[Buddha-l] there he goes again (sam harris)

[Richard Hayes]

On Thursday 26 October 2006 10:02, curt wrote:

> However, as well as being a snide and unjustified ad homimem swipe of my
> own - there was a certain point I was making. The point being that
> obviously Sam Harris (and his toadies) decided quite intentionally to
> associated themselves with Dershowitz' idiotic sniping at Chomsky.  Just
> take a look at the Dershowitz  quote - in one breath he bemoans the need
> for "reasoned debate" while simultaneously lumping suicide bombers
> together with Noam Chomsky.

That's par for the course for Dershowitz. To him, anyone who criticizes any 
Israeli policy is pretty much the moral equivalent of an anti-Semitic suicide 
bomber. (So much for rigorous thinking at Harvard, eh? But maybe we should 
invite him to join buddha-l.) I'm not sure Harris is signing on with 
Dershowitz in any big way. The range of reviewers he has cited on his website 
is quite wide. Clearly not everyone who agrees with some parts of Sam 
Harris's work agrees in every respect with everyone else who agrees with some 
parts of Sam Harris's work.

> And Harris places this at the very top of 
> the fawning reviews! Kinda makes you think. Don't it?

Well, no. The review at the very top of the list is by Richard Dawkins 
(another of my many cultural heroes). You have to scroll down past several 
reviews to get to the Dershowitz review, which is at the top of a section 
called Early Praise for The End of Faith. And I think I might be tempted to 
describe the reviews as positive rather than fawning.

-- 
Richard P. Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico
http://www.unm.edu/~rhayes

"Divided we stand. United we fall." --Thomas Jefferson, commenting on the 
advisibility of having an established religion in the USA.