Sam Harris, Ironically The Author Of "Lying" Again Defamed By Liars

…Please do your part to confront liars in social media

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY (Definition)

Is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas. A person is being intellectually honest when he or she, knowing the truth, states that truth.

Shortly after moving to my new home in Bend, Oregon in 1995, I received a call from a surgeon I had only just met and to whom I had referred a patient. He said, “John...    I fucked up.  I nicked your patient’s ureter while operating and so I had to open him up to repair it.”  This certainly made a small operation become a big one.  In my career, many surgeons have had complications like this occur.  It happens.  Yet no one had ever taken the time to call me and cop to it personally. I have come to trust this man completely.  Honesty is more powerful than many of us realize.  In today’s world of information, such courageous honesty can be applied or denied to the exchange of ideas. I believe all of us have much to gain, or lose, in the battle against liars.

People can and do disagree in good faith. Intellectually honest people will accurately acknowledge and reflect the content and meaning of opposing ideas advanced by others whenever they engage in a dialog with, or quote the statements of, those with whom they disagree.  In other words, they address themselves to the difference in opinion regarding the ideas under discussion.  They are strong enough to understand and present their opponent’s ideas with integrity, while then presenting their opposing opinions and reasoning.

Liars don’t.

The intellectually dishonest knowingly distort, misquote or quote deliberately out of context (or support others who do so) to defame, slander and harm those with whom they disagree, often to further an agenda of their own.  They sacrifice the important, constructive and honest interplay of ideas to rally the support of other, often less-informed individuals.  When unable to successfully defend an idea they dislike, they stoop to lying about the idea itself and attack the person at its source.

I believe that humanity benefits greatly from Intellectual Honesty and that individuals, societies and humanity as a whole are often greatly harmed by the intellectual dishonesty of liars.  This has certainly been proven true of scientific progress.  Distortion of the truth for reasons such as fame, fortune or funding have done significant harm in many fields.

I’m moved to blog about this in the wake of the social media frenzy that erupted after the Bill Maher interview with author and neuroscientist Sam Harris and actor Ben Affleck on REAL TIME, October 3, 2014.  The show was one thing – a bit strange and frankly riveting – but the aftermath is appalling.  Amidst the dishonest post-interview mudslinging by so many individuals, from (supposedly) respectable journalists on down to some not-too-bright flamers on twitter, I have only seen one party to this debate keep their integrity and habitual honesty intact and above reproach.  Ironically that person is the object of the out and out lies deliberately perpetrated against him, Mr. Sam Harris.

You may agree or disagree with Mr. Harris on many points, but you will never see him sell himself down the river by lying or deliberately distorting the views and statements of his opponents.  He will call them out on their many lies (again, an exhausting form of honesty) but will even go to great lengths to clarify anything he might have written that even APPEARS to be misunderstood by his readers.  When he has had his mind changed on a subject, even to a small degree, he is the first to put it out there.  

If you believe yourself to be intellectually honest, I truly hope you will step up and help promote intellectual honestly in the rapidly evolving world of social media.  I don’t ask you to agree or disagree with anyone else’s opinions, only that you aggressively point out lies to those you know have perpetrated them.  IF YOU FOLLOW MR. HARRIS ON TWITTER, and you see that he is once again taking the time to go on record to refute deliberate, knowing distortions of his work, please take a few minutes to check out the situation to your own satisfaction.  When you know that you have found such dishonesty, PLEASE RESPOND vigorously to the liar by replying to them with all the disgust that their action deserves.  Do your best to disseminate the criticism of liars to those in your circle of influence.  Of course this goes for ANYONE who is being misquoted and lied about, even if you violently disagree with them!  Make sure that even those whose opinions you abhor are confronted for the right reasons, not because of a liar.

Intellectual Honestly, in an era of manipulative infotainment and propaganda from all sides, is fighting for survival and we need it more than ever for the sake of individuals, society and humanity as a whole.  Please be active in defense of the truth within the important exchange of ideas.  Call out all Liars on their destructive crimes of dishonesty.

Andrew O'Hehir And SALON Are Off On A Tangent - Or Ten

Regarding this article in SALON

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/11/atheism_islam_and_liberalism_this_is_what_we_are_really_fighting_about/

There are numerous dishonest or at least inaccurate representations in this article by Andrew O’Hehir but this paragraph is among the most obvious. (see direct quote in bold below)

Is it just me, or did I miss Sam Harris and Bill Maher saying we needed to “kill or cut out the cancer of Islam”? 

Gee, what I thought they said was that we need to support the reformers within the religion and in Muslim societies because, as the author, Mr O'Hehir himself pointed out (again, see below) most majority Muslim nations are associated with “the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression.”  You may not personally call that the motherlode of bad ideas (I would) but it would be disingenuous for any liberal thinker not to rank them as a rich friggen vein of them! 

Hey, I know, let’s take that bolded last line below, and tweet it to millions of people completely out of context and attribute it to Mr. O’Hehir!  That will hurt his cause and since I disagree with him we should all do it!  (That, BTW was sarcasm, not a suggestion.)

It continues to amaze me how supposedly intelligent writers can take an idea they misunderstand and construct a four page edifice of nonsense out of it. 

For my own part, again from his article, the day that my opinions are seriously undermined because Mr. Harris' worldview "would provoke eye-rolling from a sophomore seminar in the subject" will be the pre-arranged day that my wife or caretaker will put me out of my misery.

Cheers.

“Ultimately it does not aid the cause of tolerance to deny that social practice in most majority-Muslim nations involves a lot of stuff that Western liberals rightly find appalling: the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression. One can discuss these troubling aspects of real-world Islam – as Reza Aslan and many other Western Muslims frequently do, in fairness – while also insisting that you can’t understand them independent of social and historical context. We don’t have to follow Maher and Harris down the rabbit hole of unjustified assumptions and disastrous conclusions: Illiberality and intolerance are intrinsic elements of Muslim doctrine, they argue, and Islam is a zone of monolithic groupthink unlike any other world religion (“the mother lode of bad ideas,” says Harris). Therefore Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out.?