At the risk of taking this thread even further afield –
Is anyone familiar with Sam Harris’ book End of Faith? It is ostensibly a critique of the
irrationality of religion and how the human race just has to get over it to survive. The middle third or
so is, as far as I’m concerned, the real purpose of the book, that is a vicious Islamophobic rant.
Believe me, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage have nothing on this guy. He advocates taking over
middle eastern countries but in a more “benign” way than we have up to this point and then making
a “space for civil society to grow” — and oh, but of course we should make it look like it really came
from inside those societies so they won’t catch on that it is us trying to change them. As an example
of his razor-sharp reasoning, Harris makes a near-hallucinatory argument for torture, saying that it’s
“hypocritical” (I think he must really mean “inconsistent”) to accept collateral damage from our bombings and other escapades on the one hand, but to be squeamish about torture on the other —
so the solution for Harris is to learn to accept torture, perhaps with pharmacological aids if necessary to mask the agony of those being tortured (so the torturers aren’t psychologically damaged!).

IMO Harris gives away his game entirely in the book and in pieces he wrote in the LA Times and
Washington Times when he states flatly and categorically that there is absolutely no valid
explanation other than radical Islam for the terrorism coming out of the middle east (he explicitly
rejects socioeconomic considerations or consideration of US military and political intervention). After
all, he says, there are oppressed people all over the place, but only these ones have the bad taste to
strike back to such devastating effect (I didn’t mention that Harris is fixated on suicide bombers) —
so what could their problem be if not their religion?

He mocks (or at least attempts to mock) Noam Chomsky at one point, saying that all Chomsky wants to pay attention to is “body count” when clearly the West’s superior and benign intentions need to be taken into account in comparative moral reckonings between Us and Them. (oh, and of course US/Israel has “moral high ground” over Hamas/Hezbollah because “we” go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties while “they” purposely target the innocent — and this written after the Israel/Hezbollah conflict this summer).

I know the phrase gets used alot, but you can’t make this shit up.

At any rate, Harris looks like the perfect poster boy for some of the things Stan, Yolanda Carrington,
and Denander say above.
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For an interesting take on what it means to be a committed leftist and still feel a need to connect
with familiar spiritual traditions without necessarily being a religious person, there is a series of
three or four pieces by Robert Jensen (the U of Texas/Austin journalism professor many of you may
be familiar with) on Counterpunch. too lazy to link them here, but just go to counterpunch.org and
search say “Jensen religion” and see what comes up.

I am 53 years old and still continuing to discover what it means to be a preacher’s kid from an
isolated farming community in Iowa who has also been an activist of some sort since about the age of 15.
Yolanda, I especially appreciated your comments about your family in this regard. Thank you all for
some really good discussion that has definitely helped me move my thinking along.

Thanks for the debunking of this belief system in the preceding comments; reading them was quite a pleasure.

but even secular revolutionary sentiment arises at its best from a sense of the sacred — El Che said all revolutionaries should be driven by love, love of the people and love of life. and that is another way of talking about the sacred, no? the sense of sacredness, of values that are sufficient per se and do not revolve around our personal/human convenience and self-aggrandisement, is behind our resistance to slavery, our resistance to extirminism, our love of place, our love of community.

one doesn’t have to believe in a Big Bearded Guy Up In The Sky to acknowledge and defend the realm of the sacred….

Feynman said that understanding fluid dynamics doesn’t make the ocean any less beautiful. it makes it even more beautiful, more mysterious, more delightful. understanding the microbiology of soil ought to inspire us with more awe and respect for what goes on in every tablespoon of the stuff, sustaining all landlife on the planet.

well I’m wandering here, trapped at the crossroad of my own lifetime in Big Science and my painful awareness of the lunacy of Cartesian reductionism on which much of that science is based.

amen to that

Hornborg’s commentary (which I was just reading this morning) on the function of the sacred in ensuring sustainability, would be very relevant here. it is the only bulwark against totalising instrumentalism.

I would also add that absolutist secularism is a byproduct of white male privilege. The rational scientific philosophical traditions we employ to arrive at “objective truth” were developed by white men, and tend to be most accessible to white men with access to higher levels of education (read: university schooling). Also, the hypothetical “reasonable person” that drives philosophical-scientific inquiry reflects white man standpoint, and as a consquence rational inquiry has never been the most user-friendly tool for women. So whose secular “truth” are we talking about anyway?

Is it any coincidence that most dedicated religious folks globally are women of color? I don’t think so.

The Dems are part of the same ruling class! Why dont you run as a third party instead of supporting the Dems? You are smart and charismatic and a good speaker.

Say it aint so Stan.

No one knows when there will be a revolution, complexity theory right? So why not try to push in every way possible for the revolution rather than supporting the other party of the same oppressive state.

The three predominant Abrahamic religious traditions were all shaped not merely by religious beliefs but by the socioeconomic structures of the societies in whch they emerged. Pastoral and patriarchal, slave-holding, and pre-feudally monarchical. There is a reason that we hear acolytes called sheep and stories of the blood of the lamb of God (pastoral economy), and have references (later reinforced in translation during the rise of European feudalism) to the King of Kings (this is a political position, no?).

While I am certainly, personally, a heathen, I find militant atheists — for the most part — to be most concerned with demonstrating their individual intellectual superiority over those ignorant religionists. It’s an illusory position in my experience. Most of those who make the extremely superficial claim that “religion begets violence, yada yada yada” (with nil reference to actual material social conditions) couldn’t contend as debaters in the same room with a prophetic Black minister that I saw last week in Durham, nor with the likes of, say, Paul Tillich. And, of course, the militant secularists (anti-religionists) have about as much chance to connect with real masses of real people to do real social action as I do of becoming a US Senator from North Carolina.

They seem to be smugly satisfied with their discovery that no one is really watching, but unconcerned with why religion persists the way it does in the face of their evidence… which is often as mystifying as what they critique. It was one of my favorite atheists, Charlie Marx, who pointed out that religion is a reflection of the need for comfort and meaning in a painfully reified world. He didn’t say the critique of religion was an end in itself, He called it a “prerequisite” to getting at the real root causes of human misery that were rooted in oppressive secular social power. He said that, “Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” This oft misunderstood phrase needs one clarification… back then, opium was widely and commonly used as a pain-killer (not a high), so this might better translate today as “religion is the aspirin of the people.”

In other words, opposing religion is opposing the fever (which is the body’s defense) instead of the pathogen.

The so-called Objectivity of many secularists, as we have discussed herabouts at some length, is every bit as mystical as transmogrification or visitation by a ti loa at a Haitian gede. We might be better off spending our time fighting the religious fallacy that “money grows” than engaging in what I call the “fish wars” — the competing bumper-decals between seculars and Christians. The most destructive world religion today is Economics.

In my own political life, I have found fewer more effective or constant allies than politically active faith-communities. They share the same political goals as many of us on the left. The difference between us and them, that I have seen, living here in the American South, is that people listen to them. Imagine these same anti-religionists in 1967 — say — opposing the Civil Rights struggle, which was a religiously led mass movement.