Atheist declares war on religion ! - reads the headlines. In the abstract it sounds so gallant, so quixotic: the charge of the light atheist brigade, boldly they rode into the valley of death... On the surface it's got broad appeal -  Logic over superstition ! Reason over faith ! As it turns out, Sam Harris' thought is not the stuff of pure logic and reason as John Gorenfeld illustrated in a January 5, 2007 piece entitled Sam Harris's Faith in Eastern Spirituality and Muslim Torture:

The thrust of Harris's best-sellers is that with the world so crazed by religion, it's high time Americans stopped tolerating faith in the Rapture, the Resurrection and anything else not grounded in evidence. Only trouble is, our country's foremost promoter of "reason" is also supportive of ESP, reincarnation and other unscientific concepts. Not all of it is harmless yoga class hokum -- he's also a proponent of waterboarding and other forms of torture. . .

Harris's work has won a surprising following among nonmystics. Times science writer Natalie Angier felt "vindicated, almost personally understood" reading it, she wrote in a review. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has practically adopted Harris as the American Robin to his Batman in confronting unreason wherever it may lurk in the hearts of men. "The End of Faith" should "replace the Gideon Bible in every hotel room in the land," blurbs Dawkins.

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When that happens, Muslims will check into the Best Western and find a text cheering their torture.

Gorenfeld's article covered a number of aspects to Sam Harris' ideas that somehow have escaped widespread notice but there's more to Harris' darker side than merely his advocacy of torture (especially when applied to Muslims). In an op-ed on the Huffington Postm Harris wrote:

"[R]eligious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that the very ideal of religious tolerance--born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God--is one of the principal forces driving us towards the abyss."

One can find entire books on this theme, from leaders on the American right and Christian right: intolerance is good ! It's a virtue ! The theme gets used to propell various sorts of bigotry and also Christian nationalism.

Of course, the issue of "tolerance" vs. "intolerance" is a tricky one because human societies reserve the right to collectively condemn various acts and behavior as "intolerable", which in context is another way to designate acts which violate shared societal norms. But, Sam Harris isn't talking about that sort of intolerance. Rather, he's claiming we shouldn't allow people to hold certain beliefs and he expresses that with the grim eliminationalist assertion:

"Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. . . . There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense."

Although I agreed with most of Chris Hedges' significant arguments put forth in his book "American Fascists" (which I have read) it was often light on substantiating charges Hedges leveled against the Christian right. But "I Don't Believe In Atheists" seems rooted in Chris Hedges' strongest experiential resume, in both his theological training, at Harvard Divinity School and the decade Hedges spent, in war torn Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere, as a war correspondent for the New York Times - so it's almost certainty on stronger ground. Hedges is at  his most persuasive, in my view, when he draws upon his understanding of human nature developed from witnessing humans at war and caught up in war.

To understand that most humans are actually capable, under the right conditions, of acts of mass violence is to become acutely aware of the problems of evil and sin - regardless of whether one couches those in a religious idiom or not. By "evil" and "sin" I mean, here, that which humans are capable of, our potential to do violence. Chris Hedges has witnessed some of this potential and so he is acutely sensitize to the danger of denying our inherent destructive potential.

Several years ago I became interested in the question of how human beings are able to commit acts of mass violence. It seems unimaginable... except, of course, to people who have witnessed acts of mass violence, perpetrated them or survived massacres. As it turns out, it is not actually very difficult to condition average human beings to carry out acts of astonishing brutality. A recent, groundbreaking work by the psychologist James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2002) explores that process. Explains Waller:

"To offer a psychological explanation for the atrocities committed by perpetrators is not to forgive, justify or condone their behavior. Instead, the explanation simply allows us to understand the conditions under which many of us could be transformed into killing machines. When we understand the ordinariness of extraordinary evil, we will be less surprised by evil, less likely to be unwitting contributors to evil, and perhaps better equipped to forestall evil."

Later, I was moved to compile, in a Talk To Action piece, "a short compendium of research into methods and processes by which human instinctual inhibitions can be bypassed or dampened such that average human beings can be socially conditioned to carry out acts of genocide and mass violence against fellow members of their own species, even against their neighbors.", entitled How Average Humans Can Be Conditioned To Carry Out Acts Of Mass Violence One of the important steps in the process by which human beings can be conditioned to carry out ( or condone ) acts of mass violence is dehumanization : "they" are fundamentally different from "us". Let me take an excerpt from a February 7, 2006 piece, by Sam Harris, with the rather grandiose title Sam Harris on the Reality of Islam published on Truthdig.com, to illustrate how this works. Harris' original piece generated a great deal of controversy, and so he followed up later with the following. Harris starts out by noting he's been critical of other religious traditions than just Islam:

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I am extremely critical of all religious faiths. I have argued elsewhere that the ascendancy of Christian conservatism in American politics should terrify and embarrass us. I have argued that the religious dogmatism of the Jewish settlers could well be the cause of World War III.

