No, I'm just not using the label "violent extremist" to label people who aren't "violent extremists."

Yeah this may have been my misunderstanding you to a point. Yes small groups can influence larger groups so that the larger group acts violently or acts in some way we consider reprehensible. This I agree is also non-controversial.

However before we label that society/nation/culture violent there needs to be more than a small minority engaged in the acts. If it is still only a small minority acting then we are better pointing at the minority than the larger group.

The brevity of the quote may be throwing you off. She isn't suggesting greed can be singled out any more than religion. She means that blaming everything on greed or religion is a hollow exercise, but if we engaged in it, we can just as easily say something other than religion, say, the will to power, is the real source of violence.

Take the British empire. Participants were devout Christians and understood themselves as engaged in God's work. So we can easily blame the British empire on religion because that's how the participants explained it. But the quasi governmental system of mercantilism was a huge part of it, and even as they understood themselves in a Christian manner, it was also an economic enterprise. So was it really merchant greed disguised as Christianity, or should we take people at their word and call it a religious enterprise?

Or better yet, focus on the interplay between economic activity and personal belief. That would be a more balanced attempt at explaining events in historical context. That is what is bereft from Harris's writing.

Harris doesn't explain events according to multiple influences, he plays "find the religious component and trash it."

I don't think using the British empire is probably the best example to support your arguments here as there aren't many, if any, who would blame it on religion. You'd need to find something where the lines are a bit more blurred.

That's good, they aren't being monocausal. Point is, if we wanted to use Harris's methodology, the British Empire can be attributed primarily to religion. Playing Harris, I could point to the diaries of colonial officials and their missionary siblings and say they explicitly understood it as a religious enterprise. When this monocausal argument is applied to something more familiar, you see through it. But then we have Harris attributing violence on the West Bank to Islam, not realizing Islamists were barely present until the 1990s. But unfortunately in that case we can't say "there aren't many, if any who would blame it on religion." Suddenly it's simple instead of complex like the British empire.

A series of posters have engaged my claims yet you can't detect that an argument has even been made.

A more generous take on Harris' position would be that, yes things are multicausal but the variable of religious ideas, specifically different ideas in different religious lead to different interactions leading to different ranges of outcomes.

That's an inventive thought, but it makes more sense in physical sciences. The problem it creates in interpreting history is that the variable -- Islam in this case -- does not remain constant. It is reinterpreted each generation, each region, and even each individual each decade. It's the nature of religious symbols that each person internalizes them for their own uses and meanings.

In the Arabian peninsula soon after Muhammad, it had a strong component of conquest. But Islam spread to most people as "the shopkeeper's religion" because of the emphasis on honesty and fair play. Islam reached Southeast Asia through commerce, though states also appropriated it as a technology of governance.

So is the "variable" Islam that won Arabia the same one that bartered, bought and traded its way to Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim nation? The same religion, just interacting with different contexts? I'd say not so much. Merchants took what they needed and built bonds of trust with fellow Muslim traders. Sultans took ideas of obedience and built city states. Islam is what each group made it, not ghostly inspirations from centuries ago.

Your suggestion still treats Islam as an essence, something that produces different products when combined with different multipliers, but retains a constant nature. If you are going to treat Islam as one thing identifiable in different contexts, you have to carefully define it. As you do so, it will become more elusive until you're left with just "tries to pray five times a day," or even "self identifies as Muslim."

You should definitely pass your very generous interpretation on to Harris himself because he needs all the nuance he can get. But he'd still be doing it wrong.

After watching Harris' 3 hour session on TYT I think the interpretation that I said is eventually what Harris' boils down to eventually after a lot of push and pull. I think, in general, it's the same idea that Mahr expressed when, at the end of his conversation with Cornel when he said 'don't throw religion out of the mix' and 'I'm just saying ideas matter'.

I have a hard time reading your posts. They are filled with such nonsense and fluff it's almost all I can do to stand to read it. As a side - I simply don't understand why people do this on the internet. I'm unsure if you are insinuating you are very much more well versed than Harris is on this topic, which is laughable, or if it's because you took some personal offense to his position and just want to trash the guy.

As I've said, disagreeing with him is one thing, but insinuating that the guy is actually stupid or uneducated is so ridiculous it actually reflects badly on you.


This, again, is simply untrue. Whenever Harris "boils something down" to the religious ideas behind why a person would commit an act where we are questioning the motive, he touches on every single possibility. When he explains his position of the 9/11 hijackers, does he not mention economics, education, political oppression, family life, general happiness or comradarie, etc etc? Does he just say "well it was a bunch of fanatical Jihad Arabs lol!"? Of course not. He touches on every single possibility he could come up with. He does nothing close to what you are implying.

Btw this is a much better critique than Sam Harris could give

http://m.huffpost.com/uk/entry/60763...ushpmg00000067

Show.

Show to who? You? Are you so critical of Harris yet have no familiarity of his work? Do you even know wtf you are talking about?

Anyone who has seen the most superficial of his views knows this to be true.

lol "show"

I have a hard time reading your posts. They are filled with such nonsense and fluff it's almost all I can do to stand to read it. As a side - I simply don't understand why people do this on the internet. I'm unsure if you are insinuating you are very much more well versed than Bill Haywood is on this topic, which is laughable, or if it's because you took some personal offense to his position and just want to trash the guy.

