If Books Could Kill - Sam Harris's ＂The End of Faith＂

00:00:00.000 i have no zings except for joking about how sam harris is racist that'll be the focus of the

00:00:06.120 episode so it's not the worst we don't want to spoil the episode the thing i really want to give 0.95

00:00:10.260 him shit for is if you listen to his podcast he never says um or uh or any other filler words he 0.96

00:00:16.280 just pauses for like minutes i mean they're so fucking boring anyway i can excuse racism but long 1.00

00:00:22.700 pauses they're either about how muslims aren't people or meditation yeah he's like clear your 0.99

00:00:30.700 mind all right we we are back the filthy mongrels of palestine are attacking israel free your mind 0.99

00:00:37.900 of all thoughts other than ranking of the races empty your mind of all your biases 0.99

00:00:42.560 create a castle at the top white people oh oh oh oh oh i have one i have one i have one okay

00:00:49.500 All right. Michael. Peter. What do you know about The End of Faith? 0.58

00:00:54.300 All I know is that this book was the end of mine in Sam Harris.

00:01:11.580 I like that zinger because it was the first thing he ever did.

00:01:15.640 okay that's well whatever don't fact check the zinger 0.96

00:01:19.500 boom keeping michael hobbs honest on the if books could kill podcast fuck we're also continuing our 0.80

00:01:28.560 tradition of the zinger being the least funny thing about the opening to the show at no point 0.88

00:01:32.560 has the zinger ever been we've maybe done one zinger that was actually funny good the theory

00:01:37.560 behind the zinger and that you once told me explicitly if you play the music right after

00:01:44.600 the zinger it presents as if it were a joke and people will enjoy it the same yeah people will

00:01:50.220 think that it is funny if the music tells them that it's funny because the first couple episodes

00:01:53.580 remember we only came up with the idea of that like five episodes in so a bunch of our early

00:01:58.540 episodes you just like said something normal you're like i haven't heard of this book and

00:02:02.280 it's like people think it's like a joke we're using tricks of psychology to get you to enjoy

00:02:07.820 this podcast we've actually never said anything funny on the show there's the magic of editing

00:02:12.080 There's the magic of editing.

00:02:13.160 So, yeah, the book is The End of Faith by Sam Harris.

00:02:16.780 Came out in 2004 when he was just a guy with a degree in philosophy.

00:02:23.380 He was a student pursuing his Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience. 0.93

00:02:28.380 He's sort of a Nepo baby. 0.99

00:02:30.000 His mom is Susan Harris, who's a renowned writer and producer, most famous for Golden Girls. 1.00

00:02:35.920 Okay. 0.92

00:02:37.140 Are you pausing to let me say something gay about how I watch Golden Girls?

00:02:40.920 I almost didn't want to mention it on the episode in case someone enjoyed Golden Girls and then I was going to ruin it a little.

00:02:46.980 He's such a he's such a mod.

00:02:49.020 He's such a he's such a what are the names of the characters on that show?

00:02:51.960 Yeah. And who's the most racist?

00:02:53.580 That's that's him.

00:02:55.200 So this book really launched the phenomenon of new atheism, a very popular political and cultural movement that openly challenged theism and religion.

00:03:08.560 I had a tough time figuring out what this episode would be about

00:03:11.560 because New Atheism, it's like this big sprawling movement

00:03:15.820 with tons of different characters.

00:03:18.360 Sam Harris himself is extremely prolific.

00:03:21.580 He's a huge podcaster.

00:03:23.200 He appears on TV all the time.

00:03:25.040 He has some liberal bona fides but extensive ties

00:03:28.500 with a bunch of right-wing creeps.

00:03:30.540 He's like a consistent peddler of race and IQ science.

00:03:34.540 He's a big anti-woke guy.

00:03:36.940 And this book, in many ways, is just very boring.

00:03:41.840 And all of these new atheism books are sort of very boring in a way that is not conducive

00:03:48.000 to our podcast.

00:03:49.920 Yeah.

00:03:50.640 Like, remember, you once tried to do a little behind-the-scenes action here for our listeners.

00:03:56.020 You once tried to do the Christopher Hitchens atheism book.

00:03:58.820 Yeah, I couldn't do it.

00:03:59.340 And it was so boring that you just had to stop. 0.75

00:04:01.020 Yeah, he's awful.

00:04:01.500 You just texted me one day being like, I can't do it.

00:04:03.640 I'm going to do the anxious generation.

00:04:04.900 There was a time in my life where like I thought it was an interesting intellectual exercise to try to talk people out of their like most deeply cherished beliefs, right?

00:04:15.020 Or like debate like, oh, is God real?

00:04:17.260 And then I turned like 13 and I just like wasn't interested in doing that anymore.

00:04:22.960 I don't really disagree with any of the arguments in these whatever atheism books.

00:04:27.320 Like I guess I'm an atheist or agnostic or whatever.