Having asserted his credentials as an ostensibly unbiased observer, Harris moves on to:

And yet, there are gradations to the evil that is done in name of God... there is a direct link between the doctrine of Islam and Muslim violence. Acknowledging this link remains especially taboo among political liberals...

In other words, "liberals" are in denial, weak and unrealistic concerning the threat of militant Islam. Harris then moves on to a series of unsupportable and a-historic assertions:

The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.

Unlike Sam Harris, University of Chicago professor Robert A. Pape has actually researched the relationship of Islam to suicide bombing by way of compiling, with the help of teams of graduate students, the world's largest database on suicide terrorism, and Pape summarizes the results of that research in the 2005 book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (link to interview with Pape published in American Conservative magazine. Here is a 1-hour video interview with Pape). In the interview, Pape states:

Over the past two years, I have collected the first complete database of every suicide-terrorist attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004.... This wealth of information creates a new picture about what is motivating suicide terrorism. Islamic fundamentalism is not as closely associated with suicide terrorism as many people think. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group that you may not be familiar with: the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. This is a Marxist group, a completely secular group that draws from the Hindu families of the Tamil regions of the country. They invented the famous suicide vest for their suicide assassination of Rajiv Ghandi in May 1991. The Palestinians got the idea of the suicide vest from the Tamil Tigers.

Sam Harris tries to counter the secular origins of suicide terrorism, according to Pape, by claiming that it's somehow significant that the Tamil Tigers draw members from a Hindu population. But, note Pape's unequivocal language; the Tamils are "completely secular" and that's unsurprising given they're a Marxist group. In other arguments, Harris has actually asserted that the death toll associated with Stalin-era Russia did not happen under an atheist or a-religious regime, and Harris tries to pull a similar stunt by claiming that even if the Tamils aren't Muslims they're nonetheless quasi-religious due to the Hindu population from which the group draws it's membership. So : the reigning world expert, who has extensively studied the issue, states:

The central fact is that overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland.

Getting back to Sam Harris' extended vilification of Islam, Harris then pulls out the "we must fight them over there or else we'll eventually be fighting them over here" argument:

Unless the world’s Muslims can find some way of expunging the metaphysics that is fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the world....

But Robert A. Pape states, unequivocally:

Since suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism, the use of heavy military force to transform Muslim societies over there, if you would, is only likely to increase the number of suicide terrorists coming at us.

Then, Sam Harris moves along to almost perfectly invert the history of European colonial adventurism in the Middle East which goes back, to put it with blackest sarcasm, 'a little ways'...

...it is clear that the doctrine of Islam poses unique problems for the emergence of a global civilization.... Islam is undeniably a religion of conquest. The only future devout Muslims can envisage—as Muslims—is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, politically subjugated, or killed.

It's difficult to understand what Harris is talking about unless he's somehow being projected from a parallel Earth in which Jihadist suicide armies are at the gates of New York, Brussels, Paris and Tokyo. But back on the Earth where we live, European powers and later the United States, have bombed, invaded, occupied, manipulated and coerced nations and territories in the Middle East with dreary frequency to the point that it's really not possible to say what the character of Islam or the cultures in the region might be had the area simply been left alone. Further, unless Sam Harris is indeed being projected from a parallel reality, he's aware of that history and his allegation that Islam is a "religion of conquest" is possible, yes - if Islamic countries had the preponderance of force they might well prone to attack neighboring, non-Islamic countries. The current fact, though, is that the history of the region, up to this day, is one of Christian and western nations using coercive force in the region and Sam Harris claims are risible given the current US invasion and occupation of Iraq, generally acknowledged to have been based on false premises and which has been attributed, by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, to have been mainly about controlling Iraq's oil resources. Then, Sam Harris moves in for the propagandistic kill:

...Devout Muslims can have no doubt about the reality of Paradise or about the efficacy of martyrdom as a means of getting there. Nor can they question the wisdom and reasonableness of killing people for what amount to theological grievances.... the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world....

"They" want to conquer the world : Evidence for that claim ? I'm sure Harris has plenty of arguments. But back on the Earth where we live, American Christian fundamentalists are doing their best, amidst the United States occupation of Iraq, to convert Iraqis to Christianity. As far as subjugation goes, polls tend to show that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops to leave their country. As a final touch, Sam Harris hauls at the menacing:

Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is, after all, little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons

IN short - "they're" insane. "They" do not value, as we do, human life and so if they acquire nuclear weapons they will not behave in a predictable, sane and human manner. "They" will immediately lash out and bomb the US or Israel and accept the consequences as their country is bombed into vitrified glass, it's civilian population vaporized. What are readers apt to take away from this hateful propagandistic screed ? The implication is that by some magical, allegedly corrupting force of Islam, "they" have been changed - "they" are less than human. The text cited from Sam Harris, above, functions as one of the preliminary steps necessary for conditioning humans to carry out acts of mass violence.

