Sam Harris takes sides

Sam Harris is no friend of religion. I enjoyed reading his End of Faith if for no other reason than it validated some of my opinions about religion. One of the faults I found with his book is that he does not realize that religion comes naturally to us; religion will be with us for a long time. Religion is not the kind of thing that is amenable to persuasive logic. Skeptics tend to forget this.

Harris weighs in on Islamic extremism and the Liberal response with this LA Times opinion piece: Head-in-the-sand Liberals.

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.

I am sympathetic to that statement. However, he goes on to say:

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.

This is where my sympathy ends. This taking of sides between Israel and its enemies is exactly the sort of thing the religious skeptic should not do or recommend if the skeptic wants to maintain consistency. The US ought to be the leader in bringing both sides to task, negotiation, and settlement of disputes. Israel contains its fair share of religious extremists too, and they influence a policy of brinksmanship and war as the ultimate solution. All kinds of people think that the only thing you need to do to get to heaven is be right in your own mind when you die: another one of those things that is pretty to think so.

The religious skeptic who recommends reason as the curative for overcoming religious zealotry and destructiveness ought to apply the tonic to all afflicted parties equally.