your work?

Rauch: Well, it doesn’t get in the way because I spend no time thinking about how I categorize myself politically. I don’t even bother.

Reason: Isn’t that strange in your line of work? Most people in your position have a political identity which is not only fully articulated but is very central to who they are.

Rauch: Now, that’s strange. Why would anyone want a political identity? I understand an ethnic identity, a cultural identity, a [sexual] identity, but why would anyone want a political identity?

Reason: As the editor of political magazine–of a libertarian magazine–I have no fucking idea why anyone would want such a thing.

Rauch: I hope that was on the record. Put that in there. I’m completely mystified by the mindset that judges one’s moral character in life by how well you fit in some political party or other. It makes no sense to me at all.

Reason: Many people would say that it is part of a cultural identity–of being on a certain team, or being a certain type of person.

Rauch: I think that’s right. There is the team aspect and there is also the member of the club aspect.

Reason: Do you vote?

Rauch: Oh, yeah.

Reason: Do you vote Democratic or Republican? Do you vote on candidate-by-candidate basis or something like that?

Rauch: I don’t tell my vote, my specific vote, but over time, my votes have been pretty much esoteric, like my writing. I feel very much emotionally like part of the marginalized middle. That isn’t to say that all my views are wishy-washy and that I’m halfway between Republicans and Democrats, but I do feel myself to be one of these independent voters who is kind of left behind by a political system biased in favor of people who fit into neat boxes and have extreme views. And I vote like an independent.

A product whose moment has arrived. Caffeinated spiders, however, catch fewer flies.