Excellent post! Having grown up Evangelical (I’m not Evangelical now by a long shot), I know there are thoughtful Evangelicals. Tolerance and respect is a two way street.
Peace!

Fortunately for Mr. diZeriga, he will never know how wrong he is, once Muslim fundamentalists acquire nuclear weapons and use them against the United States, because he, like the rest of us, will be dead. Maybe Jesus can explain it to him in heaven.

I read Sam Harris “End of Faith”. Not sure what book you are talking about in your article but it doesn’t sound like the same one.
Comments like “To forestall simple-minded supporters of Harris” really reduces the weight of your words and puts you in more of childish reference than a mature adult.
When you use phrases and lies such as “Harris advocates mass murder based on careless and slipshod research” it is doubtful you will be taken serious by most reasonable people.
Just thought you might want to know in case you are looking for a target audience past the playground.
Look forward to your next article and hope you will attempt to adhere to a more professional journalism approach. Your readers deserve better.
Thanks

Ah the internet. A place where even the simplest minds of all can write their opinions.
Something tells me you simply searched quotes from Harris and never read his book.
If you can’t see why Collins is a bad choice to run the NIH you’re even a bigger fool than you sound.

Harris is proposing nothing more and nothing less than that Collins be blacklisted on the basis of his religious beliefs. The irony is that if Collins had ever voiced such a bigoted position, THAT would constitute a good and proper reason to oppose his appointment to an important position of public trust.

Not that I like Harris, but here’s what he really said in “The End of Faith”:
“It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—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. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in which much of the world’s population could be annihilated on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher’s stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our side.”

As an atheist, I’m not a fan of Sam Harris. I only like his book “Letter to a Christian Nation” because it’s short, to the point and he doesn’t ramble about silly things. Harris sometimes raises good points, but I think Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennett are better representatives for the atheist community. However it’s important to note, that while they may be recognizeable faces of atheism, atheists do not worship them and respect their opinions while still fully willing to criticize if they feel they are wrong about an issue. Not true with religious leaders.

Good Friends:
I’ve read Harris’ “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation”. I think Gus is correct in his assessment of Harris’ work. Harris makes good points. The most important, I think, is his view that religious arguments and views should be subject to the same public scrutiny and debate as any other views, that religious views cannot legitimately hide behind the idea that issues of faith are beyond critique. This is an important point and, in my opinion, a genuine contribution.
But his overall assessment of religion is flawed, particularly when it comes to Islam, but also in general. He is historically incorrect in blaming religion for every evil in society as Soviet Russia, Communist China, North Korea, etc., amply demonstrate.

The Harris column makes it difficult, beyond the report of Collins’ slide show, to discern whether Harris is quoting Collins directly or is putting in his mouth canned Christian answers to simple philosophical questions. If Collins actually believes that neuroscience can never find the brain mechanisms of morality because that’s a miraculous insertion into our brains by God, then there’s a problem. But Harris fails to make that case.

Banana Fontaine gives a larger quotation but does not in any sense change the message of Harris’s advocating mass murder. Unfortunately the larger quote also emphasizes that Islamic regimes will be suicidal and have the means to take us out.
It ignores what always happens when clerics and preachers become rulers. Always. Those who seek and use power want to keep it, and being dead does not keep it. Religion in power very quickly becomes corrupt. Iran is a wonderful example. Corrupt people do not want to die, they want to enjoy the fruits of their corruption.
Further, Harris suggests by implication that all Muslims, or all who are in positions to make the reality true, will read and interpret the Koran the same way. It treats the Islamic world as monolithic. It’s a variant of the “Asians are like little yellow ants that do not respect life the way white people do” argument. And as false. On both sides. Plenty of Asians – and Muslims – respect life and plenty of Americans do not.
Anyone tempted to give Harris and his Neoconservative allies any credence at all would do well to read Chris Hedges’ War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. Military men I know have told me, he has spent more time in war zones than almost any soldier, and writes extensively in that book about what really happened in Bosnia.
Finally, any one with even a small degree of sense would realize that no Islamic country in the life time of anyone living will develop the military power to seriously threaten the existence of the US. They lack the industrial base, the level of educational training, the scientific infrastructure, and the culture of technical innovation needed to even have the capacity, let alone the will. To develop any of these would require abandoning Fundamentalism.
Harris is a bloody minded bigot as much as and in the spirit of Pat Robertson.

