Thinker: Sam Harris

[raygun]

A crucial participant in the worthwhile, ongoing discussions about the value of reason and rigorous inquiry in the 21st Century?

A mountebank, intentionally misrepresenting political and social conflicts as religious ones in order to gain leverage for a xenophobic world view?

A detractor, who, on a hobby horse of irrational beliefs is diluting a movement which ought to unceremoniously reject anything which lends credence to any variety of religious experience?

The George Clooney of New Atheism?

You pick. The question is simple: Sam Harris: Crap, or Not Crap?

As far as antecedents, there is a C/NC poll on one of his books, The Moral Landscape, but there is a broader discussion to be had, and I'm keen to have it.

[dabrasha]

Tried to read "The End of Faith" and couldn't get anywhere. Maybe his other books have something. That one didn't.

[OrthodoxEaster]

Aw, fucking hell. I was hoping the poll was gonna about THIS Sam Harris, the pig-nosed white guy who released the oh-so-'80s single "Sugar Don't Bite" on Motown:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPf0jCF1wHQ

Love those moves. Enjoy coke!

[omh]

First of all, I should note that I have only read The End of Faith and a number of his articles. It may be that his other books redeem him, though I'm doubtful.

As addressing everything I dislike about his work that I've read would take many posts, I have focused just on his anti-Islam writings, of which there is a great deal, because Sam Harris like many in these times is obsessed with Muslims.

So, with apologies in advance for this very long post...

With regard to the hypothetical scenario of an 'Islamist' (whatever that means) regime acquiring nuclear weapons,

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.

He goes on to say:

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime [that is, dropping a nuclear bomb on a country without provocation - omh]—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

(From 'The End of Faith', pp. 128/129)

So let's be clear on this. Mr. Harris asserts here that dropping a nuclear bomb may be (note 'may'--let it never be said that he is a rash man) the 'only' course of action. And this course of action would be the result, not of what Islamists do, or have done, but what they 'believe'. Their beliefs make them eligible for extermination, according to Sam Harris.

There is a reason why Sam Harris is quite willing to make this suggestion. The reason being, I think, that he has already dehumanised Muslims sufficiently that to his mind there can be no reasoning with them--were they to get hold of a nuclear weapon they would be bound to use it, and so, according to Sam Harris, we must kill them all first.

Sam Harris informs us in an article called Head-in-the-Sand Liberals - Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists (published in the Los Angeles Times, 2006), that:

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world

A cult. Of death.

From his article titled The Reality of Islam:

The truth about Islam is as politically incorrect as it is terrifying: Islam is all fringe and no center. In Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside.  But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism. In confronting the religious literalism and ignorance of the Muslim world, we must appreciate how terrifyingly isolated Muslims have become in intellectual terms.

If the Muslim world wasn't 'utterly deranged', you see, invading their countries, destroying their infrastructure, slaughtering thousands of civilians, and installing new governments would have worked a charm.

Indeed, the Muslim situation has gotten so bad, Sam Harris tells us gravely, that:

Political correctness and fears of racism have rendered many secular Europeans incapable of opposing the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst.

If only I wasn't so politically correct I would strike at the heart of the sinister Islamification of Europe!

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe.  The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow.

Not only are the servile liberals welcoming with open arms this horde of barbarians into our homes, but they're breeding like rats, too. Sam Harris is warning us--soon we'll all be Muslims. My Daily Mail is surely quivering in my hands.

Fortunately for Sam Harris, not all hope is lost. There are people on his side, who really understand the immense danger that Muslims pose to civilisation:

The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

(LA Times, 2006)
It's okay, Sam Harris, the British National Party and English Defence League have got your back on this.

On the question of the Muslim community centre proposed two blocks from 'ground zero' (The Mosque), Sam Harris has these wise words:

Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself

You see, what politically correct head-in-the-sand liberals don't understand about Islam (though Sam Harris understands it, oh yes) is that:

When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith.

Of course, if we were to ignore the actual practice of faith and its context, and if we were to selectively read their holy books, and 'consult jurists' of their respective religious laws, many other religions would leave us with much the same impression. The crucial difference is, if you remember, that other faiths are not 'utterly deranged' like the Muslim world is. There is no context to the Muslim's actions, no independent reasoning. The Muslim is a slave to the letter of their holy book, the one true interpretation of which Sam Harris has provided for us, but we, having our heads in the sand, cannot see the truth.

Ultimately, Sam Harris says:

The claim that the events of September 11, 2001, had “nothing to do with Islam” is an abject and destabilizing lie. This murder of 3,000 innocents was viewed as a victory for the One True Faith by millions of Muslims throughout the world (even, idiotically, by those who think it was perpetrated by the Mossad). And the erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory—and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.

A community centre is not merely a community centre when Muslims are behind it. Their actions do not represent themselves, but are riding the surf of a tidal wave of Muslim villainy. Not one of them is innocent, Sam Harris makes clear.

Like Hitchens and others, Harris claims that he is not 'allowed' to criticise Islam or even religion in general. He claims that it is a taboo. Apparently, despite writing best-selling books, despite participating in talks and debates across the world, despite being embraced by the media and academia, despite making a substantial amount of money from his attacks on religion and Islam in particular, he is, in fact, censored and persecuted for his views.

Despite the fact that Sam Harris is participating in what is currently perhaps one of the most vicious and popular forms of bigotry, he should in fact be considered a courageous warrior for freedom and Enlightenment 2.0.

In any case, he admonishes us:

Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as “racist” or as a symptom of “Islamophobia” display a nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world.

(From the article Response to Controversy)

I could go on and on, but maybe I've gone on too long already...

[warmowski]

A greasy little war pimp. A farmer of fear and hatred. The intellectual heir to the 11th century's Pope Urban II. Would not piss in mouth if teeth were on fire.

Other than that, he's okay.

-r

[warmowski]

A greasy little war pimp. A farmer of fear and hatred. The intellectual heir to the 11th century's Pope Urban II. Would not piss in his mouth if teeth were on fire.

Other than that, he's okay.

-r

[jimmy two hands]

Total prick. Writes numerous books and articles advocating torture, then when someone calls him out on it, claims he never advocated torture. Unable to separate a religion from those who follow it. Fuck this guy. Actually, don't fuck this guy, because he doesn't deserve pleasure.

[Rickylad]

I think you guys, or rather most of you, have completely missed Harris many points. To say he isnt maligned for his views - his rational, scientific and yes, moral views- is just flat out wrong.
I am sure he has had some many from his work (and why, one is tempted to ask, might that be a problem) but his books and those like them are a drop in the ocean compared to the books published, and sold, in the tens of millions that instill division, morality, willful ignorance and even racism. And this, try as many have to leapfrog around it being such, is a brute fact. Again, if one is being honest.

