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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.
As an atheist myself, I certainly don't succumb to this failing. If one sincerely believes in that their holy book is the Word of God and doesn't contort themselves into knots when the literal interpretation is inconvenient, then yes, performing jihad or other activities offensive to modern western sensibilities is the right thing to do.
I agree with Yudkowsky that the men who flew the planes into the WTC were many things, but not cowards.
Since I aim to be sincere in my beliefs with minimal delusions of convenience, I respect such adherents more than insincere mealy-mouthed Cultural Catholics or the "moderate" Muslims who eat pork, smoke and drink while nominally calling themselves Muslim. Do I get along better with such people than a Hamas operative? Of course, doesn't mean I don't respect them less.
As has been discussed before, religion both shapes and is shaped by the human carriers of its memeplex. Beliefs and traditions that are grossly bad for flourishing (in the sense that the humans who believe them tend to die early without reproducing), tend to be marginalized or explained away. Despite believing that Life is Dukkha, the average Buddhist doesn't have the stomach to starve themselves to death. Things like excessive fasting, self-flagellation and the like usually die out, but as always, there's plenty of ruin in a civilization, and plenty of bad things persist or arise de novo.
Think of it as exactly analogous to the competing drives of a virus seeking to infect humans. On one hand, they want to maximize the number of copies of themselves, on the other hand, they wish to persist (in a metaphorical sense, virii don't actually want anything at all).
If a virus disregards the health of the host and maximizes reproduction, then it usually causes debilitating illness or even death, and in most cases, prevents further spread of the virus.
Hence, in combination with host-immunity, viruses tend towards becoming as benign as possible. This is not out of any charitable inclination, since they're strictly agnostic to the host's wellbeing, it just happens to be robust way of ensuring its own goals are met.
The typical mainstream religion today is cowpox to the smallpox of a brand new cult, it has adapted to not get too much in the way of human desires and affairs, or provoke frenzied behavior that leads to itself dying out or being stamped out.
On the other hand, for a new virus/cult, it might make sense to maximize infectiousness or zeal in the early stages when it has to overcome other competitors, and then let itself mellow out when it's dominant.
I personally know plenty of moderate Muslims, both at home and abroad, and they don't strike me as particularly evil people, the majority have, with various degrees of self-doubt and internal conflict, adopted the tenets of their religion that aren't too much of a hindrance for normal life while avoiding the drive to murder and kill in the name of the Prophet. They might be more zealous than average, or at least the average Muslim is compared to the average Hindu/Jew/Christian/Buddhist, but Islam is a religion that was designed to minimize value drift, as the Prophet declared all prophets after him as false, and their culture strongly endorses a literal interpretation of the Koran and Hadith, not that that removes all room for sectarian splits. There's also the strong stigma against apostasy, making the average lukewarm Muslim keep the branding from convenience if nothing else.
Even then, that can't last forever under the cold imperatives of incentive, and I don't think Islam is worth losing too much sleep over, certainly not to the extent the majority of its adherents deserve to die, even though I don't disagree that they're not the most desirable immigrants to the West, not if you want to keep liberal culture intact.
The fact that you think Islam isn’t worth losing “too much sleep over” is akin to a blue state New Englander saying that illegal immigration has no negative consequences worth worrying about. Geography saves you from having to live with the consequences of your tolerance, which amounts to little more than a virtue signal.
Atheists have spent decades now sweating and tryharding to explain how Muslims are really no worse than Christians, when only one of those two religions is throwing gays off buildings and subjecting women to state-sanctioned torture if they get too uppity. It’s a meme at this point that the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church was considered one of the most evil men in the world while having opinions that would be considered a bit too gentle by more than half the Middle East. Whether you were or are one of those atheists, that level of disingenuous both-sidesing demands a sharp rebuke.
Record scratch.
You do know that I'm an Indian right? We've got so many Muslims here that if it was just them, we'd be one of the largest Islamic nations, there's over 200 million of them.
And there are plenty of them in the UK too, where I'm likely to live in the foreseeable future.
Did your eyes gloss over the part where I said I considered Muslims more fanatical on average than most other major religions? Still not worth "losing sleep" over, and I even suggested checks on immigration from the most traditional countries.
Do tell, if you still think I'm a disinterested observer with no stake in the matter.
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