Sam Harris DESTROYS the Bible in 5 Minutes?! | Pastor Reacts

Wise Disciple

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

Slavery is condoned in the Bible, in both Testaments and in the Quran. If you go to the books and try to figure out what the creator of the universe wants, he expects you to keep slaves and he's told you how to do it.

00:12

But here's what I can promise you, this is gonna be a real conversation and it's gonna be tough, okay? The kid gloves will not be on and we're gonna have to talk about difficult things.

00:20

So now we've reached the most replayed moment of the entire video and I wonder, is this the part where he destroys the

00:27

Bible, right? Should we put on Kevlar here? Did Sam Harris just destroy

00:39

Christianity in five minutes? Now we've reacted to Harris before on this channel, he's made the rounds in his career as one of the four atheist horsemen.

00:47

I think it was Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett who attacked Christianity, well basically all religion.

00:54

But maybe this time Harris has actually said something that we need to hear, so we'll get right into it. If you're new here, my name is

00:59

Nate Sala and this is Wise Disciple, where I'm helping you become the effective Christian that you were meant to be. Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and if you find this video helpful at all, please share this with someone else just so we're all ready as Christians for the challenges that come our way.

01:13

Don't forget to avail yourself of the special Logos discount that we're running through Wise Disciple. Logos Bible software is the app that I use to study the scriptures and read the

01:21

Bible in these videos with you. It's a game changer for the Bible student, definitely check out the Logos link in the notes below.

01:28

Because they claim that the Quran say, or the Bible for that matter, is the literal word of God.

01:37

But more than that, they claim that their understanding of that word is correct.

01:43

Okay, so we have a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris. Peterson and Harris are definitely very friendly to each other.

01:51

Okay, they've engaged each other on lots of different issues. Peterson from the perspective of a, yeah, what do you, like a

01:58

God -fearer, I guess. And Harris definitely from the perspective of not only an atheist, but like an anti -theist.

02:05

An anti -theist is somebody who not only does not believe in God, which is the definition of theism, they're actually opposed to theism.

02:12

And Harris has been extremely vocal about how he thinks that religion, and especially Christianity, is beyond foolish.

02:19

It can even be dangerous. Now we've reacted to conversations that they've had before on this channel, so you should definitely check out those videos, and I'll try to leave a link for that in the notes.

02:29

But right now, Peterson is setting up the premise, which is religious folks who believe that their particular holy book contains the literal words of God.

02:39

Which means they conflate two things, because you could imagine a situation where you had a book, and I'm not saying this is the case, it's an imaginative exercise, where you had a book that had all the answers that was extraordinarily complicated, and so that when you read it, it wouldn't be obvious that you understood it, or perhaps it wouldn't be obvious that you didn't understand it either, but you're not going to be able to, you can't get an uninterpreted version of the book.

03:04

And so the fundamentalist claim is far worse. It's that not only is there an absolute reality, truth, embedded in the book, but that their particular take on that absolute reality is the absolute take on that book.

03:15

So they conflate their own, they make an assumption of their own omniscience, and then pass that off onto God, so to speak.

03:23

Yeah, except in their defense, and I don't. So we're missing the greater context out of which this conversation emerges, because this is a five -minute video, but I think there was a longer conversation.

03:33

So it's hard to get a grip on what that looked like. But if Peterson's problem with religious people is that they think that they have the proper interpretation of the text, so now

03:43

I'm gonna sidestep like Islam here, you know, and how, right, and I'm just gonna deal with how this applies to Christianity and to the

03:49

Bible, but if Peterson is trying to suggest that Christians who think their interpretation of the Bible is correct, and that's somehow a problem, and somehow that makes them a fundamentalist, well,

04:01

I guess I'm a fundamentalist, guys, okay? I guess I'm outed. Like, do I, what happens next?

04:07

Do I get a T -shirt? Like, do I get a set of steak knives? Like, what's happening? But here's the problem, and maybe this is gonna come out in the conversation, but there seems to be no appreciation for really three things.

04:19

Number one, the Holy Spirit. Number two, biblical exegesis. And number three, the

04:25

Orthodox understanding of biblical doctrine, right? So Jesus did tell his disciples this.

04:32

This is John chapter 14, verse 26, "'But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, "'whom the Father will send in my name, "'he will teach you all things "'and bring to your remembrance "'all that I have said to you.'"

04:44

That means the Holy Spirit is a teacher of Christ's commands. He plays an active role in the disciples of Jesus in their learning what it is that Jesus taught and remembering what he said as it connects to their daily lives.

04:58

Here's how Jesus described the Spirit's role later. This is chapter 16, verse 13. "'When the Spirit of truth comes, "'he will guide you into all the truth.