And that is all that Harris is trying to convey, that there are people (and I use the term loosely) who get away with pretending to know things they absolutely cannot know, they do this to both their detrement and to those around them. The most Harris has ever advocated is a conversational intolerance of the sort we employ in all other avenues of discourse, nothing more. He has, as someone mentioned, stated the well known fact of the matter that conflicts have and will be fought on, what is at base, a war of ideas. He, and I join him in this after having read and understood his work ( and failing as I do to fathom someone could not, save for the other irrational beliefs I spoke of earlier) has never advocated violence to another people. He has, objectively at that, pointed out how beggardly and cruel some of their practices are, and asked us - again rationally - to criticize them (just as we would a mad man who thought that saying Latin words over his pancakes turns them into the body of Elvis Presley, literally) in the hopes that they might abate.
First strikes however, as someone extruded from a baseless start above, are, painfully obviously, wholly on the behalf of the Holy.
My two cents. Cheers guys.

[raygun]

Not at all what I was expecting. Greasy?

With regard to the hypothetical scenario of an 'Islamist' (whatever that means) regime acquiring nuclear weapons,

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.

He goes on to say:

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime [that is, dropping a nuclear bomb on a country without provocation - omh]—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe.

(From 'The End of Faith', pp. 128/129)

I'm not up to defending that. I don't recall the preceding pages, but I'm not sure what they'd have to contain for me to think that your quotation was an observation worth recording in a book.

So let's be clear on this. Mr. Harris asserts here that dropping a nuclear bomb may be (note 'may'--let it never be said that he is a rash man) the 'only' course of action. And this course of action would be the result, not of what Islamists do, or have done, but what they 'believe'. Their beliefs make them eligible for extermination, according to Sam Harris.

Sam Harris has repeatedly described Islam as a religion, which, at its core, reveres values incompatible with those a civilization seeking to promote well-being. More specifically, and here, maybe more saliently, he's described its theology as implying political eventualities we ought not to ignore, as long as people are taking this religion seriously. The endgame of Islam, as articulated in the Koran makes very specific its desire for a monoculture - a victory - in which the remaining apostates buy their right to survive through a tax on existence. There's room here for a long list of what Islamists have done, but the argument - that what they believe is sufficiently corrosive to constitute a tangible threat - is the basis for this writing. Given even that, the implication that these beliefs, taken seriously, warrant "extermination", is a conclusion which exists only in the paragraph you wrote.

The Sam Harris quote was written in the subjunctive, and is explicitly talking about doing. We wouldn't be having this discussion - and would not exist - if belief was the only prerequisite for the acquisition of atomic weapons. He's talking about an awful lot of doing.

There is a reason why Sam Harris is quite willing to make this suggestion. The reason being, I think, that he has already dehumanised Muslims sufficiently that to his mind there can be no reasoning with them--were they to get hold of a nuclear weapon they would be bound to use it, and so, according to Sam Harris, we must kill them all first.

Conjecture followed by caricature. Surprisingly, there do exist people who take Islam seriously, to a degree where it might affect the clothes they wear, or the kinds of foods they eat, and when - with whom it is still possible, on a constrained number of topics, to reason. This can't be said of the kind of Muslims Sam Harris is talking about. I'd rather reason with a rabid terrier in an alley.

This opinion is not the result of dehumanization on my part, or I'd venture, on the author's. My parents' marriage was consented to by a cleric in a Mosque (my Jewish mother reciting passages from the Koran), I have a Muslim name, have lived in a Muslim theocracy, visited many others, and in general have dealt, and continue to, with (apparent, and declared) Muslims with an open mind. Platitudes, sure, but I'm not sure what else would convince you that I'm not motivated by blind hatred.

As for radical Muslims, they've spared us the effort by stripping themselves of their humanity.

Sam Harris informs us in an article called Head-in-the-Sand Liberals - Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists (published in the Los Angeles Times, 2006), that:

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world

A cult. Of death.

From his article titled The Reality of Islam:

The truth about Islam is as politically incorrect as it is terrifying: Islam is all fringe and no center. In Islam, we confront a civilization with an arrested history. It is as though a portal in time has opened, and the Christians of the 14th century are pouring into our world.

It now appears to be a truism in foreign policy circles that real reform in the Muslim world cannot be imposed from the outside.  But it is important to recognize why this is so—it is so because the Muslim world is utterly deranged by its religious tribalism. In confronting the religious literalism and ignorance of the Muslim world, we must appreciate how terrifyingly isolated Muslims have become in intellectual terms.

If the Muslim world wasn't 'utterly deranged', you see, invading their countries, destroying their infrastructure, slaughtering thousands of civilians, and installing new governments would have worked a charm.

Indeed, the Muslim situation has gotten so bad, Sam Harris tells us gravely, that:

Political correctness and fears of racism have rendered many secular Europeans incapable of opposing the terrifying religious commitments of the extremists in their midst.

If only I wasn't so politically correct I would strike at the heart of the sinister Islamification of Europe!

I'm not sure you'd strike at its heart, but you might be a little more concerned.

'07 Policy Exchange poll of UK Muslims, as reported by BBC, and just about every major newspaper:
- "37% of 16 to 24-year-olds would prefer living under Sharia law than British law"
- "74% of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer Muslim women to choose to wear the hijab"
- "13% of 16 to 24-year-olds admire organisations like al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West"

According to the Office for National Statistics in '03, "18.2% [of Muslims in the UK] are aged 16-24" (as expostulated by The Muslim Council of Britain). The prevailing estimates of that year, and the previous one, in terms of the number of Muslims in the UK centered around 1.8 million. A multiplication gets us to 327,745 Muslims between 16-24 as of seven years ago. More than 120,000 admit a preference for a legal system which penalizes homosexuality (perhaps by death), forbids the application of forensic science, and rewards apostasy, unless you read with one of your eyes closed, with death. 240,000 of these (and this phrase requires a couple of seconds to parse) would "prefer Muslim women to choose" to wear sackcloths. That's the society they'd like to realize. That's their most articulate expression of their thoughts on the promotion of healthiness and civility. Hey, I've got a spare room.

As for the 42,600 who support militant activity against the culture they inhabit (electively, in an large number of cases), I don't think there is much to be said.

"46% percent of young British Pakistanis and 48% per cent of young British Indians want four or more children, compared to just 19% per cent of white people". Let's see how these numbers look in a couple of years.

