Angered? Indifferent? Agreeable? From there, select the essay that you
feel best represents an ethos-pathos-logos "triangle," note why, and
formulate a critique to its major, or minor, points/ideas (even if you
completely agree).
-The idea is that if you can identify an ethical, logical, or pathetic
appeal, then instead of just surmising to say, "I disagree," one should be
able to construct, however brief for our purposes, an antithetical
ethical, logical, or pathetic appeal to what it is one disagrees with.
Likewise, if you can surmise to say, "I agree," then you should at least
be able to substantiate your own agreeableness with a paraphrased ethical,
logical, or pathetic argument.
What follows is an attempt to somewhat situate each of the three authors'
ethical character prior to reading their respectful essays:
Sam Harris: Stanford graduate of philosophy; neuroscience scholar; author
of "The End of Faith," and "Letter to a Christian Nation."
John Stuart Mill: 19th century Utilitarian philosopher; prodigy of James
Mill -his father, and Jeremy Bentham -the father of Utilitarianism; author
of, among others, "Utilitarianism" and "On Liberty."
Friedrich Nietzsche: 19th century German (continental) philosopher; father
was a priest; famously declared that "god is dead;" responsible for the
saying "what does not kill me only makes me stronger;" was cited as giving
the foundation to Nazism/Aryanism, even though he was the most ardent of
anti-anti-semites; most read under his "will to power" mantra; author of,
among others, "Ecce Homo," "Nietzsche Contra Wagner," "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra," "Twilight of the Idols," "Genealogy of Morals," and "The
Anti-Christ." -I only give a longer introduction to Nietzsche because he
is often the most difficult to read, as well as the most ill understood.
-Excerpted from “The End of Faith.” -Sam Harris.
…It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly, there is sanity in numbers. And yet, it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window. And so, while religious people are not generally mad, their core beliefs absolutely are. This is not surprising, since most religions have merely canonized a few products of ancient ignorance and derangement and passed them down to us as though they were primordial truths. This leaves billions of us believing what no sane person could believe on his own. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions. Consider one of the cornerstones of the Catholic faith:
I likewise profess that in the Mass a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice is offered to God on behalf of the living and the dead, and that the Body and the Blood, together with the soul
and the divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ is truly, really, and substantially present in the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, and there is a change of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into Blood; and this change the Catholic mass calls transubstantiation. I also profess that the whole and entire Christ and a true sacrament is received under each separate species.30
Jesus Christ--who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens--can now be eaten in the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd could be possible?
ON LIBERTY
The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign. -John Stuart Mill
THE ANTI-CHRIST
The problem I raise here is not what ought to succeed mankind in the sequence of species (the human being is an end): but what type of human being one ought to breed, ought to will, as more valuable, more worthy of life, more certain of the future. This more valuable type has existed often enough already: but as a lucky accident, as an exception, never as willed. He has rather been the most feared, he has hitherto been virtually the thing to be feared - and out of fear the reverse type has been willed, bred, achieved: the domestic animal, the herd animal, the sick animal man - the Christian…
One should not embellish or dress up Christianity: it has waged a war to the death against this higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type, it has distilled evil, the Evil One, out of these instincts -the strong human being as the type of reprehensibility, as the 'outcast'. Christianity has taken the side of everything weak, base, ill-constituted, it has made an ideal out of opposition to the preservative instincts of strong life; it has depraved the reason even of the intellectually strongest natures by teaching men to feel the supreme values of intellectuality as sinful, as misleading, as temptations. The most deplorable example: the corruption of Pascal, who believed his reason had been corrupted by original sin while it had only been corrupted by his Christianity…
…as though humility, chastity, poverty, in a word holiness, had not hitherto done life unutterably more harm than any sort of frightfulness or vice whatever. ... Pure spirit is pure lie. ... So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of 'truth'...
I make war on this theologian instinct: I have found traces of it everywhere. Whoever has theologian blood in his veins has a wrong and dishonest attitude towards all things from the very first. The pathos that develops out of this is called faith: closing one's eyes with respect to oneself for good and all so as not to suffer from the sight of incurable falsity. Out of this erroneous perspective on all things one makes a morality, a virtue, a holiness for oneself, one unites the good conscience with seeing falsely -one demands that no other kind of perspective shall be accorded any value after one has rendered one's own sacrosanct with the names 'God', 'redemption', 'eternity'. I have dug out the theologian instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, peculiarly subterranean form of falsity that exists on earth. What a theologian feels to be true must be false: this provides almost a criterion of truth. It is his deepest instinct of self-preservation which forbids any part of reality whatever to be held in esteem or even spoken of. Wherever the influence of the theologian extends value judgment is stood on its head, the concepts 'true' and 'false' are necessarily reversed: that which is most harmful to life is here called 'true', that which enhances, intensifies, affirms, justifies it and causes it to triumph is called 'false'. ... If it happens that, by way of the 'conscience' of princes (or of nations), theologians stretch out their hands after power, let us be in no doubt what at bottom is taking place every time: the will to the end, the nihilistic will wants power …
-Friedrich Nietzsche “The Anti-Christ,” “Twilight of the Idols”
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