05:08

"'For he will not speak on his own authority, "'but whatever he hears, he will speak, "'and he will declare to you the things that are to come.'"

05:15

So the Spirit actively will guide us into what is true, and that activity is described by the

05:22

Apostle Paul this way. This is 1 Corinthians chapter 2. "'Now we have received not the

05:28

Spirit of the world, "'but the Spirit who is from God, "'that we might understand the things freely given us by God, "'and we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, "'but taught by the

05:39

Spirit, "'interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. "'The natural person does not accept "'the things of the

05:47

Spirit of God, "'for they are folly to him, "'and he is not able to understand them "'because they are spiritually discerned.'"

05:54

So you see what I mean? The Holy Spirit is involved in how we understand and obey the teachings of the

06:00

Lord, in other words, the Bible. And good biblical exegesis, which that word just literally means to lead out of, it's not a personal subjective enterprise at all.

06:13

It is an objective, careful analysis of what the original author intended when they said what they said.

06:19

And that requires us to be good critical readers, to ask analytical questions of the text, to safeguard against our own novel interpretations in order to discover the author's original meaning.

06:32

And guess what helps with this? Paying attention to how the church has understood the scripture before we came on the scene.

06:39

So this whole fundamentalist Christian understanding of the text, it just doesn't actually appreciate what goes on in churches with careful pastors and leaders who understand the role of the

06:50

Holy Spirit, who understand proper exegesis and know their history. Often rise to the defense of fundamentalists.

07:00

So now we've reached the most replayed moment of the entire video. And I wonder, I don't know, is this the part where he destroys the

07:08

Bible, right? Should we put on Kevlar here, you know? So I don't know, let's find out what happens. It's very easy to get there because some of the claims in the book are not at all hard to parse.

07:19

In fact, many of them can only be honestly interpreted one way. So to take, again, an example that will be not inflammatory to you, but makes the point, it just says that the remedy for theft in the

07:34

Quran is to cut the hands off a thief. That is the unambiguous injunction.

07:41

It's not an allegory. It's not, so the, you have to, you have to indulge some kind of tortured interpretive scheme to avoid the shocking fact that the creator of the universe thinks you should live this way for all time.

07:59

So I'm not gonna defend Islam because I'm not a Muslim. But what I'm listening for is the moment that Harris destroys the

08:07

Bible. Haven't heard anything just yet, though. And people like ISIS, I mean, this is my claim.

08:15

Most of what is in these books, and this is what worries me about those books because they can't be edited, most of what's in the books is clearly not the best that humanity is capable of in the ethical domain.

08:30

Or in the, no, so, and so clearly, and this is true for morality, you know, most pressingly, but it's true for science, it's true for economics, it's true for anything else that we are wise to pay attention to.

08:48

It's like slavery is condoned in the Bible in both Testaments and in the

08:53

Quran. There's no getting away from that. Now you can say, well, it's not the central thrust of any of these books, but if you go to the books and try to figure out what the creator of the universe wants with respect to the owning and needless immiseration of other people, right, he expects you to keep slaves and he's told you how to do it.

09:14

You know, don't knock out their eyes and their teeth. Don't take, if you're a Muslim, don't take other Muslims as slaves, but it's not an accident that the people who joined

09:23

ISIS thought that it was absolutely kosher to take slaves.

09:30

Okay, so there it is. The Bible is pro -slavery. God condones slavery, and so this is how

09:37

Harris destroys the Bible because it contains, in parts of the Old Testament, certain regulations for the taking of slaves.

09:46

So here's what I'm not gonna do. I'm not gonna be like a lot of other

09:51

Christian apologists. By the way, I don't consider myself to be an apologist at all. I'm a teacher.

09:57

I was trained as a pastor, but I'm not out here creating new apologetics resources for folks.

10:02

That's not my focus at all. So I'm not going to do what I think a lot of other apologists might do, which is just come back at Harris with my own immediate defense of these, you know, each and every one of the quote -unquote slavery passages.

10:19

I'm just gonna point out some observations that I have, and then I'm just gonna let you guys decide ultimately whether or not the

10:27

Bible was destroyed. But here's what I can promise you. This is gonna be a real conversation, and it's gonna be tough, okay?

10:33

The kid gloves will not be on, and we're gonna have to talk about difficult things, okay? But first,

10:38

I'm gonna let Harris finish his thought. Big sex slaves. And I mean, they were even, their use of their sex slaves was conducted as a sacrament, and that's not an accident.

