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Notes -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
I don't think the 'inoculation' idea is realistic, those ideologies have been turned towards justifying plenty of atrocities in recent history (slavery, native genocides, etc). I think that any religion could be turned towards those ends if that's what its leaders and zealots want to be doing with their time.
(Well, maybe not the Jains. You always gotta caveat the Jains.)
To whit:
I don't think there's really a conflict between these two views, as evidenced by the fact the Christians and Jews who live comfortably in peaceful societies don't commit this type of sadism and murder en masse.
Yes, people need a justification for doing horrible things, something that lets them tell themselves a story about how they are justified or good. Religion is one of several things that can provide this type of justification.
But people also need a motivation to do horrible things. The justification isn't itself a motivation, it just allows you to act on that motive, and live with yourself afterwards.
Terrible conditions are one of several things that can provide this type of motive.
To stop horrible things happening en masse, we can get rid of all the justifications, or we can get rid of all the motives. Or, ideally, both.
I think that working on the motives is lower-hanging fruit, partially because people can just invent new justifications really easily when they want to, but mostly because the motivations are usually themselves stemming from bad things that it is good to fix.
I think that's a lot of the lefty view of these systems and how to address them, and I don't think it's incompatible with these insights into religious justifications. As an atheist, I'm fully capable of intellectually understanding what that perspective would look like to someone who actually believed it, and at the same time thinking that cleaning up the terrible conditions pushing them into those actions is the best way to solve the problem.
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