I plan to read this guy to understand contemporary movements.

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>>7531635
The God Delusion

Waking Up is pretty cool

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Define "contemporary movements." If you're referring to the campus fringe / tumblr variety, I doubt any of them have read anything by Sam Harris. They're probably too preoccupied with feminist authors.

he is a dim witted fanatic who worships the idea of a secular state. reading his books may actually make you stupider.

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Not all troll threads are Sam Harris threads but all Sam Harris threads are troll threads

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>>7531635

Harris isn't very original as philosopher, and most of its work is already dated. if you want to understand contemporary movements it's better to look at their broader context

New Atheism is (or more accurately, was) a product of its time, the post-soviet post-9/11 era that saw the rise of both the religious right and political islam. Western liberal rationalism had triumphed over both marxism and older religious and nationalistic ideologies, but is now under assault by irrational alien forces and must be defended.

This narrative eventually collapsed, weakened by the american military's misadventures in Iraq, the 2008 crisis, the rise of social progressivism and a new culture war mostly independent from the religious-secular conflict. The liberal idealism of the post-cold war era has been largely discredited, this explains why New Atheism became associated with fedora tippers as an archaic ideology disconnected from the zeitgeist.

It certainly had an impact on the world, many of its ideas went mainstream as part of geek culture and the OMG I LOVE SCIENCE! mentality. but the dream of a stable world guided by logic and reason is dead and there's nothing to take its place.

>>7531717
>The liberal idealism of the post-cold war era has been largely discredited, this explains why New Atheism became associated with fedora tippers as an archaic ideology disconnected from the zeitgeist.
Like... where, on 4chan and reddit? You're mixing low internet maymay culture with global worldview-related shifts. Very small % of people(maybe just 'smal' and not very in our demographic group, but still) allows some silly online forums to shape their beliefs.

>>7531717
New Atheism isn't really that new. "New Atheist" types were already around in the 19th century... read Ernst Haeckel's "The Riddle Of The Universe"

>>7531736
>You're mixing low internet maymay culture with global worldview-related shifts.

Increasingly, they are one and the same, even traditional media is increasingly dependent on it. Memes are a an unprecedented form of mass communication and probably a better indication of what people are actually thinking that TV or newspapers. A lot of it comes across in an exaggerated, highly distorted way, but it's there all the same, see the rise of the radical right in Europe for example.

>>7531738
those kind of views have a long history from the enlightenment and its predecessors to darwin and logical positivism. I'm not really against them, either. But New Atheism goes beyond simple positivism, see Harris' attempts to derive a ethical system from neurology, Dawkins' cult of personality or Hitchens' neocon rhetoric. They were actually trying to use science for the purposes of a pseudo-religious neo-liberal ideology

>>7531717
>the dream of a stable world guided by logic and reason is dead and there's nothing to take its place
Except for Will and Power