Yes, but I am still failing to see why this should somehow make it difficult to criticize religion as a catalyst and cause of war and conflict. It doesn't have to be "the sole reason" and it doesn't have to "exclude interplay". I am no fan of Harris' simplistic writings, but do you really think he goes around believing that religion is the sole cause of war and that religion does not interplay with other factors?

Arguments like comes dangerously close to asserting that we can not describe human phenomena as trends. As a professional who occasionally does social science, I find this rather absurd.

When we have a religion. When have a holy work that contains war. When we have supporting scholars and texts that excuse war. When we have religious leaders who seem to both believe and use the texts in conquest, and historical counterparts that seemingly display the same behavior. When we have historical proof of such things casting enormous regions out in hundreds of prolonged and zealous wars and millions of people both fighting and dying with their respective holy symbols branded...

... why on earth is it somehow even remotely controversial to point out that Abrahamic religion is quite often both a cause of war and is a catalyst for violent conflict. That is what the evidence suggests, the only thing this lady does is point out that we can't prove it conclusively. Who cares? Nothing can be proven conclusively. She is equivocating.

Karen Armstrong is usually pretty good.

I'm not sure why you want to blame religion, or would you also blame politics as a catalyst for war? It seems we do better to understand that causes of conflicts than merely trying to blame them on something that at best can be a contributor.

It's not that it's difficult to criticize religion, but rather that the criticism is far weaker than people who want to criticize religion usually are willing (and able) to admit.

Why? Because that does, in fact, not follow.

Pending on the nature of actual claims regarding interplay and complexity (instead of just noting that it exists), it could even be strengthened.

Follow from what? The statement isn't a logical conclusion but an observation. The observation doesn't "follow" anything.

Sure. It's possible. When speaking in generalities, one implicitly acknowledges exceptions. I explicitly acknowledged it with the word "usually."

So the observation is that criticism should be weaker? That doesn't make much sense. The observation is obviously that there is more to history and current events than religion. That this should somehow weaken criticism of religion must obviously be a conclusion.

This conclusion does not follow. If Bob locked the children in, it isn't necessarily mitigating that the incarceration was not the sole cause of harm. If the other cause of harm was a fire, then Bob is potentially even more to blame.

I see no "usually" in your post... except when talking about the willingness to admit the error you accuse people of.

Your criticism here is pointless. I don't even know where to begin.

I swear you've got a reading comprehension problem. Let's put the word "usually" in different places in that sentence and see if it makes any sense:

(1) "It's usually not that it's difficult to criticize religion, but rather that the criticism is far weaker than people who want to criticize religion are willing (and able) to admit."

(2) "It's not that it's difficult to criticize religion, but rather that the criticism is usually far weaker than people who want to criticize religion are willing (and able) to admit."

(3) "It's not that it's difficult to criticize religion, but rather that the criticism is far weaker than people who want to criticize religion usually are willing (and able) to admit."

Which one of these do you think is the most reasonable place to put the word "usually"?

(1) states that criticizing religion is easy
(2) states that the criticism is weaker
(3) states that people behave in a certain way

You are behaving exactly as (3) indicates you would. And that's precisely what I'm saying.

He acknowledges complexity in theory, but only addresses religion. He regularly slips into simple-minded monocausal statements, for example in this conversation with Andrew Sullivan about all the barriers to peace in Israel/Palestine:

His single minded focus on religion leads him to grossly misinterpret that conflict. Israel was founded by secular socialists, the PLO secular nationalists. The religious militants were sideshows for decades. He's just wrong. To explain the rise of fundamentalism among both Jews and Palestinians that we see today we have to look way beyond theology.

It's like when Northern Ireland was described as a religious conflict even though there was not another place in the world where Catholics and Protestants were fighting like that. People would say sure, there's other stuff involved, then go right back to calling it a religious conflict. So in terms of Harris's actual practice, the answer to your question is yes, he really does go around blaming everything on religion. A concrete result is that there is no solution to Arab/Jewish conflict because it's all about religion. Actually, there's a lot that could be addressed.

For the same reason it would be a mistake to say that Israel/Palestine is just a land dispute with religious noise. If it's all you address, you do not understand the conflict well enough to conceive of new policies.

So I agree in general with your position on Harris and I also accept that the conflict in NI was complex but there was definitely a religious component to it, there were fears, legitimate I feel, that Protestants had regarding being discriminated against in a Catholic Ireland.

There had been a long and strong tradition of Protestant Irish Nationalism and it was certainly a question of national identity before it was a question of religious affiliation but they came to almost correspond due to the fears and experience of Catholics and Protestants in the run up to and post partition.

I do think had their not been the religious division in Ireland then the nationalist question would have manifested very differently.

sorry for the derail.

On a aside, ironically, Harris acknowledged on the Young Turks Show that the N Ireland conflict wasn't a religious conflict but one where religious identity was a marker for the conflict. He's still a bit sloppy though.

Anyways I thought this was an interesting piece on the interplay between religion, politics, identity, etc

http://m.theatlantic.com/internation...appeal/382175/

Thanks for the link

I like how some posters (not you) go to great lengths to state that this and that criticism of religion is out of context, and then they point to Ireland as a conflict where the issue is not religious. Which pretty much is a statement only possible to make if you go to extreme lengths to ignore every last bit of context.

People really, really need to pick up a history book. And I mean it. This isn't just some minor fluke. It is on par with claiming France was not involved in WW2.

The issue in Ireland is not only about religion no, but to claim the conflict is not about religion is abysmally bad. It is a clear case of a conflict where both historically (and to some extent even currently) religion has served as both a very powerful catalyst and also in part cause.