I mean, yeah, I would study love by scientific analysis. I do understand what you're saying. I think there is some value in the sort of phenomenological research you are talking about. I just think it is fairly limited, and not nearly as fruitful as what we learn from sociology, history, or psychology. The grad student has studied some of the smartest and most knowledge people to have written about religion (or love). They are trained in scientific techniques to evaluate and gather data on these subjects.

Finding some wise, but ignorant person is just much less likely to give us real knowledge on these subjects. Much of what passes for this kind of wisdom is really just results-oriented thinking and iterations of the fundamental attribution error. These people very rarely have the ability or knowledge to conceptualize their insights in more that just platitudes. Platitudes can be important and useful for day-to-day life, but I'm not looking to them for deep knowledge of a subject.

I guess we have two completely different ways of looking at things. It seems to me you have a sincere desire for wisdom but you really just want to gather data and facts to make you feel more knowledgeable.

Wise but ignorant is a contradiction in terms. I think you'll find that wise people aren't full of platitudes. Generally it's the people with knowledge but little experience who use platitudes.

Can science explain a rainbow, or the tides, or why Jews and Arabs have fought each other non-stop in the middle east for millennia?

Sure, you pointy headed nerds can use your facts and your data and your being widely read on the topic, doing first hand research, and staying abreast of related topics in fields like psychology, history, and sociology, and putting a great deal of effort over a period of many years into forming a broad base of "knowledge" and "wisdom" and in the process training yourself to think and write clearly and effectively... If you want to stroke your own ego and feel knowledgeable or whatever. Congratulations! But the rest of us are going to eschew that stuff in favor of what we feel like saying at the moment, and damn it, we're proud of it, too!

So go back to your books and your learning and your beliefs proportional to the evidence, Poindexter, but no pocket protector TI-89 calculator is going to help you understand love. And that, my friend, is where you an I part ways.

Well, I was damn near tempted to have a chat with Mr. Kristofero because he is polite and intelligent but I noticed he is banned. How in the world does a fan of Wilbur Smith get himself banned? Ha!
I guess all I was wondering was - what is meant by a non observer standpoint? Are you referring to an observer traveling at the speed of light? Or what exactly is a non observer standpoint? Are you referring to quantum mechanics experiments when an observer isn't present?
Actually my questions have nothing to do with the OP. I'm just a very curious fellow and more curious about your banning than anything else.

Sam Harris eviscerated in nine paragraphs:
https://www.juancole.com/2018/11/eve...ris-about.html

meh... "eviscerated" is pretty strong.

What, Cole didn't use sufficiently colorful language?

It's the claims and evidence. Harris says there is something uniquely violent about Islam. But the suicide bombings he points to were pioneered by secular groups. All of the genocides of the 20th century were committed by Christian or secular movements, not Islam. And social research shows no correlation between depth of piety among Muslims and their tendency to support violence.

Harris has no argument. When "Everything Sam Harris Says is Wrong," is shown to be true, that's an evisceration. It's empirical :-).

Sam Harris gets disagreed with in nine paragraphs :P

I tend to also disagree with Harris but that wasn't a very effective takedown IMO. This sort of irritates me:

I'm not sure if this is just a bad argument or it merely does a bad job explaining what in Harris' book it's responding to, since I haven't read the book. If Harris claims that only radical Islamist groups use suicide bombings than a counter-example is a good counter-argument, but otherwise I'm not sure it is.

I mean, I also think if Harris is trying to use an example of a terrorist attack to justify an argument that there are no moderate Muslims than that argument is also wrong, and quite prejudicial. But a better response would be to point out the actual flaw in his arguments, which would involve pointing out the reliance on over-generalization, rather than validating the same flawed methodology by just cherry-picking some other example of secular violence. The rest seems fine, but pretty much the same stuff that everyone else has pointed out about the problems with his views on Islam.

You have not read carefully; Cole says much more than "here's a suicide bomb that wasn't Muslim." He argues that Islamicists picked it up from the sustained suicide campaign of the Tamil Tigers.