Banana Fontaine, thank you for providing a context to the rebuttals of Gus’ stated opinions.
Having read the quoted text carefully (and twice), I submit the following as examples of unsubstantiated assertions that the average reader can reasonably see as hyperbole:
“…an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise…” I wonder how many Christians would say the same of me if I painted them all as in fervent prayer for the second coming and the subsequent rising of the dead and the end of the world.
“…we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is…” & “…the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own…” & “…much of the world’s population could be annihilated…” This progression shows an egregious ignorance of military practice, the level of professionalism and competence of our officer corps and commanders, and a poor grasp of arithmetic concerning the hundreds* of nuclear explosions necessary for “much of the world’s population [to] be annihilated.” It is that same mentality that our government counted on in its “duck and cover” propaganda during the 50s and 60s. No sane person sees any rational connection between hiding under a desk and surviving a nuclear explosion.
An author who takes an aggressively epithetical approach to any subject is not worthy of considerations, and that some (few) can glean valid ideas from his writing is no excuse for wasting the time to read the rest, especially when those and other ideas have been expressed by others more coherently and with less emotion-laden rhetoric to obscure them.
* Ask any military strategist from the Soviet regime how expensive it is to hide enough nuclear warheads to “annihilate” the US. [sarcasm] You might find some of them begging for change on a street corner.

The Bigotry lies in disrespect for all religion, and atheism can also be a religion.
The idea that all Muslims are the same as the tiny minority of nutcake Muslim violent fundies is classic “strawman” bullshit. That’s like saying that everyone in America is like the KKK.
Yes, there is a risk that nutcake Arabs will obtain and use nukes. We will have far less control over that than the Arab moderates will.
Our main concern should be keeping our own nutcakes here from getting control over and using nukes.
Our own dope dealers kill more people per year in the U.S. alone than all the arab terrorists do in the whole world. The difference is that our media downplay our own internal violence while waxing hysterical about the terrorists. The terrorists are a desperate, sick, tiny little minority being supported by the fading dictators of feudalism’s last stand. They aren’t fighting us, they’re fighting Arab moderates, and they are losing.
Letting them turn us against all Arabs would be helping them. It’s what they want. An open, fair relationship with Arab moderates, backed by real efforts to generate Interfaith respect is how to kick the terrorists where it hurts.
Basing international policy on the assumption that all Arabs are so ignorant and fanatical as to embrace mutually assured destruction would be as stupid as assuming that peace can be made in the Middle East without the ending of Israeli colonization of Arab lands.
The First Amendment in the U.S. Bill of Rights holds the answer.
The secularization of governments and the guarantee of religious freedom for all is the way out of this nightmare.
But it will never be imposed from without. It will only occur when the moderates in the involved countries get tired of the radicals, and take their countries away from them.
And the best way we can help the moderates is by treating them with respect.
Thermal

I think we maybe ought to be a *bit* more concerned about the Christian Fundamentalists that have long shown a bit more interest in our *own* strategic arsenal than I think is healthy.
Some of them seem pretty convinced that ‘God’ will make ‘someone’ nuke a few cities they just don’t happen to like, themselves.
I think the Fundamentalists closest to the means, motive and opportunity to try and take out San Fransisco and New York and other places certain people don’t happen to like… Are really a lot closer to home.
Vocal atheists not always being big on nuance doesn’t necessarily mean we should be blind to who’s guarding the various henhouses.

Harris also makes a case for the “ticking time bomb” defense of torture in “End of Faith.” The man is beneath contempt.

The realm of nuclear warfare is a wonderland in which one gets permission to imagine the unimaginable. And in which one is encouraged to believe that doing so is rational, logical, and imperative in some sort of “survivalist of me and mine, Jack!” outlook.
I grew up in one of the various primary military targets of the Cold War. I understood–with a certain existential resignation–that in a matter of hours to minutes, I and everything around me could turn into an atomic wasteland. Later investigation confirmed both the military targetting and the physical impact.
Boom! Boom boom boom! Boom! All–and I mean ALL, because the entire region had been targeted for nuclear destruction across a range of different selection priorities, so that if a warhead assigned to priority A didn’t arrive, a warhead assigned to priority B would do the same thing–gone…
However great the threat of nuclear attack–a threat that I experienced as personal–I never thought that the remedy involved a preemptive first strike on America’s Cold War opponents.
An overarching realization of common humanity and planetary commonwealth trumped all and any weaponeer fantasies.
These days, I have come to see that years of living under the threat of personal nuclear devastation leached away any and all fantasies of surviving nuclear attacks and carrying on any and all worlds as we could know them. I walked away from that wonderland, gave up imagining myself safely and sanely dancing on the knife edge of the unimaginable…
This has had a profound part in shaping my overall Neo-Pagan world view.
69zwje

