Five Before Chaos

I was digging around yesterday and found a new op-ed by Sam Harris in the LA Times, called, ‘Head-in-the-Sand-Liberals’. Sam, after laying out his bona fide liberal creds, lays out his case for how liberals by and large don’t get how dangerous Muslim extremism really is.

“Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.”

“In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.”

He also take a dig at 9-11 conspiracy theorists, too. Now, what I do love about Sam Harris is his constant recurring theme that we need to take the gloves off and start criticizing religion as we would anything else in our society, and point out its absurdities. I’m 110% behind that. However, one of the things in The End of Faith that I found so unsettling was the idea that somehow Harris thinks that obliterating Muslim extremism through military might is somehow an option. When he gets going on Muslim extremism, sadly, a lot of his rhetoric sounds like Bushspeak, giving the U.S. and Israel a free pass - “we don’t intentionally murder noncombatants”. A quick glance at the news will expose that as a crock of shit. Granted, we don’t do the ‘human shield’ thing, but we don’t seem to have a problem bombing those human shields, either. So much for not intentionally murdering noncombatants.

I’d like to point you to two criticisms of Harris’ latest screed, the first from RJ Escow, called ‘The Sad State of Atheism Today’. Now, Escow is no atheist. He takes on Harris for ignoring data:

“I met Sam when we both participated in a group seminar on faith and progressive politics. He seemed pleasant enough, but when I cited the exhaustive works of research that have been conducted on fundamentalism in Islam and other religions he pointedly refused either to discuss them - or even to express willingness to look at them.

How can anyone argue for the virtue of knowledge and reason over faith and emotion, yet refuse to either examine the data or subject one’s own arguments to logical challenge?

Specifically, Harris would not acknowledge the research of Martin E. Marty and the Fundamentalism Project, whose complex multidisciplinary study found several intriguing patterns in the distribution of fundamentalism throughout all faiths.

Among the Project’s findings was the discovery that fundamentalists, who average roughly 20% of any major faith today, all seek to acquire power using similar techniques and belief systems. Their beliefs share much more in common with fundamentalists of other faiths than they do with their co-religionists, a finding that challenges the notion that Islam is an especially evil religion.

This finding challenges an assumption that is deeply cherished by Harris and his ilk, and equally beloved by Bauer and the Christian Right: that Muslims are more extremist than other people. That makes great fodder for recruiting wavering Christians to atheism, or convincing Americans who question the Iraq invasion that we’re at war with a world of “Islamofascists.”

He accuses Harris, as well as Richard Dawkins, of promoting a form of ‘Evangelical Atheism’. Now, when I hear Harris or Dawkins get up on thier soapbox in regards to thier strong support of science and the insane irrationalities that being religious entails, I tend to agree with them strongly, and often find myself taking that same approach. But I don’t think that approach wins over too many people on the fence.

Over at Huff Post, Air America radio host Marty Kaplan also takes on Sam with his ‘Atheists for Cheney’. His is more the criticism of how Harris’ dissing of liberals feeds right into the RNC talking points. I tend to agree.

I present this all in the interest of fairness. I still admire Sam Harris, but I don’t quite agree with his take on Muslims, it has always hinted at stereotyping. One of Sam’s points in the End of Faith was that religious moderation can be as harmful in many ways as extremism. I agree with that, I just don’t agree with his premise that somehow Muslim extremism represents the majority of Muslims, because whether that’s his premise or not, it’s how it’s coming off.

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