He focused on the suicide bombings to accent how Harris is misleading from the very first page.

He then rattles off the great genocides of the Twentieth Century and points out that none of them were committed by radical Muslims. That's the crucial evidence. Mountains of genocide victims, molehills of Jihadi murders. The Jihadi killings are especially ugly because they are ongoing, not in comparison to Armenia, the Shoah, Russia, China, British Kenya, Cambodia, etc.

For Harris to single out Muslims as violent shows how ahistorical he is. A genuine hack.

My point is that it's not clear why I should care about that at all, at least with respect to the question of what my opinion should be about the possibility of "moderate" Muslims and all of that. I agree that Harris is wrong if he singles out any particular group in an a-historical way, but were he only arguing that this sort of violence was problematic in Islam (without saying anything about anyone else) then it would be like a weird tu quoque fallacy. As I said though I think there are other problems with Harris' views, which to be fair the author also addresses to some extent.

Bill,

have you read "The End of Faith"?

I read the Islam chapter carefully several years ago. Haven't been able to stand him ever since. He makes sophomoric historical errors, in particular essentializing Islam as choice picks from the Koran.

That's the point. He acknowledges that other violence exists, but singles out Islam as uniquely menacing. His book is completely ahistorical -- Islam's violence is cannonical, outside of history. He basically argues that Muslims who are not violent extremists are not authentic Muslims.

Yes, Cole does say this, and he is just as misleading as Harris. The Tamil Tigers were initially inspired to use suicide terrorism by a Hezbollah suicide attack on a US Marine base in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 military personnel. Of course, Cole's larger point is correct that suicide terrorism is not unique to Islam, eg the Russian nihilists in the nineteenth-century, the Tamil Tigers, etc.

That being said, Harris is correct that there is a positive correlation between using suicide terrorism and religion, and Islam in particular. Given the ideological justifications for martyrdom in religion, I think it is a reasonable hypothesis that there is a causal connection here as well.

Some atheists like to quote Steven Weinberg's statement that "for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." That is an obviously false statement and, as you say, betrays a complete lack of historical knowledge. People will kill for both religious and non-religious ideologies, because of mistaken moral views, etc. Both nationalism and communism killed many more people in the twentieth-century than Islam. If I recall correctly, in The End of Faith Harris tries to get around this obvious fact by no True Scotsmanning these ideologies, claiming that the cult of personality that grew up around Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc were essentially religious in character.

That being said, the fact that Jihadist terrorism is ongoing is a relevant reason to focus on it (even if primarily because the backlash to this terrorism - a backlash encouraged by Harris - has been so destructive, eg the Iraq War, Uighur internment). I'll also say that I agree with Harris that many people are too loath to treat religious ideas and institutions as the motive for violence, instead treating it as a superstructure on top of class, ethnic, or other structural features of society that are the "true" causes of conflict.

What conclusion are you drawing from this? I can easily believe there's a "correlation," between a movement and one particular technique of terror. The Soviets liked a bullet in the head from behind. The Nazis used gas. Islam still has a long way to go to match any sort of terror or genocide that the world has already dished out. It still sounds like you are trying to do a back-door essentializing of religion -- and maybe especially Islam -- as evil. Islam is a special terror when it is and isn't when it's not.

I mean, religion is part of one person's suicide attack, while another person will say religion is why they don't commit suicide bombings. It is all contingent on history.

But you make a good point about how Harris argues from definition -- he categorizes Nazis and Khmer Rouge as motivated by secular religions. If that's true, then all thinking is religious and he has destroyed his own point. If the Khmer Rouge were religious, then religion has no explanatory power because it just means "culture."

OrP stated that he think there is a causal connection, so that would be his conclusion?