10:50

I mean, they were preying over the Yazidi girls before they raped them. So these -

10:56

That's a reference to Islam. Just FYI. This is not, unlike what many people expect, it's not that this doctrine is being used as a pretext for people who would otherwise do terrible things like take sex slaves and rape them, and so there's no net damage being done here by this belief system.

11:18

No, these are, I would argue in many cases, psychologically normal people who are simply convinced of the absolute veracity of these ideas.

11:27

And in this case, the perfect example of Muhammad as the most self -actualized human who's ever existed, and what did

11:36

Muhammad do? Muhammad took sex slaves. So, and then once you grant that, and this is where there's a tension between how we pursue the same goals, like as we've just established, we have many of the same goals, but insofar as you make religion look palatable, insofar as you suggest to your audience that they can have their religious cake and eat it too, they can have their reason, they can have their respect for science, they can have a 21st century worldview, but they can also hold on to everything they love in Christianity or fear to lose.

12:17

And it's undoubtedly mostly Christianity, but whatever, any religion. My concern is that it keeps us shackled to these

12:28

Iron Age philosophies and these Iron Age conversations where we should be having a 21st century conversation about everything, ethics included.

12:37

Okay, okay. So they cut off Peterson, that's the end of the video, before he had a chance to respond.

12:43

And I wonder what he says here. By the way, have you guys seen the fuller clip? Like what does

12:49

Peterson say? Let me know in the comments below. Okay, well, let's have a difficult conversation about the

12:55

Bible, and I'll just go ahead and start unpacking what's in my mind at the moment. By the way,

13:00

I probably will not be able to plumb the depths of this issue by any stretch, but what

13:06

I'm trying to do is just get the conversation at least going, and then you can pick it up where I leave off, how about that?

13:12

Okay, the first thing I will say is, and I only say this to set the table,

13:19

I just don't see how the existence of God has been disproved and the Bible itself has been disproved by Sam Harris here.

13:27

So notice there were no arguments being made and evidence being provided and in support of any kind of arguments that God does not exist, that the

13:34

Bible is not actually God's word. Instead, what just happened was Sam Harris talked about why he doesn't like the

13:41

Bible and why he doesn't like the God of the Bible. The only reason I bring that up is to gauge the title of the video, okay?

13:50

The title of the video, I don't know if you can see it here, is Sam Harris Destroys the Quran and Bible in Five Minutes.

13:56

Did Sam Harris really destroy the Bible? I don't think so. I mean, if by destroy we mean he somehow disproved

14:03

God and the Bible, I don't think he did that. But he certainly brings up a point that is very compelling because he's right, slavery is in the

14:13

Bible. God does regulate slavery by giving certain commands to the

14:19

Israelites in the Bible. So what can we conclude about this? Hey, real quick, I'm so grateful that you're watching.

14:25

If I've earned the right to get your sub, I'd love it if you would just click the like and subscribe button. It would really help me to get the video out to more and more people.

14:34

I really do appreciate you. Well, this is a difficult concept to hear and I don't think it's gonna please some people, but God doesn't seem to be too concerned with quickly changing the political principles of the nations of the world.

14:49

So slavery was an absolute political reality in the world at that time. I mean, it's also a humane issue, right?

14:56

So I'm not trying to be too reductionistic here when I talk about it, but it's all wrapped up in politics.

15:02

This is a political reality that has real negative and harmful impacts on human beings, okay?

15:09

And the reason why I point that out is all nations had slaves. The Israelites were the slaves of the

15:16

Egyptians. So of course they know better than anyone what it means to be a slave and suffer under inhumane treatment by their masters.

15:23

And they suffered as slaves for 400 years, we're told in the scripture. So what we're looking at when we see these slavery related texts in the

15:34

Old Testament, and I'm gonna try to pull a couple up here for you, is a group of former slaves who now are told to be certain kinds of individuals when they have their own slaves.

15:47

And I don't know if I can get too far deep into the differentiation between indentured servitude and kind of the other forms of slavery, right?

15:57

Even in the Bible. But maybe we should break this down like this. There were Hebrews who had

16:03

Hebrew slaves and there were Hebrews who had Gentile slaves, okay? So there appear to be in the

16:09

Bible two different kinds of teachings and laws on this. A good example of this is Leviticus chapter 25, verse 39.

16:16

It says, if your brother becomes poor beside you and sells himself to you, you shall not make him serve as a slave.

16:23

He shall be with you as a hired worker and as a sojourner. He shall serve with you until the year of the

16:29

Jubilee. Then he shall go out from you, he and his children with him, and go back to his own clan and return to the possession of his fathers, for they are my servants whom

16:38

I brought out of the land of Egypt. They shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him ruthlessly, but shall fear your

16:44

God. So here we see what's called indentured servitude taking place.