If we move a little further afield, to, let's say, Turkey (still negotiating EU membership?) - in '07, 8% of survey participants indicated support for militant action against Western civilians (World Public Opinion). A further (thoughtful) 10% expressed "mixed feelings" on the topic of killing non-combatants. This was a public opinion poll which did not take religious beliefs into account when selecting participants, in a country where men have a 95% literacy rate (78% for women). We're talking about 14,000,000 people who are either in favour of, or not entirely sure of their position on the killing of western civilians (literacy and population figures taken from the CIA World Factbook). How do you think these fourteen million people convened at this edge of the spectrum of opinion? Soul-cleaving economic oppression? A lack of access to information?

(I've endeavoured to be punctilious, but the figures were collected by different agencies, occasionally with several years intervening between studies. They are far from exact, but correct, I'd say, within a tolerable margin of error.)

Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe.  The demographic trends are ominous: Given current birthrates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years, and that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow.

Not only are the servile liberals welcoming with open arms this horde of barbarians into our homes, but they're breeding like rats, too. Sam Harris is warning us--soon we'll all be Muslims. My Daily Mail is surely quivering in my hands.

Your following paragraph about the BNP was devoid of content.

[url]
On the question of the Muslim community centre proposed two blocks from 'ground zero' (The Mosque), Sam Harris has these wise words:

Should a 15-story mosque and Islamic cultural center be built two blocks from the site of the worst jihadist atrocity in living memory? Put this way, the question nearly answers itself

You see, what politically correct head-in-the-sand liberals don't understand about Islam (though Sam Harris understands it, oh yes) is that:

When one reads the Koran and the hadith, and consults the opinions of Muslim jurists over the centuries, one discovers that killing apostates, treating women like livestock, and waging jihad—not merely as an inner, spiritual struggle but as holy war against infidels—are practices that are central to the faith.

Of course, if we were to ignore the actual practice of faith and its context, and if we were to selectively read their holy books, and 'consult jurists' of their respective religious laws, many other religions would leave us with much the same impression. The crucial difference is, if you remember, that other faiths are not 'utterly deranged' like the Muslim world is. There is no context to the Muslim's actions, no independent reasoning. The Muslim is a slave to the letter of their holy book, the one true interpretation of which Sam Harris has provided for us, but we, having our heads in the sand, cannot see the truth.

Ultimately, Sam Harris says:

The claim that the events of September 11, 2001, had “nothing to do with Islam” is an abject and destabilizing lie. This murder of 3,000 innocents was viewed as a victory for the One True Faith by millions of Muslims throughout the world (even, idiotically, by those who think it was perpetrated by the Mossad). And the erection of a mosque upon the ashes of this atrocity will also be viewed by many millions of Muslims as a victory—and as a sign that the liberal values of the West are synonymous with decadence and cowardice.

A community centre is not merely a community centre when Muslims are behind it. Their actions do not represent themselves, but are riding the surf of a tidal wave of Muslim villainy. Not one of them is innocent, Sam Harris makes clear.

Like Hitchens and others, Harris claims that he is not 'allowed' to criticise Islam or even religion in general. He claims that it is a taboo. Apparently, despite writing best-selling books, despite participating in talks and debates across the world, despite being embraced by the media and academia, despite making a substantial amount of money from his attacks on religion and Islam in particular, he is, in fact, censored and persecuted for his views.

I've no major objection to the Harris quotes, though the quotation marks dried up when you approached the ridiculous claim that Harris has spoken or written anything even hinting at feelings of persecution.

Despite the fact that Sam Harris is participating in what is currently perhaps one of the most vicious and popular forms of bigotry, he should in fact be considered a courageous warrior for freedom and Enlightenment 2.0.

In any case, he admonishes us:

Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as “racist” or as a symptom of “Islamophobia” display a nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world.

(From the article Response to Controversy)

I could go on and on, but maybe I've gone on too long already...

Keep going. You're awesome for reading the book.

In any case, that particular quote is admittedly a non-sequitur. The people he's describing display wilful ignorance and faceted insensitivities, but the lampooning of Islamic criticism as veiled racism or xenophobia (as effective a means of ending an argument as exists) has nothing specifically to do with the treatment of women in Islam.

I think Sam Harris is a man of integrity, who is, in his own words, genuinely worried. I'll forgive intentionally jarring invective like "death cult" in the service of communicating a manifest anxiety.

I've lived, as I said, in a Muslim theocracy, and visited others. I know what a country feels like when Sharia law is in place. In Riyadh, there was, and is a public square - Deera Square - where shoplifters had hands amputated, and homosexuals, practitioners of Witchraft, unrepentant drug users and adulterers were beheaded, and still are. Chop-chop square, my father told me, was the translation of the square's nickname (Google bears this out). We were friendly with the royal family, and many of them viewed attendance at the square not only as a form of social obligation, but of entertainment.

I've not been blinded by atrocity. I never saw someone get his anything cut off. If I went out, it was to eat in gender-segregated Taco Bell or Burger King franchises (I once accidentally asked for a Bacon Double Cheeseburger. Luckily, the cashier was from the Philippines, and smiled condescendingly). The rest of the time, I was in an air conditioned house, watching pirated Betamax cassettes of Fried Green Tomatoes and Kimba The White Lion, filmed shakily in movie theaters populated exclusively by men.

I have, though, moved around enough to know what kind of society I'd like to live in, and I'm not sure how compatible my ideas are with those of an unfortunate number of my neighbours.

[raygun]

This debate between Sam Harris and Reza Aslan is likely the one in which the criticisms levied above (against Sam Harris) are most explicitly articulated. It's worth watching. My opinion of the coherence of Reza Aslan was much greater, for whatever reason, after I watched the debate for the second time. He does a pretty good job.

[omh]

Firstly, thank you for the lengthy and detailed reply. I hope you're feeling ok now.

Sam Harris has repeatedly described Islam as a religion, which, at its core, reveres values incompatible with those a civilization seeking to promote well-being. More specifically, and here, maybe more saliently, he's described its theology as implying political eventualities we ought not to ignore, as long as people are taking this religion seriously. The endgame of Islam, as articulated in the Koran makes very specific its desire for a monoculture - a victory - in which the remaining apostates buy their right to survive through a tax on existence. There's room here for a long list of what Islamists have done, but the argument - that what they believe is sufficiently corrosive to constitute a tangible threat - is the basis for this writing.

