To start, even people living under rocks heard about this exchange — troubling and fascinating in equal measure — a couple weeks ago on Bill Maher's Real Time.
It's pretty obvious Sam's near supercomputer ability to instantaneously call forth essential facts about Islam began causing many of Ben's ideological walls, which he probably cherished and thought were rock-solid, to crumble, and the resulting apoplexy almost turned him into his O'Bannion character from Dazed and Confused for real.
The reactionary racism accusation/straw man and the "shifty Jew" analogy were completely obnoxious, infantile, and inappropriate. Islam is not a race; it is a religion...a collection of dated ideals, apocryphal stories, and mostly backward morals which could only have lasted this long in our culture thanks to an extreme dedication on the part of humans to ignoring evidence and dismissing reason. Is someone racist for criticizing Christianity? The password is "no." As he often does, Harris was making an eloquent, reasoned argument along these lines, and Affleck was simply sticking his fingers in his ears and having a tantrum ridiculous enough to make an 8 year-old blanch. Further proof that you are just NOT allowed to criticize religion, not even in a calm, factual, and rational manner, in front of some people.
The shock waves from this titanic television event are still rippling through the blogosphere and Web.
After linking to that SFGate blog post, do I even need to mention once again that you are just not allowed to criticize religion?
A few days after his appearance on Maher's show, Sam was interviewed on The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, mostly about the heated debate (not surprisingly, Sam's doing the talk show rounds to sell a book, and his publisher must be doing backflips over all the attention). The entire discussion is worth watching, but I want to focus on one question O'Donnell posed and Harris' response.
Lawrence O'Donnell: "Sam, I think one of the things we are talking about here, uh, uh, uh, or that's involved here is the maturation curves of religions. Christendom, uh, was once a pretty murderous operation."
Sam Harris: "Yeah."
Lawrence O'Donnell: "The Inquisition was all about murdering people for not being, uh, good Christians, and not being convincing Christians after they had, uh, converted. Uh, just conversion wasn't good enough, and so, so, uh, but, but what happened at some point was that Christianity matured out of that thinking, and they matured out of thinking that the penalty for not observing the Sabbath should be death. And so no one is killed anywhere in the world now for not observing the Sabbath. No one is stoned to death for that..."
Sam Harris: "Right."
Lawrence O'Donnell: "...anymore. So, I guess, what, what I'm looking at when I look at, at this situation now, uh, with, uh, this fanatical interpretation of passages of the Quran is when and how will, will that same maturation curve be followed, uh, in Islam?"
Sam Harris: "Well, the first thing to point out is we don't have centuries to wait for this process. It took centuries, as you say, and, and..."
Lawrence O'Donnell: "Yes."
Sam Harris: "...it was based on the collision with science, and secular human rights, and, and secular ethics. Uh, it took a long time. We need, we need to hasten this process through honest conversation."
Let's just skip over the fact that O'Donnell does not seem to understand that religion did not so much "mature" as have its fangs and claws torn out in the West by enlightenments and highly-influential, legally-binding, secular documents like the US Constitution (factors largely lacking in the Middle East), and get right to the essence of what Sam said...
We don't have centuries to wait...collisions with science...hastening the process through honest conversation...
When I heard those words, I couldn't help but think that they may no longer apply to Western religion's greatly attenuated murderous nature, but when it comes to faith's retrograde effect on the urgency of the climate change issue and discussion, they unfortunately are still relevant to the point of being painfully poignant.
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