LA Times Oped piece by liberal Sam Harris, round two

[Lyion]

Sorry, this thread was somehow deleted when it was moved between two forums. Reposting.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printeditio ... s18sep18,0 ,622365.story

TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.


This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

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.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

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.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

[Hound]

Bummer. Well, I'll post my reply to your last reply anyway, so you can rip it to shreds devoid of its prior context:

To frame it only in terms of 'ends justify means' is to oversimplify the matter.

Utilitarianism has its shortcomings, no question there. But it has evolved as an idea -- from 'greatest good for the greatest number' to
'greatest happiness principle'. Granted it may be a long way from being philosophically ironclad, but I think this evolution is encouraging,
and there are people doing work in the field of secular ethics (not all of whom are pro-Utilitarian).

If everyone espoused a non-religious ethical system, would there be less suffering or unhappiness than there is right now?
I can't answer that, because I don't know. But I see evidence that the road the world is travelling right now is going to lead to a
pretty bad place, and one of Harris's points was that the majority of people seem to be ok with that, since it will foster in their
ideals of what awaits them after their earthly life is over.

[Lyion]

I agree with what you are saying, but the grass is always greener on the other side.

Where we see secular countries, we moreso see despair in a much broader fashion than we do in religious oriented societies. Stalinism is a great example of this.

Islam plays things differently, in that there is no compromise or basis for freedom of speech or compassion, as every other religion displays. This is moreso the foundation of this article, as it looks at the promoted violence of Muslim Nations and their desire for conquest.

This is a great example. Benedict quoted the 14th century Byzantine ruler Manuel II Paleologus

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the ‘Book’ and the ‘infidels’, he [Manuel II Paleologus] turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. ‘God’, he [the Byzantine ruler] says, ‘is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death’....

Just him quoting this in an intellectual discussion promoted... what else, violence. This is a horse of a different color.

Again, I think many broadly reference this article about religion, and not about the speficifity of what it covers. The author holds true to his liberal beliefs, but recognizes the truth for what it is.

[Zanchief]

So you believe there is no hope for morality without religion? Or you think it's only hopeless for your society? Some of this is taken from your comments that have since been cratered.

[mofish]

edit, I was pissed then saw the first sentence

Ill just restate what I said in my first reply to previous thread.

The author makes some good points. Sometimes I feel like the only Liberal left that doesnt apologize or attempt to misdirect focus for Islam and terrorism.

The way my liberal contemporaries hung Israel out to dry during this latest conflict with Hezbollah left me pretty disgusted.

[Tikker]

So what's the real point of this thread?

the author( a self proclaimed liberal) says that both left and right wing americans that are religious are semi nuts (shocking)

he claims liberals are soft on what the right wing calls terrorism (shocking)

Where we see secular countries, we moreso see despair in a much broader fashion than we do in religious oriented societies

quick, name 3 secular countries

[Lyion]

So you believe there is no hope for morality without religion? Or you think it's only hopeless for your society? Some of this is taken from your comments that have since been cratered.

I believe morality is due to applied behavior and education moreso than personal religion. Religion is something different, but our societies ethos and behavior I think are very much inherited from our religious history.

The issue the author raises are moreso what is acceptable from Muslims and the difference of opinion regarding the threat. That is what I find interesting. This is also very true of discussions I have, where the focus becomes the Republicans or something besides the basic, real threat which is downplayed wrongly, in my humble opinion.

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.


While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

[Zanchief]

You're assuming all or the majority of Liberals defend Muslims. Maybe the majority of the ones that wrote into him do, but some of us think all religion is a little wacky.

[Lyion]

I didn't write this article. A very well known L.A. Times writer did. I simply liked the article. What I do agree with and what he stated so eloquently is this. Do you disagree that many liberals do not see the danger of Islam, which in my opinion are greater than other religious 'nuts' to coin your own words?

my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

[Gidan]

I do have to agree that the data the author is using is bias. The sample of people that responded to his book is more then likely not an accurate sample of Liberals.