And that's precisely what I object to. Talking of the 'endgame' of Islam seems absurd to me. It denies millions of people their own agency, their own interpretations, their own reason. 'Islam' has no endgame. Whatever is written in the Koran may well be mad nonsense--I've never read it. What's written all over the place in all sorts of texts is nonsense, so it would be no great surprise. What's the endgame in the Bible? Not a barrel of laughs, were it to come to pass, I imagine. Whores of Babylon straddling the Euphrates or something. Anyway, the characterisation of Islam as a concrete, unchanging monolith divorces it wholesale from reality. Hardline Christians and various other religious followers have some pretty crazy desires, and dictatorships are frequently not very nice. Am I to believe that there is really some intrinsic quality in Islam that gives it this particular malevolence? I could cite many countries that are (or were, in the case of historical examples) every bit as horrific as any Muslim country and often far more so. What does that tell us, really?

Is is not far too reductive to call it a problem of religion (well, Islam) and leave it at that?

Given even that, the implication that these beliefs, taken seriously, warrant "extermination", is a conclusion which exists only in the paragraph you wrote.

I may be guilty of exaggerating, but Harris is quite clear that he believes a pre-emptive (as despicable a word as that is) nuclear strike against a so-called Islamist state may be necessary. This is a conclusion he appears to have drawn, not from actions of Islamist states (who, let's be clear, seem to possess no more of a tendency towards unprovoked attacks than many non-Muslim states I might care to mention), but from what he believes about their beliefs. That, and that alone, justifies in his mind the mass murder of countless innocent people. I can't see how else to interpret his words on that one.

The Sam Harris quote was written in the subjunctive, and is explicitly talking about doing. We wouldn't be having this discussion - and would not exist - if belief was the only prerequisite for the acquisition of atomic weapons. He's talking about an awful lot of doing

I don't believe even that. However, I understood Harris to be discussing a hypothetical situation where an Islamist state had already acquired nuclear weapons.

There is a reason why Sam Harris is quite willing to make this suggestion. The reason being, I think, that he has already dehumanised Muslims sufficiently that to his mind there can be no reasoning with them--were they to get hold of a nuclear weapon they would be bound to use it, and so, according to Sam Harris, we must kill them all first.

Conjecture followed by caricature. Surprisingly, there do exist people who take Islam seriously, to a degree where it might affect the clothes they wear, or the kinds of foods they eat, and when - with whom it is still possible, on a constrained number of topics, to reason. This can't be said of the kind of Muslims Sam Harris is talking about. I'd rather reason with a rabid terrier in an alley.

What is the 'kind' of Muslim he is talking about, though? He routinely just says 'Muslims', or 'Islam', or the 'Muslim world'. Yeah, it was caricature on my part, but I think Harris' analysis of religion in general, and Islam in particular is so superficial that it can't help but dehumanise its followers.

This opinion is not the result of dehumanization on my part, or I'd venture, on the author's. My parents' marriage was consented to by a cleric in a Mosque (my Jewish mother reciting passages from the Koran), I have a Muslim name, have lived in a Muslim theocracy, visited many others, and in general have dealt, and continue to, with (apparent, and declared) Muslims with an open mind. Platitudes, sure, but I'm not sure what else would convince you that I'm not motivated by blind hatred.

You've given me no reason whatsoever to believe that you are motivated by blind hatred, and nor, even, has Sam Harris, as much as I dislike him.

As for radical Muslims, they've spared us the effort by stripping themselves of their humanity.

No one can do that.

I'm not sure you'd strike at its heart, but you might be a little more concerned.

'07 Policy Exchange poll of UK Muslims, as reported by BBC, and just about every major newspaper:
- "37% of 16 to 24-year-olds would prefer living under Sharia law than British law"
- "74% of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer Muslim women to choose to wear the hijab"
- "13% of 16 to 24-year-olds admire organisations like al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West"

I'd just like to note that the Policy Exchange study was of about 1000 people in total, and that 1000 was comprised of all age-groups, so when they say '37%', or whatever, they mean '37% of an utterly trivial number'.

I have to admit, I'm still not worried.

According to the Office for National Statistics in '03, "18.2% [of Muslims in the UK] are aged 16-24" (as expostulated by The Muslim Council of Britain). The prevailing estimates of that year, and the previous one, in terms of the number of Muslims in the UK centered around 1.8 million. A multiplication gets us to 327,745 Muslims between 16-24 as of seven years ago. More than 120,000 admit a preference for a legal system which penalizes homosexuality (perhaps by death), forbids the application of forensic science, and rewards apostasy, unless you read with one of your eyes closed, with death. 240,000 of these (and this phrase requires a couple of seconds to parse) would "prefer Muslim women to choose" to wear sackcloths. That's the society they'd like to realize. That's their most articulate expression of their thoughts on the promotion of healthiness and civility. Hey, I've got a spare room.

120,000 have admitted no such thing. Unless you are referring to a different study but just haven't cited it.

In any case, I suspect we could find plenty of worrying views among young people in general. At 16 I was a complete idiot. Would it be unreasonable to speculate that, perhaps, these young Muslims might identify with an 'extreme' religious/political ideology because they feel unrepresented by the wider society in which they live? That their anger at the foreign policy of the West leads to a view that the enemy of their enemy is their friend? If so, would that identification (by no means permanent, let's remember) be all that dissimilar to Sam Harris when he talks about anti-Islam sentiment among fascists, or Richard Dawkins when he posts things like this:

"46% percent of young British Pakistanis and 48% per cent of young British Indians want four or more children, compared to just 19% per cent of white people". Let's see how these numbers look in a couple of years.

We'll be overrun by Hindus?

If we move a little further afield, to, let's say, Turkey (still negotiating EU membership?) - in '07, 8% of survey participants indicated support for militant action against Western civilians (World Public Opinion). A further (thoughtful) 10% expressed "mixed feelings" on the topic of killing non-combatants. This was a public opinion poll which did not take religious beliefs into account when selecting participants, in a country where men have a 95% literacy rate (78% for women). We're talking about 14,000,000 people who are either in favour of, or not entirely sure of their position on the killing of western civilians (literacy and population figures taken from the CIA World Factbook).

How do you think these fourteen million people convened at this edge of the spectrum of opinion? Soul-cleaving economic oppression? A lack of access to information?

Well, I have absolutely no idea. I would imagine, if I really had to guess, that there would be a wide variety of reasons. Considering that Western states are quite happy to kills countless civilians on the off-chance that a militant is around, I don't know that this minority of Muslims you reference are dramatically out of step with the rest of the world. Harris' writing is reasonably good on the subject of collateral damage, as it happens.

I've no major objection to the Harris quotes, though the quotation marks dried up when you approached the ridiculous claim that Harris has spoken or written anything even hinting at feelings of persecution.

I'll grant you that I exaggerated, but, despite the fact that criticism of Islam/Muslims is one of the favourite topics of the Western media, he does still seem to think that there is something stopping him from indulging in criticism.