I think that is a more than fair assessment. We have supporting evidence in the form of looking at traits of Islamic belief. It puts a lot of value on submission, authority and linking theology to law and statemanship ("fiqh"), these are all important symbols that Islamic extremists use in their rhetoric ("submit to god", "respect the religious leader","religious law should be the law","build the Islamic state") Couple this with direct causal evidence, for example theological leaders or fora that directly advocate terrorism based on their interpretation of Islam, and I would say such a conclusion isn't only possible, but in fact completely evident.

And no, terrorism is not unique to Islamic extremists. But that is a weird point to try and score. Invading neighboring countries isn't unique to fascist states, but that doesn't mean we excuse fascism as an underlying reason for such invasions.

Nor is pointing out a link between Islam and terrorism some kind of damnation of Islam as a whole. Extremists only make up a small minority of Muslims. The problem with extremism of course, is that you don't need a whole lot of them for it to become troublesome. So even if it the phenomena is rare, it is still fair to see it as a problem.

I think there's a valid point there, but I also think there's an element of misunderstanding (or misrepresentation?) between the two sides of this argument and a certain amount of people talking past each other. I don't think (for example) that most of the people who take issue with Harris' views on Islam would disagree that religious motivations are important to understanding actions taken by Al Qaeda or ISIS members, per se. But they do generally think it's important to place religious meaning and motivation in some larger historical and cultural context. And I agree that this is important, because it's clear that trying to evaluate the causal role of religious beliefs in a superficial way can be problematic. So I'm generally cautious about arguments like this:

It's not that I think the kind of inferences being used here are completely invalid, but I think it's easy to over-extrapolate. It's like if someone tried to predict the role of religion in American politics based only on a reading of the New Testament, would they be likely to predict the alignment of evangelicals with a right-wing populist movement with strongly negative sentiments towards immigrants? I think it would be easy to pull out quotes from Jesus and symbolically important phrases ("love your neighbor as yourself") and arrive at a very different conclusion.

So I think it's important to keep in mind that the things we think of as the most important intellectual/symbolic elements of a religion can all be given pretty diverse interpretations, and to some extent I think we're reasoning backwards from the actual existence of Islamist terrorism to putting more emphasis on those elements of the religion. Which is fair enough, to some extent. The religion is what its adherents believe and do, but that gets to this point:

I think the problem with Harris' views is that he does tend to ignore all of the cultural/historical context and the variation in views and practice within the religion, for example when he says that the only true Muslims are the ones who adhere to the extremist version he thinks is authentic, as Bill mentioned. If he were only saying that members of extremist groups were influenced towards extremism by their particular version of the religion than I doubt most people would have a problem with that. The problem isn't pointing out a connection between religious ideology and behavior, it's in trying to overgeneralize from one particular version of the religion to the entirety of the religion. (And to be clear, there are other areas where I think general criticisms of Islam as a whole would be more valid, for example complaints about treatment of women)

And so my criticism of the article Bill linked was mostly that the author didn't do a good job (IMO) of pointing out this problem with Harris' views.

That may very well be, I am not at all familiar with Harris' statements or views.

However, it is not really a problem to aggregate in general when looking at trends. I have no problem stating that "American culture has an enormous problem with obesity". I don't even think such a statement is at all controversial.

I don't have a problem with that statement either, but I think it illustrates the problem of assessing representativeness. Something like 40% of Americans are obese. Nowhere close to 40% of Muslims are engaged in terrorism in any sense.

I think a lot just depends on exactly what is said and on what conclusions are supposed to be drawn. I'm not even opposed to someone saying that Islam has a problem with religious violence that is somewhat unique among the major world religions at this point in time, and that some of the trends towards fundamentalism in the last few decades are problematic. I agree with that, although I also think how we construct the categories we use is pretty important to how we understand geopolitics, so I also agree with the statements that US foreign policy and US cultural attitudes about the military are problematic, regardless of whether or not they are considered to have any religious component.

But leaving aside some comparison about the relative severity of different social problems, I do agree with some statements about problems in Islam. But, I disagreed with the arguments made in favor of Trump's travel ban (for example), because I don't think the facts as I understand them justified that particular policy response, mostly because I think the arguments involved prejudicial forms of generalization.