16:49

And the Bible is trying to make it clear here that they shouldn't even be referred to.

16:55

These Israelites who sold themselves into indentured servitude, they should not even be referred to as slaves.

17:02

By the way, many in early America utilized the same idea to work off debt and other things, indentured servitude.

17:08

So the interesting takeaway here, I think, is do not rule over these folks ruthlessly, right?

17:16

That's verse 43. But let them free in the year of Jubilee, which is every seven years. More than that, when they are set free,

17:25

Deuteronomy 15 instructs masters to let their slaves leave with a share, or I should say servants, right?

17:32

Hired workers. They should let these folks leave with a share of the master's wealth or the owner's wealth for their hard work, okay?

17:40

So it's kind of a picture of what that looks like. On the other hand, there is teaching about the treatment of Gentile slaves.

17:47

And this is where we start to see a difference in treatment. So later in Leviticus, it says this.

17:52

This is in verse 45. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you.

17:59

So strangers, key word there, who have been born in your land and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever.

18:09

That's different. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers, the people of Israel, you shall not rule one over another ruthlessly.

18:18

Okay, so instead of being set free in the year of Jubilee, Gentile slaves are slaves for life.

18:23

That's a little difficult to hear, right? In our 21st century sensibilities. Here's another difficult passage to read.

18:29

This is Deuteronomy 20, verse 10. When you draw near to a city to fight against it, offer terms of peace to it.

18:36

And if it responds to you peaceably and it opens to you, then all the people who are found in it shall do forced labor for you and shall serve you.

18:44

But if it makes no peace with you, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it. This is Moses speaking to the

18:50

Israelites. And we can presume that Moses is speaking on behalf of the Lord. So what do we make of this, right?

18:58

Again, other apologists will point out that, you know, slaves at the end of the day were given special treatment, even to the

19:06

Gentile slaves. You know, and Sam Harris points this out. You know, don't poke out their eyes.

19:11

Don't poke out their tooth or they can be set free. So they were afforded certain rights to protect their health and safety, as well as the way that they would be treated humanely.

19:20

And again, this is like a really complex issue that I'm just not gonna be able to fully unpack in a 20 minute video, but here's what

19:27

I will say. And again, it's difficult for those of us who live on the other side of the abolition of slavery to hear this, but God does not seem to want to end slavery overnight.

19:38

I think that is an obvious conclusion from studying the Bible. As a matter of fact, God doesn't seem to be too concerned with reshaping the world into a pure utopia overnight.

19:49

So we see the same thing with Jesus' ministry, you know? He heals some blind people, but not all.

19:55

He heals some lame folks, but not all of them. And the question is why, why not?

20:01

Well, it's because the Bible tells us that God is, what he's doing is he's fixing the precise location of where the world got broken.

20:12

We're told in Genesis chapter three that the whole world became broken, but as it turns out, it did not break over politics.

20:20

It did not break over governmental structures. It didn't even break over slavery. It broke because of the human heart, where the desires and the passions live.

20:31

And so the story of the Bible is the story of God working through humanity to redeem what has been broken one soul at a time.

20:40

That means it's a very slow process that finds its culminating work in the incarnation of Christ and his death on the cross and resurrection.

20:50

That is a much more slow, patient process. In other words, the kingdom of God that he desires to bring here on earth in order to fix what has been broken starts out as a mustard seed, and then it becomes a great tree, right?

21:05

And that's both a picture of the slow transformation of human society on the whole, but it's also a picture of the slow transformation of the individual human heart.

21:15

And God knows that too much change too quickly will not accomplish the plans that he has for his kingdom.

21:22

Society will not change overnight. And guess what? Neither do people, by the way. And so he works with people where they are.

21:30

So I'll give you an illustration of what I mean by that. So imagine that God shows up today, right now, and he reveals all of heaven, including himself in the sky for everyone to see.

21:43

And it's unmistakably him, okay? Nobody can say that they don't know that God exists any longer.

21:49

Now he's here. And by God, I don't mean any God. I mean the God of the

21:54

Bible. And let's say that God decrees from the sky, I am Yahweh, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

22:01

I am your creator, savior, and king. And I declare that all of you, every single person on this planet should no longer perform abortions.

22:11

Do you think that everyone on this planet who is pro -choice will just automatically be transformed in their hearts and say, oh my gosh, my mind has changed.

22:20

The unborn is an innocent human life. You really think that's gonna happen? Because I don't, you know?