While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society

When you say you've no major objection to the Harris quotes about the 'ground zero mosque' and so on, do you mean that you agree them? If so, I'd be interested to know why.

Despite the fact that Sam Harris is participating in what is currently perhaps one of the most vicious and popular forms of bigotry, he should in fact be considered a courageous warrior for freedom and Enlightenment 2.0.

In any case, he admonishes us:

Those who object to any attack upon the religion of Islam as “racist” or as a symptom of “Islamophobia” display a nauseating insensitivity to the subjugation of women throughout the Muslim world.

(From the article Response to Controversy)

I could go on and on, but maybe I've gone on too long already...

Keep going. You're awesome for reading the book.

Well, thanks! I used to be into this stuff. More the general anti-theism part than the anti-Islam part, but a bit of that as well. Prattling on about how religious people are all irrational and going on about 'logical fallacies' and all that. Feels like longer ago than it was.

In any case, that particular quote is admittedly a non-sequitur. The people he's describing display wilful ignorance and faceted insensitivities, but the lampooning of Islamic criticism as veiled racism or xenophobia (as effective a means of ending an argument as exists) has nothing specifically to do with the treatment of women in Islam.

Indeed, and his suggestion that it does is utterly pathetic.

I think Sam Harris is a man of integrity, who is, in his own words, genuinely worried. I'll forgive intentionally jarring invective like "death cult" in the service of communicating a manifest anxiety.

And yet it's such a popular anxiety that I wonder if his jarring invective is really necessary? Does he really need to shake us awake when our society is already rife with Islamophobic hatred and fear-mongering? Wouldn't a rather more measured analysis be a welcome relief in the present climate?

I've lived, as I said, in a Muslim theocracy, and visited others. I know what a country feels like when Sharia law is in place. In Riyadh, there was, and is a public square - Deera Square - where shoplifters had hands amputated, and homosexuals, practitioners of Witchraft, unrepentant drug users and adulterers were beheaded, and still are. Chop-chop square, my father told me, was the translation of the square's nickname (Google bears this out). We were friendly with the royal family, and many of them viewed attendance at the square not only as a form of social obligation, but of entertainment.

That sounds dreadful. I've never visited a theocracy of any sort. Is there a particularly baleful 'Muslim' quality to it, though? Is it a problem with Islam or a problem with oppressive, hate-filled dictatorship? Are the Muslim population content with their theocrats? It seems not, and yet many would have us believe that theocracy is their deepest desire. Are these 'theocrats' even really all that religious? I heard that members of the Saudi royal family aren't exactly models of Muslim piety. Aren't they just your average autocrats who use religion as a crude tool similar to nationalism in other places?

I have, though, moved around enough to know what kind of society I'd like to live in, and I'm not sure how compatible my ideas are with those of an unfortunate number of my neighbours.

Eh, I know how you feel. My neighbours are racists.

I may watch the debate you posted later.
All good fun.

Cheers.

[raygun]

Firstly, thank you for the lengthy and detailed reply. I hope you're feeling ok now.

Sam Harris has repeatedly described Islam as a religion, which, at its core, reveres values incompatible with those a civilization seeking to promote well-being. More specifically, and here, maybe more saliently, he's described its theology as implying political eventualities we ought not to ignore, as long as people are taking this religion seriously. The endgame of Islam, as articulated in the Koran makes very specific its desire for a monoculture - a victory - in which the remaining apostates buy their right to survive through a tax on existence. There's room here for a long list of what Islamists have done, but the argument - that what they believe is sufficiently corrosive to constitute a tangible threat - is the basis for this writing.

And that's precisely what I object to. Talking of the 'endgame' of Islam seems absurd to me. It denies millions of people their own agency, their own interpretations, their own reason. 'Islam' has no endgame. Whatever is written in the Koran may well be mad nonsense--I've never read it. What's written all over the place in all sorts of texts is nonsense, so it would be no great surprise. What's the endgame in the Bible? Not a barrel of laughs, were it to come to pass, I imagine. Whores of Babylon straddling the Euphrates or something. Anyway, the characterisation of Islam as a concrete, unchanging monolith divorces it wholesale from reality. Hardline Christians and various other religious followers have some pretty crazy desires, and dictatorships are frequently not very nice. Am I to believe that there is really some intrinsic quality in Islam that gives it this particular malevolence? I could cite many countries that are (or were, in the case of historical examples) every bit as horrific as any Muslim country and often far more so. What does that tell us, really?

Oh, sure, it's all ridiculous. And I'm sympathetic to the view that using a word like "endgame" - when we're essentially talking about the conclusion of a poor work of fiction - may come off as fatuous. The endgame of Christianity, if my tepid, Church of England boarding school theology lessons are still rattling around in my head, involves bottomless pits, eyes of flame and foreheads adorned with diadems.

It turns out, though, that there far fewer Christians intent on manifesting this conclusion that there are Muslims. Or, to the extent that there are, their efforts are more likely to consist of Evangelicals tilling fields in Israel on their Summer vacations, rather than flying aeroplanes into the sides of buildings.

As for the sentence "Am I to believe that there is really some intrinsic quality in Islam that gives it this particular malevolence" - yeah, absolutely. Maybe you ought to read that book.

Is is not far too reductive to call it a problem of religion (well, Islam) and leave it at that?

Is it reductive? Sure. What we're discussing is a confluence of a staggering number of factors, and there is no single word which would do them justice. Do I think that Islam is the worst word which could have been picked? No.

I'm not sure you'd strike at its heart, but you might be a little more concerned.

'07 Policy Exchange poll of UK Muslims, as reported by BBC, and just about every major newspaper:
- "37% of 16 to 24-year-olds would prefer living under Sharia law than British law"
- "74% of 16 to 24-year-olds prefer Muslim women to choose to wear the hijab"
- "13% of 16 to 24-year-olds admire organisations like al-Qaeda that are prepared to fight the West"

I'd just like to note that the Policy Exchange study was of about 1000 people in total, and that 1000 was comprised of all age-groups, so when they say '37%', or whatever, they mean '37% of an utterly trivial number'.

I have to admit, I'm still not worried.

I've more than a passing familiarity with statistics. If the sample were entirely random, what number of people would have to be asked the set of questions in order for it not to be utterly trivial, or rather, statistically insignificant?