What percentage is necessary before we should recognize that their is an inherant problem?
If we look at the recent #metoo movement it becomes obvious that there is a widespread problem with sexual harrassment, abuse and violence in (for example) the workplace, especially in certain industries. The percentage of perpetrators is likely very small but there is a misogynous culture full of enablers and apologists that empower the abusers.

See also the sexual abuse epidemic in the Catholic church.


Similarly few Muslims are willing to engage in terrorism but that is not the full extent of the problem. There are other forms of violence that can traced directly back to religous beliefs. Killing blasphemers and apostates, stoning or lynching homosexuals, honor killings.

Only recently the Pakistani supreme court overturned the death penalty for a Christian woman accused of blasphemy (insulting the prophet*). A mob stormed the court building trying to take "justice" in their own hands. The woman had to leave the country because her life would never be safe.


I did not have the time to reread more than a few pages in the chapter Harris wrote. In the introductory paragraph he contrasts Islam with Jainism, remarking that there is nothing in the latter that would be able to justify any form of violence while in Islam there is.



-----
(*) the actual incident is likely made up and the accusation was the result of an argument with a Muslim co-worker being offended that the "unclean" Christian drank from a cup meant to be for Muslims.

I think I addressed this somewhat when I said I think a lot depends on what actual conclusions, policy choices, or actions are being suggested. So I said that I think it is already reasonable to say that there is a problem of violence that is unique to Islam, but that I don't think the evidence supports the kinds of blanket travel restrictions Trump favored.

Part of the reason I think discussions on this issue often suffer is because they're too abstract. What does it mean to say that there is a problem? What follows from that? It's easier to have a conversation about a more specific decision like a travel ban.

edit: which is not to say that I object to having some more general conversation, it's just kind of a different conversation. I don't want to live in Pakistan and I have no problem with criticisms of blasphemy laws in Pakistan. But I can't think of any particular way in which US law or policy should be changed because of the existence of those events in Pakistan. Other than expressing my disapproval of them I don't have much else to say about it.

Agreed.



Fair enough. (The travel ban is obviously not only wrong but also very stupid.)



My naive and unrealistic suggestion is to treat countries with barbaric laws like we did apartheid era South Africa. Strategic and economic interests make this likely impossible. More realistic might be pushing for energy independence to reduce the influence of countries like Saudi Arabia or Russia.

Yeah that's an interesting point re: the balance between favoring strategic/economic interests over trying to use influence to shape local policy in other countries. It does seem clear we almost exclusively care about the former (case study: Arabia, Saudi) but I'm also not really sure that the outcomes associated with the latter would be particularly positive, even though the goal would be admirable. I probably wouldn't object to us trying to do more of that, but I'd guess the devil is in the details and I don't think it's easy to do in a morally defensible way, let alone an effective one.

Seems like the US needs some other countries to do something similar to pressure us into changing our bad policies also :P

'Murica's sovereignty is more important than human rights and the opinion of international interlopers!

For the life of me, I can't figure out why those that are always first in line to bash Christianity, are also first in line to defend Islam.

It's not like Islam doesn't degrade women and gays. It's not like Islam's *holy* prophet was a pedophile and a terrorist. It's not like it's a scientific fact that 60-70% of the world's Muslims are inbred, the result of 1500 years of incest.

Oh wait.

https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/...-talk-about-it

Have we really become so utterly sick as a society, that we can't prosecute Muslims that mutilate the genitals of little girls?

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fed...chigan-doctors

The reason why you can't figure out why people who bash Christianity defend Islam when you are around is because criticizing Christianity (or Islam) isn't the same thing as bigotry, and that is what you ask for from people towards Muslims.

After all, everyone in this conversation, except for you, have criticized both Christianity and Islam in this forum. This is a thread about Sam Harris, a famous critic of both Christianity and Islam. But nonetheless, your take is that no one will criticize Muslims, so let's post some Christian propaganda and adopt the pose of a victim of unfairness.