Why There is Religion

This is a transcript of a Youtube video with Sam Harris speaking. The transcript begins at the two minute mark into watching the video:

"I view religions as essentially failed sciences. Religion was the discourse that we had when all causes in the universe was opaque. We didn’t know the basis of anything. We didn’t know why we were here. We didn’t know how diseases spread or what disease was. We didn’t why people died early and why others flourished. We don’t know what causing thunderstorms or what’s causing crops to fail.

We very naturally as a cognitive and behavioral imperative we formed descriptions of the world and we try to figure out what’s going on. We tell ourselves stories about our origins and about where we are going and about causes in the world.

Those stories given our pervasive ignorance and our disposition to see agency in the world, to view ourselves in relationship to the world, these stories entail being in relation to invisible friends and enemies. So we have this parent figure and this guy who is going to take care of things if you live rightly and we have other demonic presences that which we should be really worried about.

Gradually, what you see happening, as rationality and dozens of specific sciences were birthed in the human conversation, you see religion on a hundred fronts losing the argument with science.

On the front of human health and disease, it used to be that you could get a diagnosis of demonic possession, that was a reasonable thing to believe that you had, if you were having seizures. But now we have a science of neurology and we know about epilepsy and so when your kid has seizures you don’t go to the church to get him diagnosed and treated by exorcism. And so that’s a good thing.

I’m saying that religion is losing the argument on every other front, it’s losing the argument ethically, it will lose the argument spiritually, I mean we will understand spiritual experience so well at some point, at the level of the brain, at the level of the way in which using attention in certain ways can change the human experience.

We’ll understand it in a way that makes a mockery of this kind of denominational religion talk about Jesus and grace or about Buddha and magic powers. And that will break down in the same way it’s broken down on medicine. That’s a process we have to be honest about and let it unfold."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lu7OePVglE