According to the Office for National Statistics in '03, "18.2% [of Muslims in the UK] are aged 16-24" (as expostulated by The Muslim Council of Britain). The prevailing estimates of that year, and the previous one, in terms of the number of Muslims in the UK centered around 1.8 million. A multiplication gets us to 327,745 Muslims between 16-24 as of seven years ago. More than 120,000 admit a preference for a legal system which penalizes homosexuality (perhaps by death), forbids the application of forensic science, and rewards apostasy, unless you read with one of your eyes closed, with death. 240,000 of these (and this phrase requires a couple of seconds to parse) would "prefer Muslim women to choose" to wear sackcloths. That's the society they'd like to realize. That's their most articulate expression of their thoughts on the promotion of healthiness and civility. Hey, I've got a spare room.

120,000 have admitted no such thing. Unless you are referring to a different study but just haven't cited it.

The 120,000 amounts to the 37% of respondents who would prefer to live under Sharia law. "a legal system which penalizes homosexuality...forbids the application of forensic science, and rewards apostasy, unless you read with one of your eyes closed, with death" was my generous description of some of the implications of Sharia law, as it is currently practised throughout the world.

In any case, I suspect we could find plenty of worrying views among young people in general. At 16 I was a complete idiot. Would it be unreasonable to speculate that, perhaps, these young Muslims might identify with an 'extreme' religious/political ideology because they feel unrepresented by the wider society in which they live? That their anger at the foreign policy of the West leads to a view that the enemy of their enemy is their friend? If so, would that identification (by no means permanent, let's remember) be all that dissimilar to Sam Harris when he talks about anti-Islam sentiment among fascists

Sure, but we were lazy, complacent idiots. I listened to Jello Biafra's spoken word records and went to Anti-Capitalist rallies in a $900 trenchcoat my parents bought me, and I believed all kinds of completely nonsensical things which I hadn't thought through, but nothing like this.

I deeply understand your attempt to apologize for the people who hold these views, and to explain them away - as teenage angst - but I'm a little less understanding. An alarming number of people holding these kinds of views grow into adults who resort to communicating their conviction with explosives. I don't have an infinite reservoir of optimism or tolerance.

If we move a little further afield, to, let's say, Turkey (still negotiating EU membership?) - in '07, 8% of survey participants indicated support for militant action against Western civilians (World Public Opinion). A further (thoughtful) 10% expressed "mixed feelings" on the topic of killing non-combatants. This was a public opinion poll which did not take religious beliefs into account when selecting participants, in a country where men have a 95% literacy rate (78% for women). We're talking about 14,000,000 people who are either in favour of, or not entirely sure of their position on the killing of western civilians (literacy and population figures taken from the CIA World Factbook).

How do you think these fourteen million people convened at this edge of the spectrum of opinion? Soul-cleaving economic oppression? A lack of access to information?

Well, I have absolutely no idea. I would imagine, if I really had to guess, that there would be a wide variety of reasons. Considering that Western states are quite happy to kills countless civilians on the off-chance that a militant is around, I don't know that this minority of Muslims you reference are dramatically out of step with the rest of the world. Harris' writing is reasonably good on the subject of collateral damage, as it happens.

His writing is also pretty good on the topic of whether hatred, endorsement of indefensible acts and retaliatory violence are inevitable by-products of "collateral damage", dehumanization and sustained civil and economic oppression. It'll take you about 3 seconds of to come up with several instances where that absolutely has not been the case.

I've no major objection to the Harris quotes, though the quotation marks dried up when you approached the ridiculous claim that Harris has spoken or written anything even hinting at feelings of persecution.

I'll grant you that I exaggerated, but, despite the fact that criticism of Islam/Muslims is one of the favourite topics of the Western media, he does still seem to think that there is something stopping him from indulging in criticism.

While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam.

As Ayaan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society

When you say you've no major objection to the Harris quotes about the 'ground zero mosque' and so on, do you mean that you agree them? If so, I'd be interested to know why.

I find the objections to the mosque pious, theatrical and a little embarrassing - but it wasn't my country that got a couple of planes flown into it, so I'm willing to yield some ground.

I think Sam Harris is a man of integrity, who is, in his own words, genuinely worried. I'll forgive intentionally jarring invective like "death cult" in the service of communicating a manifest anxiety.

And yet it's such a popular anxiety that I wonder if his jarring invective is really necessary? Does he really need to shake us awake when our society is already rife with Islamophobic hatred and fear-mongering? Wouldn't a rather more measured analysis be a welcome relief in the present climate?

They're two words. I think, and I guess this is where we disagree, that his treatment of the topic has been incredibly considered and measured.

I do agree that even a well-intentioned, mostly fair critique of such an appalling situation is likely to provoke unhealthy reactions in certain types of readers, and that's a pretty complex ethical problem, particularly from the writer's perspective.

I've lived, as I said, in a Muslim theocracy, and visited others. I know what a country feels like when Sharia law is in place. In Riyadh, there was, and is a public square - Deera Square - where shoplifters had hands amputated, and homosexuals, practitioners of Witchraft, unrepentant drug users and adulterers were beheaded, and still are. Chop-chop square, my father told me, was the translation of the square's nickname (Google bears this out). We were friendly with the royal family, and many of them viewed attendance at the square not only as a form of social obligation, but of entertainment.

That sounds dreadful. I've never visited a theocracy of any sort. Is there a particularly baleful 'Muslim' quality to it, though?

That's a great question. Yes and no. The most memorable expressions of the religion struck me as so absurd that I can't use a word like "baleful" - for example, boxes of Barbie dolls in toy shops, where everything except the face had been enthusiastically blotted out with frenzied strokes of a Sharpie. We're talking about a photo of a doll of an imaginary woman, on the side of a toy box.

Or my mother removing the cassette inlay from my copy of Master of Puppets on the aeroplane when she saw that it was covered in crucifixes.

And there'd be Taco Bell shut-ins if you timed your meal so that it was interrupted by a call to prayer.

That's all cute and everything, but the heads of gay men were getting cut off around the corner.

That, and walking around with my mother covered head-to-toe in a sack - on one occasion, having obscenities shouted at her by religious police (a separate kind of police to the actual police) for having some of her blonde hair slip out of the bottom of the headscarf. Oh, and my parents not being able to kiss in the airport whenever we arrived to meet my father.

So yeah, maybe baleful.

Are these 'theocrats' even really all that religious? I heard that members of the Saudi royal family aren't exactly models of Muslim piety. Aren't they just your average autocrats who use religion as a crude tool similar to nationalism in other places

Yeah, that's a fair characterization, mostly - but whether these guys drank Johnny Walker and played craps in their free time (which isn't so far from the truth) - they got their yuks cutting the heads off of homosexuals and people who denounced Islam.

The debate is worth watching. I'd seen Sam Harris talk this stuff to death before I bought any of his books.