22:27

I think I know enough about humanity to recognize that that's not gonna happen. But do you see how if enough people changed their hearts and their minds over time on this issue, and from the place of deep reflection and new conviction, they decided that the unborn is an innocent human being, that it would actually end abortions forever?

22:49

So the effect of the decree that came out of the sky, like in keeping with the illustration that I just gave, that would actually be accomplished eventually, but not because it was compelled by decree from the top down, but because enough people's hearts changed from the bottom up.

23:06

Do you see that? That is what it seems God is more interested in. And a lot of us just don't like to hear that, okay?

23:15

Because you know what? We wanna see these evils disappear overnight. And you know what? That's a good thing.

23:21

I understand that, you know? I acknowledge that this is difficult to wrestle with.

23:27

You know, the Bible is not a fluffy bedtime story. It's the story of all reality. And real life is struggle and toil and pain and suffering, just as much as it is joy and peace and hope.

23:41

And God uses all of it. Another thing I'll say is this. If you wanna know the kind of world that God condones, right, so that's what

23:50

Sam Harris says, take a close look at the one he created before it got broken, right? Does that make sense?

23:56

That means that you need to look very closely at Genesis chapter one and two. And if you do that, guess what you're not gonna find there?

24:03

Slavery. That means in the world that God has designed, in order for it to function properly, there is no such thing as slavery.

24:11

As a matter of fact, when Jesus announces that the kingdom of heaven is here in the New Testament, the outworking of that sounds like this.

24:18

Galatians three, verse 28, there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

24:28

Okay? But somebody might say, yeah, Nate, but all the slavery passages in the Bible just cannot be ignored.

24:33

I don't think they should be. I think they should be studied very closely and wrestled with.

24:38

But I think when you do that, you're gonna realize what God was really up to. Those slavery passages are there because slavery already exists in the

24:48

Old Testament. That means that God did not invent slavery, he regulated it.

24:54

Why? Well, because his desire is for our hearts to change. And he knows that he should not force us to change faster than we are able to do so of our own free will.

25:04

It's interesting that, you know, Sam Harris points to the same book that the abolitionists did when they found their justification to end slavery.

25:14

They used the same book that Sam Harris just used. How is that possible? How is that possible if Sam Harris just destroyed the

25:21

Bible? The Bible was used as justification to end the same thing that Harris seems to think it condones.

25:27

How is that possible? Maybe it's because Sam Harris, he hasn't really given this much thought.

25:33

Maybe it's because he doesn't appreciate the deeper point about God and humanity that I just laid out. Maybe it's because, you know, with something as deeply ingrained as the issue of slavery, which was a reality all over the world, by the way, it still is in many places in the world even now, right?

25:50

Trafficking, other forms of slavery, if you catch my drift, these things are still happening. That's how bad the condition of the human heart still is, friends.

26:00

And Harris and others like him, man, they just wanna microwave this solution to the issue as if just, you know, speaking on this for five minutes, it's just gonna change the area of the human heart where slavery truly originates.

26:12

So what I'm trying to show you now, this isn't a trite answer that I'm giving. What I'm trying to do is talk like an adult and acknowledge that these are difficult sets of passages in the

26:22

Bible. I think we all should find them difficult, but I think we all should read these passages and be uncomfortable and admit that this makes us uncomfortable, but then we should also try to understand the mind of God on this issue as good critical thinkers and Bible believers.

26:38

Because I think when we do that, I think we'll discover that we're dealing with a God who truly understands us better than we understand ourselves.

26:46

This is a God who is patient. He is still willing to be in relationship with flawed human beings, not allowing those flaws to like deter him from maintaining relationship, but overlooking those flaws with his good eye so that you, me, and on balance, the whole world can be transformed in our hearts.

27:05

And that transformation should look like Jesus Christ. Those are some of my thoughts. That's certainly not exhaustive on this issue at all.

27:12

I'm sure I'm gonna have more thoughts about this video as I end and kind of go away, right? So why don't

27:17

I just leave it here? But I'm curious to get your thoughts now. What do you think about Sam Harris? Did he destroy the

27:23

Bible in five minutes? What do you think about these definitely uncomfortable passages of scripture?

27:28

Let's have a real conversation about it. Let me know in the comments below. Hey, if you made it this far, you need to join my Patreon community even just to read the

27:35

Bible with me. We're doing a Bible study together over on Patreon and that's free for anyone who wants to join. If you wanna support my ministry,

27:42

I could use your support financially. You can get exclusive access to videos like this before they make it to YouTube. You can join me for exclusive live streams and ask me anything you want.

27:50

The link for the Patreon is below. Hey, I'm gonna return soon and we're gonna do some more videos and have further conversation.