And, just to clarify, …as horrid as this atheist author’s view of what nightmare scenario would be (I agree with Gus that it’s not as likely as the man fears, …and to be fair, Harris makes no bones about saying such a response as he fears would be inevitable would be mass murder,) I do think that there are plenty of potential instances where someone’s religious and political views may in fact be incompatible with certain aspects of the public trust:
For instance, you probably wouldn’t want an ideological Vegan in charge of the USDA, any more than you’d want a cattle magnate: You wouldn’t want a UFO fanatic who thinks the Moon landings were a hoax in charge of NASA. (Bad enough we had a global warming denier who turned off a lot of the study of it,) …You don’t want someone who doesn’t believe they’ll be a future in charge of the environment or the public finance: You certainly don’t want someone who’d welcome an Armageddon they believe in in charge of the weapons, and you don’t want Luddites in charge of industry (though at this point, we might have done just as well that way over the past ten years.)
People who don’t believe in science shouldn’t be in charge of science, or things dependent upon it, and people shouldn’t be in charge of health care if they’ve made denying certain kinds to certain people a major part of their religious views.
There’s diversity and tolerance, and then there’s when someone may just ‘not believe in’ doing the job they’re hired for.
Too often, most especially when people profess evangelical forms of Christianity, these conflicts of interest are just talked *around,* even if putting a certain religious ideology in certain positions is exactly the agenda a given candidate was proposed for.
We just had a President who basically tacitly-admitted he religiously-believed these are the ‘End Times,’ …didn’t get a lot of attention, beyond a good bit on Jon Stewart.. But we wonder how the country got to be such a mess.

So, no one caught the fact that Harris was speaking about “men who are every bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range nuclear weaponry” and that the “Muslim world in particular must anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it?” No one caught that Harris called a preemptive nuclear strike an “unthinkable crime” and “an unconscionable act of self-defense?” No one caught the fact that he was “describ[ing] a plausible scenario,” a hypothetical situation? And yet we have people here claiming to have read the excerpt, some even twice?
Harris wasn’t advocating a “mass murder,” he was describing a situation in which our only option of self-defense may be a nuclear strike, an option that he finds “unconscionable.”

Banana, silence means silence. My remarks were limited to the quoted text, and may not be construed as commentary on any other topical point.
As for unconscionable, I give you Harry S. Truman and the nuclear destruction of two cities in Japan. People decide to do bad things immediately after affirming that they are bad.

Sorry Banana. I do not think your argument works.
The context of his book makes it VERY easy to read him as saying that this hideous outcome of suicidal people in power is likely, that most Muslims are oriented that way (his use of the PEW poll that I cited) and so on. He gives a few small caveats – but in the context of his work they are pretty minor. His entire book is marked by a lack of attention to details that complicate his argument, such as his utterly simple-minded extrapolation from his often effective criticisms of fundamentalism to his silly attacks on religion ingeneral.
Apuleius’s point about torture adds to this point. Nuance or dealing with tough questions regarding his thesis is not part of his active vocabulary, verbal or mental.
Anyone who has read this blog much knows that I have frequently written that I regard many atheists as more spiritually aware than many who claim to be religious. But Harris is not among them.

Actually (And I did grow up in a first-priority target, myself: I do think living under the whole notion of total nuclear annihilation is a traumatic experience our nation never really healed over: at the time it was presumed by Fundamentalists and others that the Soviet Union was their Antichrist and that they would be the instrument of this apocalypse of theirs: I suspect that the continuing (and increased) popularity of Fundamentalism and End Times hysteria has much to do with certain folks never having dealt with that fear and trauma: still feeling it, they look to religion to orient themselves toward the *source* of still feeling those buried fears.
When the deterrence was total and what was seen to be at stake were different economic systems and other hegemonies, there was certainly far less of a possibility for anyone to actually *use* the things, is a key difference.
Stalemate is more powerful when someone’s playing to *win.* If someone’s playing to *lose* as destructively as possible, (like Japan, at the close of WWII,) that can be when brinksmanship isn’t enough.
Nuking anyone or anything is unconscionable, …I think the author’s worry (And he sounds like a real piece of work, don’t get me wrong) is what might happen in some circumstance where *inaction* would lead to an equally-unconscionable result.
The real solution, of course, is to not let things *get* that far.
I think what I learned in my Cold War experience is to live in the present, but live *for* the future. For that, you’ve gotta *believe* in a future. And one for everyone, at that.