I consider myself a Liberal, though a fairly moderate one. I think that the Muslim radicals are completely nuts, though I also think the radicals of most religions are nuts.

[Zanchief]

Do you disagree that many liberals do not see the danger of Islam, which in my opinion are greater than other religious 'nuts' to coin your own words?

I said wacky not nutty.

I don't claim to know the general opinion of most Liberals, but I do know that most conservatives have a considerable amount to gain from making us afraid of the scary Muslims.

[Hound]

Stalinism was governmental secularism under communism. Has secularism been tried under capitalism?

Perhaps it is true that a capitalist nation that did so would turn out to have the same levels of despair as those
communist countries did, but is there evidence to that effect? I'm just curious.

And for clarification, according to his Wikipedia entry, Harris doesn't solely target Islam.

Harris's basic theme is that he considers the time has come to speak openly and unambiguously about what he sees as the dangers posed to society by religious belief. While highlighting what he regards as a particular problem being posed by Islam at this moment in respect of international terrorism, Harris has made an outspoken attack on religion of all styles and persuasions. He is especially critical of the stance of religious moderation, which he sees as essentially providing cover to religious extremism, while at the same time acting as an obstacle to progress in terms of pursuing what he considers to be more enlightened approaches towards spirituality and ethics.

[Evermore]

Do you disagree that many liberals do not see the danger of Islam, which in my opinion are greater than other religious 'nuts' to coin your own words?

I said wacky not nutty.

I don't claim to know the general opinion of most Liberals, but I do know that most conservatives have a considerable amount to gain from making us afraid of the scary Muslims.

this is true. removal of personal freedoms is one of these

[Eziekial]

Why is that true? What does removal of personal freedom have to do with most conservatives? I would argue that most conservatives want to maintain their current level of personal freedoms if not advance them.. ie no gun control, lower taxes, etc....

[Evermore]

Why is that true? What does removal of personal freedom have to do with most conservatives? I would argue that most conservatives want to maintain their current level of personal freedoms if not advance them.. ie no gun control, lower taxes, etc....

Here is a example:

Church to Fight IRS Demand for Documents
Friday, September 22, 2006 6:48 AM EDT
The Associated Press
By GILLIAN FLACCUS

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — A liberal church that has been threatened with the loss of its tax-exempt status over an anti-war sermon delivered just days before the 2004 presidential election said Thursday it will fight an IRS order to turn over documents on the matter.
"We're going to put it in their court and in a court of law so that we can get an adjudication to some very fundamental issue here that we see as an intolerable infringement of rights," Bob Long, senior warden of All Saints Church, told The Associated Press.
He said the church's 26-member vestry voted unanimously to resist IRS demands for documents and an interview with the congregation's rector by the end of the month.
The church's action sets up a high-profile confrontation between the church and the IRS, which now must decide whether to ask for a hearing before a judge, who would then decide on the validity of the agency's demands.
IRS spokesman Terry Lemons would not comment specifically on the dispute but noted in a statement that the agency could take a church to court.
"We recognize the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and religion," Lemons said. "But there is no constitutional right to be exempt from federal taxation."
Religious leaders on the right and left have expressed fear that the dispute could make it more difficult for them to speak out on moral issues such as gay marriage and abortion during the midterm election campaign.
At a news conference Thursday, church officials were flanked by about 40 representatives of mosques, synagogues and other churches.
"We smell intimidation, it smells rotten, and we should not allow any aspect of intimidation to be directed to any member of our great country," said Maher Hathout, senior adviser of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
Under federal tax law, church officials can legally discuss politics, but to retain tax-exempt status, they cannot endorse candidates or parties.
The dispute at the 3,500-member Episcopal church centers on a sermon titled "If Jesus Debated Senator Kerry and President Bush," delivered by a guest pastor. Though he did not endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would condemn the Iraq war and Bush's doctrine of pre-emptive war.


Seperation of Church and State? Freedom of Speech?