In trying to spread rationalist propaganda, I’ve been limited by the fact that some of my friends DON’T READ!  For a long time now, I’ve wanted to assemble a video equivalent of a Sam Harris reader, with his most important lectures gathered together on a DVD.  However, I’m not technically competent enough to pull videos off of YouTube.  (Also, the quality of the video would be pretty poor.)

Does anyone have DVD’s of the following lectures?  (These are the ones that I consider to be the most important.)

1.  Speech at N.Y. Society for Ethical Culture.  A summary of “End of Faith” with a fuller segment on spiritualism.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCS1twX2i6s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGwQ4lPj0uM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOpXHtHPZmU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uyWeJo-_2s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjwPmIglcnU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox1aN3Bbi-s

2.  “Believing the Unbelievable: The Clash Between Faith and Reason in the Modern World”, Aspen Ideas Festival, July ‘07.  Outlines the three main categories of arguments religious people use against atheists.  (This one seems to be a high quality video already, but I don’t know how to download it.)
http://mfile.akamai.com/19676/mov/newmill.download.akamai.com/19677/anon.newmediamill/aspen/believingtheunbelievable_hinted.mov

3.  “The Problem with Atheism” at the Atheism Alliance International ‘07.  Why it’s better to emphasize rationality than to adopt the ‘atheist’ label.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2089733934372500371&hl=en

4.  “This is Your Brain on Morality”, Beyond Belief, 2008.  Makes the argument that in the future science will be able to shed light on questions of morality and values.
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-candles-in-the-dark/sam-harris-1

In addition, there are two more interviews which aren’t as seminal, but which contain a lot of good zingers: Harris’s interview on http://www.bigthink.com and an extended interview with Roger Bingham of The Science Network.

Does anyone have the DVD’s for these lectures?  I would like to assemble these videos into a single DVD and into a single distribution for Bit Torrent.

That’s a very good idea. I can’t help you with DVDs but I think that it would be great to have a collection of links to all of his videos. It would make it a lot easier to share (just by email !)

Maybe you want to contact the Administrator as it seems that the Videos section is under construction and they might be planning to put all of Sam’s videos in there anyway.

Good luck, its a great idea.

I have accumulated over 30 public lectures, debates and interviews with Sam Harris from various online sources in the last couple of years.  I’m happy to share these, but I presently am living where I don’t have an internet connection (I have to go to a library to get internet access), so I don’t have a good way to send or upload these en masse.

Gcheng, if you or anyone else has the patience, I can e-mail or post these onlline one at a time over many days if you have the patience to wait.  Once someone with better internet access has them, they can arrange to make them available to all by some better means,  such as torrents.

Ozymandias, yes, this would be great.  I’m in no rush.  Are these videos decently high-quality?  (I’ve tried using utilities to save videos from YouTube but the quality was terrible.)

Do you have a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM burner?  If your internet access is through a public library, it might be painful for you to upload these videos one at a time.

Thanks for responding.

Ozymandias - 20 May 2009 09:42 AM

Gcheng, if you or anyone else has the patience, I can e-mail or post these onlline one at a time over many days if you have the patience to wait.