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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.
The quote from Sam made me chuckle. This was my "dumb normie" understanding of Islam back when I began trying to understand it a decade ago. The violence, sex slavery, torture, and oppression are a feature, not a bug. They made Islam successful. No amount of historical whataboutism from people who are still mad that they had to attend Sunday service as kids will change this.
The only Muslim that a non-Muslim can coexist peacefully with is an unobservant one, and even then there's the Agent Smith risk that you correctly identified. Fast food and unlimited porn aren't going to fix that. Just look at Europe.
The culture didn't develop "antibodies," its religion was displaced/cannibalized by the growth of heresy/new religion that is even more destructive. The religion of the elites and then the masses slowly changed to Enlightenment humanism and soft/hard persecuted any decisive action in the name of the Christian religion. There are plenty of Christian men who would be willing to pick up a sword in the name of Christendom today, but they're not allowed to organize. In fact their own leaders discourage it, since many of them are converts to the new religion themselves, consciously or otherwise.
Isn't this a contradiction? On the one hand, you bemoan the dilution of some truer, nobler Christianity of the past, presumably sullied in your view by forces such as the reformation and liberalism. Instead you would seem to want Christians to behave as they did in the Crusades and fight back against the intrusion of those with a foreign religion.
But then that would surely bring you closer in your Christianity to Islam, undermining your Muslim exceptionalism claim.
From my perspective, the main difference with Islam vs. Christianity is that Islam was started by a warlord and the tales of his good deeds include beheading all the men of a Jewish tribe that had surrendered. I think this is going to result in a religion that is much different from one started by (either in reality or simply in story) a former carpenter who preached peace and turning the other cheek.
Did he circumcise an entire tribe and kill them the next day when they were recovering?
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This seems likely to me too, but it could be a genetic fallacy. Islam, after all, is known as the religion of peace. Though presumably the peace comes when everyone is Muslim...
...or in heaven
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