Given that Sam Harris has suggested that it's ethical to kill people for their beliefs, it's possible to interpret his writing as advocating preemptive mass killing, on a level that's truly genocidal, of entire population groups. Harris would likely deny it, but it seems possible to take away such an understanding from Harris' work and that point gets at an observation of Chris Hedges that I feel bears widespread discussion: what Sam Harris and John Hagee alike appear to espouse is the doctrine that the world can be purified, evil somehow categorically banished, through acts of mass violence. This is not a new idea - Hitler and the Nazis held such a doctrine, of perfecting the world through violence and it was not a new idea then. Now, however, with nuclear weapons we can inflict "cleansing" violence upon the world at an unprecedented level, on a global scale.

The problem with utopian think, at base, is its insistence that the world can perfected, that by some course of human action human existence will be forever improved - war and conflict banished (a secular utopian vision), the thousand year Reich (a mystical utopian vision), the thousand year rule of Jesus (a religious utopian vision) - and the belief that some basic flaw can be eradicated from history often leads to totalistic, apocalyptic programs of violence.

As Hedges tells Wilder in the Salon interview:

I write in the book that not believing in God is not dangerous. Not believing in sin is very dangerous. I think both the Christian right and the New Atheists in essence don't believe in their own sin, because they externalize evil. Evil is always something out there that can be eradicated. For the New Atheists, it's the irrational religious hordes. I mean, Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world. Both Hitchens and Harris defend the use of torture. Of course, they're great supporters of preemptive war, and I don't think this is accidental that their political agendas coalesce completely with the Christian right.

One transcendent point Hedges touches on is the tendency of utopian thinking to warp human moral sensibilities. "We", who have ourselves defined "them" as evil also presume to sit in judgement and even to destroy "them". In theological terms, and in many different religions, that reduces to a human claim to divinity or, as Hedges puts it, "self worship" (which I take as essentially the same charge). Toward the end of the Salon interview Charly Wilder asks Hedges:

If we're afraid to privilege Enlightenment values, don't we run the risk of sanctioning religious rituals that discriminate against women and minorities?

Which Hedges responds:

"...I'm not a cultural relativist. I don't think that if you live in Somalia, it's fine to mutilate little girls. There is nothing wrong with taking a moral stand, but when we take a moral stand and then use it to elevate ourselves to another moral plane above other human beings, then it becomes, in biblical terms, a form of self-worship. That's what the New Atheists have, and that's what the Christian fundamentalists have."

Oddly, religious systems, despite Sam Harris vigorous scouring of religious traditions generally, are actually better equipped to resist these sorts of presumptions, of being on a higher moral plane whereas someone making the same presumption, in a secular context, is not so easy to rebut. The religiously based rebuke to such behavior is the charge of some sort of blasphemy or heresy and comes down, really, to the charge: How dare you! But rationalist, or pseudo rationalist at any rate, arguments made by someone such as Sam Harris can't be swatted down so efficiently.

Neither Sam Harris or John Hagee makes the claim that 1.3 bilion of the world's Muslims are just no good. But they achieve that charge quite effectively, starting with: Islam is bad ! Harris, Hagee, and others in the business of painting Islam as an inherently bloodthirsty and expansionist religion (bent on conquering and subjugating if not killing Christians and Jews) focus on specific unpleasant passages, in the Koran and the Hadeeth, and the vilification of religious traditions, by plucking out specific bits of scripture, works quite well for demonizing Christianity via the Old Testament and for demonizing Judaism via the Torah and the Talmud. Indeed, the Nazi propaganda film "The Eternal Jew" features a section of the film devoted to the proposition that Jews are mercenary, conspiratorial, murderers, rapists and so on because they're told to be that way in Jewish scripture.

There's a considerable cadre of speakers and publicists currently working the national circuit in the US (and to a lesser extent in Europe and the UK) making arguments which claim Muslims are bad because they have bad religious beliefs, and there are few currently working to rebut such hate speech. Chris Hedges' concern, and it's one I fully share, is that in the event of another major terrorist attack within the US there could be a "call for an assault on Muslims, both outside our gates and on the 6 million Muslims who live within our borders. And that frightens me, that demonization of a people -- turning human beings into abstractions, so that they're not human anymore. They don't have hopes, dreams, aspirations, pains, sufferings. They represent an unmitigated evil... that is at the bedrock of the ideology of the New Atheists as it is with the Christian fundamentalists."

There are few currently with the awareness and moral clarity to see such ongoing demonization for what it is and for where it can lead - Chris Hedges is one.