Sam Harris via Jerry Coyne’s blog.

whyevolutionistrue.com - Sam harris is back explaining why religion is bad

Sam:
“The Bible, as you suggest, “defies easy synthesis” and “can be hard to understand.” But it is worse than that. No, I haven’t argued that the book “is principally about owning slaves”—just that it gets the ethics of slavery wrong, which is a terrible flaw in a book that is widely imagined to be perfect.

The truth is that even with Jesus holding forth in defense of the poor, the meek, and the persecuted, the Bible basically condones slavery. As I argued in Letter to a Christian Nation, the slaveholders of the South were on the winning side of a theological argument—and they knew it. And they made a hell of a lot of noise about it. We got rid of slavery despite the moral inadequacy of the Bible, not because it is the greatest repository of wisdom we have.”

I enjoy Sam’s podcast and Jerry’s blog.

Jerry: “Harris is a gifted man, and I’m baffled at the number of people who seem to intensely dislike him.”

Same.