[stephen]

I have, though, moved around enough to know what kind of society I'd like to live in, and I'm not sure how compatible my ideas are with those of an unfortunate number of my neighbours.

Eh, I know how you feel. My neighbours are racists.

Aren't we all Darling. Racists I mean, if only we were honest of course. But we're not so we aren't, so there!

[raygun]

To separate the objections raised, from my intent when creating this thread: I didn't vote "Not Crap" because I think Sam Harris is a staggeringly eloquent critic of Islam. I answered the charges of hatred and scare-mongering as best I could - because they were raised unfairly, and because I don't really like the place that these kinds of criticisms tend to come from. His articulations of the threat of Islam, while valuable, can be found elsewhere. I voted Not Crap mostly for two reasons:

1) I think that the noises he's making on the relationship between science and morality ("The Moral Landscape") - and their consequences - are going to be of significant influence to our development, in the broadest possible sense.

2) I deeply respect his advocacy of mysticism, the possibility of self-transcendence, and his honesty about his use of psychedelic drugs and meditation (even, at one point, becoming a nominal bodyguard of the Dalai Lama) to, as he'd say "build his own telescope". Here's a two part lecture from AAI '07 - Lecture and Q & A. He completely knocks it out of the park in the last third of the lecture, and in his answer to Daniel Dennett's jab towards the end of the Q & A. The bit from the lecture is transcribed below, since you're lazy. You ought to read it before voting.

The last problem with atheism I'd like to talk about relates to the some of the experiences that lie at the core of many religious traditions, though perhaps not all, and which are testified to, with greater or lesser clarity in the world's "spiritual" and "mystical" literature.
Those of you who have read The End of Faith, know that I don't entirely line up with Dan, Richard, and Christopher in my treatment of these things. So I think I should take a little time to discuss this. While I always use terms like "spiritual" and "mystical" in scare quotes, and take some pains to denude them of metaphysics, the email I receive from my brothers and sisters in arms suggests that many of you find my interest in these topics problematic.

First, let me describe the general phenomenon I'm referring to. Here's what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he's healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from his search.

We've all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able.

If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us "So, what are you going to do next? Don't you have anything else in the pipeline?" Steve Jobs releases the IPhone, and I'm sure it wasn't twenty minutes before someone asked, "when are you going to make this thing smaller?" Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they've accomplished, say, "I'm done. I've met all my goals. Now I'm just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you."

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one's favorite food always available to be placed on one's tongue or having all one's friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one's desires get gratified, in spite of life's inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone's consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is "no." No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called "meditation" or "contemplation"—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here's the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn't contingent upon merely repeating one's pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he's probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn't say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone else's contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I'd like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person's life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don't know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, "not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose." But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as "atheists," tend to represent while advocating atheism. As "atheists" we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. I don't think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.

Not Crap.

[stephen]

To separate the objections raised, from my intent when creating this thread: I didn't vote "Not Crap" because I think Sam Harris is a staggeringly eloquent critic of Islam. I answered the charges of hatred and scare-mongering as best I could - because they were raised unfairly, and because I don't really like the place that these kinds of criticisms tend to come from. His articulations of the threat of Islam, while valuable, can be found elsewhere. I voted Not Crap mostly for two reasons:

1) I think that the noises he's making on the relationship between science and morality ("The Moral Landscape") - and their consequences - are going to be of significant influence to our development, in the broadest possible sense.

2) I deeply respect his advocacy of mysticism, the possibility of self-transcendence, and his honesty about his use of psychedelic drugs and meditation (even, at one point, becoming a nominal bodyguard of the Dalai Lama) to, as he'd say "build his own telescope". Here's a two part lecture from AAI '07 - Lecture and Q & A. He completely knocks it out of the park in the last third of the lecture, and in his answer to Daniel Dennett's jab towards the end of the Q & A. The bit from the lecture is transcribed below, since you're lazy. You ought to read it before voting.

The last problem with atheism I'd like to talk about relates to the some of the experiences that lie at the core of many religious traditions, though perhaps not all, and which are testified to, with greater or lesser clarity in the world's "spiritual" and "mystical" literature.
Those of you who have read The End of Faith, know that I don't entirely line up with Dan, Richard, and Christopher in my treatment of these things. So I think I should take a little time to discuss this. While I always use terms like "spiritual" and "mystical" in scare quotes, and take some pains to denude them of metaphysics, the email I receive from my brothers and sisters in arms suggests that many of you find my interest in these topics problematic.

First, let me describe the general phenomenon I'm referring to. Here's what happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he finds himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes that even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he's healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary relief from his search.

We've all noticed this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities, and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by their very nature, fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as often as we are able.

If we enjoy some great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or maybe a day, but then people will begin to ask us "So, what are you going to do next? Don't you have anything else in the pipeline?" Steve Jobs releases the IPhone, and I'm sure it wasn't twenty minutes before someone asked, "when are you going to make this thing smaller?" Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they've accomplished, say, "I'm done. I've met all my goals. Now I'm just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you."

Even when everything has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues, the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most gratifying and well-ordered life.

In this context, certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of happiness that is not dependent upon having one's favorite food always available to be placed on one's tongue or having all one's friends and loved ones within arm's reach, or having good books to read, or having something to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy before anything happens, before one's desires get gratified, in spite of life's inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical pain, old age, disease, and death?

This question, I think, lies at the periphery of everyone's consciousness. We are all, in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as though the answer is "no." No, there is nothing more profound that repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains; there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.

But certain people, for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called "meditation" or "contemplation"—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.

Such a person might even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here's the logic of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn't contingent upon merely repeating one's pleasures, then this happiness should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness should be available to a person who has renounced all her material possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.

One clue as to how daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of time alone in a box.

And yet, for thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people, whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion, deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having interesting and even normative experiences under the name of "spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.

Now let me just assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives, and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.

Leaving aside all the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we are having with ourselves.

Most us think that if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is, not able to censor himself in front of other people—he's probably mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn't say, what we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal. This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.

Of course, I am by no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning, moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.

From the point of view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.

But the problem with a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone else's contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools. Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a legitimate enterprise. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us to establish astronomy as a science.

To judge the empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments. This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that our culture knows much about.

One problem with atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible, not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.

As someone who has made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for 15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence, doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human happiness.

So, apart from just commending these phenomena to your attention, I'd like to point out that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person's life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents.

My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle. I don't know if our universe is, as JBS Haldane said, "not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose." But I am sure that it is stranger than we, as "atheists," tend to represent while advocating atheism. As "atheists" we give others, and even ourselves, the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.

We are faced, however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy tales. I don't think there is a more important intellectual struggle to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.