Bookhousegal said:
“People who don’t believe in science shouldn’t be in charge of science.”
That is nonsensical. What does “believe in science” even mean? Nothing is the correct answer.
Francis Collins has been DOING science for almost 40 years. He is not only accomplished in his own research, he is a proven leader of international scientific endeavors, such as the Human Genome Project. When a person has a track record like that they can believe they just saw Elvis at the mall – who cares?
It is anti-scientific to believe that the beliefs of scientists interfere in any way with the doing of science. I have known scientists who were very conservative and scientists who are communists and scientists who are christians, jews, muslims, hindus, buddhists, pagans, atheists, mormons, seventh-day-adventists, etc. Their beliefs are irrelevant to the doing of science. Period.

When I referred to ‘not believing in science,’ …I was talking about people who, for instance, insist that a non-scientific source constitutes scientific truth or science-overriding truth.
Having a religion is one thing, …certainly I know plenty of Pagan scientists, and others who can handle it. This is different from using one’s position to, for instance, stop or ‘cook’ research to support a religious opinion or prevent it from being further discredited, etc.
These questions are often not asked, being the point, even if the atheist in question isn’t going about it well. Evangelicals tend to get carte blanche, as long as I can remember… (James Watt never having been questioned about whether or not his belief the world was about to end had anything to do with selling off and selling out the lands and environment he was supposed to be protecting being a prominent example.)

Bookhousegal – it looks to me like you are trying to find wiggle room here – some kind of special circumstances under which it is OK to use a person’s religious beliefs as the basis for discrimination.
Watts’ problem isn’t his religion – it is that he is an evil fascist pig who banned the Beach Boys from playing at the 4th of July concert on the Mall in 1983 because “rock music attracts a bad element”! Oh, and he was also an fanatical anti-environmentalist activist. What possible difference does his religion make?!?!?!

“He objects solely because Collins is a Evangelical Christian.”
No he doesn’t. Rather, Harris goes to great length to point out how some of Collins’ publicly stated religious beliefs would shut out certain fields of scientific knowledge. While not necessarily a deal stopper considering his administrative record, it should give one pause for concern. Therefore, Harris is explicitly critiquing Collins’ ideas on certain subjects related to scientific research – not any particular label that one might apply to him.

To: Gus diZerega
From: David Edward Oliver, BS.
My name is David Edward Oliver and I am writing to let you know I really enjoyed your beliefnet blogs. I have read books on Paganism so I know somethings about what Pagans believe. I admit I come from a Christian faith and I attended a Christian School and even graduated from a Christian College (Liberty University) I fell away from the faith which cause me to reject Christianity everything else in my life. I admit I admire people of faith and I have some questions for you. Wiccans claim to do know harm but would you cast a curse to stop someone who is going to committ murder? Sometimes doing harm is only way to fight evil. Do pagans believe in evil? I hope you write back soon and I do look forward to hearing from you. – Most Sincerely; David Edward Oliver, BS.

David-
That’s worth a post of its own. I’ll have one up for you shortly.

Um… Apuleius Platonicus, I don’t see Bookhousegal making “wiggle room”, but I do see you putting words into other people’s mouths. As for Watts, yes, he was certainly an “evil fascist pig,” but where do you think he got his anti-environment, anti-rock, anti-life worldview? Don’t imagine that it’s unconnected to his evangelical X-tian upbringing. There are a good many X-tians who nevertheless grow up to be good, compassionate people, but all too many who happily cling to the worst elements of the bizarre conglomeration of contradictory elements that make up modern X-tianity. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find out how a public official views the world, for whatever reason, before handing over the keys to the country.

>> Artor: I don’t see Bookhousegal making “wiggle room” > Artor: but where do you think he [Watts] got his anti-environment, anti-rock, anti-life worldview? Don’t imagine that it’s unconnected to his evangelical X-tian upbringing.