Not Crap.

This is hot:

"and many millions more have had glimmers of them, and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle, because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a person's life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest religious opponents."

And this is as hot as the fires in, well you all know where:

"My concern is that atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in certain possibilities in principle."

And if any are wondering, as they must be, yes that's right-n-proper, I am hot, very hot, I'm bleeding boiling girls, so come on.... I'm fucking burning!

[warmowski]

Apologies for cherry-picking. Time is short.

It turns out, though, that there far fewer Christians intent on manifesting this conclusion that there are Muslims. Or, to the extent that there are, their efforts are more likely to consist of Evangelicals tilling fields in Israel on their Summer vacations, rather than flying aeroplanes into the sides of buildings.

Really? So there are only 18 whack-job evangelicals in the world to worry about? That's a fuckin' relief.

Sure, but we were lazy, complacent idiots. I listened to Jello Biafra's spoken word records and went to Anti-Capitalist rallies in a $900 trenchcoat my parents bought me, and I believed all kinds of completely nonsensical things which I hadn't thought through, but nothing like this.

Let me contribute the observation that our embarrasment over and hatred of our younger, dumber selves will, if not tempered and fairly contextualized, propel us, as have gone millions before, into the ranks of the very worst kind of complacent, reactionary idiots. See: baby boomers, former Z Magazine readers, David Horowitz, Chris Hitchens, ad nauseam. It's a sad and common outcome, but I find it avoidable to the degree one can set aside fascination with one's own self.

That, and walking around with my mother covered head-to-toe in a sack - on one occasion, having obscenities shouted at her by religious police (a separate kind of police to the actual police) for having some of her blonde hair slip out of the bottom of the headscarf. Oh, and my parents not being able to kiss in the airport whenever we arrived to meet my father.

Of course we are disgusted by the mutaween. But why not awaken to the truth of the Saudi royal political establishment that specifically imposes this theocratic police state? Could it be because you use gasoline just like the rest of us, and uncomfortable memories of your $900 trenchcoat are keeping you from noticing the objective realities of that part of the world or from illustrating the dependencies thereof?

Why not contextualize Islam as an unreconstructed faith embedded in a monumentally repressive state that is directly and quite artifically supported by western energy demands and all the poilitical tensions that follow such a monstrously huge economic concentration? Why not consider that this quid pro quo with the west is what endlessly postpones a "vaticanization" of Mecca and drives both the repression and the terror response against it? Why not accept that any "Moral Landscape" is pathetically ill-defined by a group's extremists or its repressors?

-r

[dabrasha]

I deeply respect his advocacy of mysticism, the possibility of self-transcendence, and his honesty about his use of psychedelic drugs and meditation (even, at one point, becoming a nominal bodyguard of the Dalai Lama) to, as he'd say "build his own telescope".

This is where he loses me. He can drum up anecdotal historical support for breakthroughs of so-called contemplatives, and yet not find a single positive thing to say about Jesuits. Nitpicking scholarship, if you can call it scholarship.

[raygun]

Apologies for cherry-picking. Time is short.

It turns out, though, that there far fewer Christians intent on manifesting this conclusion that there are Muslims. Or, to the extent that there are, their efforts are more likely to consist of Evangelicals tilling fields in Israel on their Summer vacations, rather than flying aeroplanes into the sides of buildings.

Really? So there are only 18 whack-job evangelicals in the world to worry about? That's a fuckin' relief.

What are you saying here? You're just as, or more worried about the effects of Evangelical Christians on the health of your country as you are Muslims? I could understand that. My point was that however deleterious the influence of Evangelicals, it's one which involves fewer explosions.

If you took what I said as a comparison of the numbers of adherents, it wasn't - I was comparing the numbers of adherents who devote their lives to immanentizing the final chapters of their religious books. The domestic effects of fundamentalist Christians, while obviously massively detrimental to the development of your country, don't quite fall into this category.

Sure, but we were lazy, complacent idiots. I listened to Jello Biafra's spoken word records and went to Anti-Capitalist rallies in a $900 trenchcoat my parents bought me, and I believed all kinds of completely nonsensical things which I hadn't thought through, but nothing like this.

Let me contribute the observation that our embarrasment over and hatred of our younger, dumber selves will, if not tempered and fairly contextualized, propel us, as have gone millions before, into the ranks of the very worst kind of complacent, reactionary idiots. See: baby boomers, former Z Magazine readers, David Horowitz, Chris Hitchens, ad nauseam. It's a sad and common outcome, but I find it avoidable to the degree one can set aside fascination with one's own self.

I'm not particularly embarrassed, and definitely don't hate that kid in the "I Blow Minds For A Living" toilet-seat t-shirt. I'll cop to self-fascination, though.

That, and walking around with my mother covered head-to-toe in a sack - on one occasion, having obscenities shouted at her by religious police (a separate kind of police to the actual police) for having some of her blonde hair slip out of the bottom of the headscarf. Oh, and my parents not being able to kiss in the airport whenever we arrived to meet my father.

Of course we are disgusted by the mutaween. But why not awaken to the truth of the Saudi royal political establishment that specifically imposes this theocratic police state? Could it be because you use gasoline just like the rest of us, and uncomfortable memories of your $900 trenchcoat are keeping you from noticing the objective realities of that part of the world or from illustrating the dependencies thereof?

Why not contextualize Islam as an unreconstructed faith embedded in a monumentally repressive state that is directly and quite artifically supported by western energy demands and all the poilitical tensions that follow such a monstrously huge economic concentration? Why not consider that this quid pro quo with the west is what endlessly postpones a "vaticanization" of Mecca and drives both the repression and the terror response against it? Why not accept that any "Moral Landscape" is pathetically ill-defined by a group's extremists or its repressors?

-r

Sincerely, I don't think I'm sufficiently educated in the assumptions of left-American political dialogue to be able to meaningfully parse this. You'd have to really spell it out for me, particularly the second paragraph.

[raygun]

I deeply respect his advocacy of mysticism, the possibility of self-transcendence, and his honesty about his use of psychedelic drugs and meditation (even, at one point, becoming a nominal bodyguard of the Dalai Lama) to, as he'd say "build his own telescope".

This is where he loses me. He can drum up anecdotal historical support for breakthroughs of so-called contemplatives, and yet not find a single positive thing to say about Jesuits. Nitpicking scholarship, if you can call it scholarship.

Is there an unfair treatment of Jesuits I don't remember reading, or are you curious about their lack of mention? What, or where, are we talking about, specifically?

[Antero]

Crap. I've never read a word by him that I needed to read. And, of course, bigotry. You know.