00:04:29.320 But it's also just really boring to be like this thing that gives your life a lot of meaning. 1.00

00:04:33.600 It's fucking fake. 0.99

00:04:34.900 four Pinocchios. Yeah. You know, I think that's a good jumping off point for talking about like 1.00

00:04:41.300 the cultural context in which this book existed, because the context has changed to the point where

00:04:47.400 now this all seems kind of silly. Right. Yeah. But if you look at the early aughts in retrospect,

00:04:53.860 it was very obviously primed for an anti-religious political movement. Yeah. Right. Like you have

00:05:00.240 9-11 where we're all exposed to the dangers of fundamentalist religion and which harris says is

00:05:06.780 a catalyst for writing this book he's like 9-11 happened and i started writing whatever oh okay

00:05:11.140 and then at the same time domestically in the united states you had the bush administration

00:05:14.280 yeah yeah which was really governing from an explicitly evangelical posture right and there

00:05:21.040 were a lot of really salient public policy disputes that were sort of undergirded by a

00:05:27.520 religious dispute, right? You had stem cell research, right? This really dynamic research

00:05:32.160 into embryonic stem cells that Bush denied federal funding to. Because they're little

00:05:36.020 tiny babies, because they're actually little tiny babies. You had early debates about gay marriage,

00:05:40.460 right? Which were sort of just starting to pick up steam. You had debates about teaching evolution

00:05:44.940 in the classroom. You had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan being touted by a bunch of politicians

00:05:51.460 as expressly religious.

00:05:53.940 And then maybe most importantly for the career of Sam Harris and his cohort, you have the

00:06:03.440 rise of social media at the same time.

00:06:05.240 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:06:05.960 It was mostly a blog phenomenon.

00:06:07.320 I feel like there were a lot of like blog debates.

00:06:09.180 I think if you back up a little bit, in the 90s, you had message boards that were only

00:06:14.940 accessible to nerds.

00:06:16.620 Yes.

00:06:16.740 And there, there was a prominent community of atheists, right?

00:06:20.380 And message boards get a little bit more mainstream.

00:06:23.880 The blogosphere is picking this up.

00:06:26.520 Facebook and YouTube and Twitter launch in pretty quick succession.

00:06:31.560 With that comes the sort of like online debate culture.

00:06:36.780 I think people underestimate how formative the atheist clique was in that respect. 0.73

00:06:42.660 Like modern like cringe compilations, like feminist embarrasses herself, those sorts of things.

00:06:49.420 Those started with atheists making fun of creationists and other religious people, right?

00:06:55.500 Remember how Richard Dawkins tried to rebrand atheists as brights?

00:07:00.240 He was like the bright community, which is basically just like reproducing all the most obnoxious aspects of organized religion.

00:07:06.620 I'm going to send you a clip.

00:07:08.060 This is Christopher Hitchens talking to Anderson Cooper after the death of Jerry Falwell. 0.99

00:07:16.620 Jerry Falwell, of course, the famous piece of shit reverend. 1.00

00:07:20.460 Yes. 1.00

00:07:21.040 Just a far-right lunatic scumbag. 1.00

00:07:23.600 Speaking of far-right lunatic scumbags, let's watch Christopher Hitchens. 1.00

00:07:29.100 Christopher, I'm not sure if you believe in heaven, but if you do, do you think Jerry Falwell is in it? 0.99

00:07:34.180 No, and I think it's a pity there isn't a hell for him to go to.

00:07:37.380 What is it about him that brings up such vitriol? 0.98

00:07:41.060 Well, the empty life of this ugly little charlatan proves only one thing, that you can get away 0.96

00:07:47.680 with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and to truth in this country if you'll just 0.98

00:07:53.020 get yourself called reverend.

00:07:54.800 Who would, even at your network, have invited on such a little toad to tell us that the

00:08:01.180 attacks of September the 11th were the result of our sinfulness and were God's punishment

00:08:05.680 if they hadn't got some kind of clerical qualification?

00:08:09.100 people like that should be out in the street shouting and horroring with a cardboard sign

00:08:13.700 and selling pencils from a cup the thing is i think that he's wrong here because he says the

00:08:21.420 only way that like a little toad can get on cnn as a credible commentator is if they have reverend

00:08:26.740 in front of their name i think the other way they do that is if they have a british accent

00:08:30.060 christopher it's so funny how insufferable he is even when he's fundamentally correct yeah i know 0.98

00:08:35.580 it felt good to hear him say it, but also shut the fuck up. That is like a huge part of what 0.98

00:08:40.940 made this whole movement popular. Yeah. The ability to sort of throw down the gauntlet and

00:08:47.000 be like, these guys are scumbags. There's also public polling, I think, about sort of who would 0.99

00:08:51.400 you not vote for for president? And like atheist is one of the highest ones. Like people would vote

00:08:55.840 for many like members of minority groups before they would vote for an atheist. Right. So the 0.84

00:09:00.180 fact that there was finally somebody standing up and being like, no, it's actually fine to be an 0.90

00:09:03.420 atheists really did feel good. We are better than minorities. Yes. Of other types. We are brights. 0.99

00:09:09.460 But then what was your what was your journey with this, Peter? Because you were also kind of

00:09:13.180 Dawkins and Harris pilled at a time, right? Right. You have the beard and the bearing of a debate,

00:09:17.920 bro. It is embarrassing. Deep inside every middle class white boy born in the 1980s is the desire to

00:09:24.080 win a debate on the Internet. Yeah. And you have to choose your path, right? Will you be a libertarian

00:09:30.360 or an atheist yeah it's different now now every middle-class white boy born in the 2000s uh has 0.83

00:09:37.100 the desire to do a gay little dance on tiktok or they're an incel those are the two paths available 0.99

00:09:43.060 you're either a straight guy with painted fingernails or you're a school shooter i know 0.96

00:09:47.420 i definitely was like way too into this for way too long and i like i didn't have i didn't have

00:09:51.300 like a cool reason like some people are like i was raised religious and then i broke out of it

00:09:56.700 I definitely was just like, wow, like this is an annoying thing to be.

00:10:01.080 But then what I think is always interesting about the sort of rise and fall of new atheism is how people got out of it.

00:10:06.160 Honestly, I think I just got a job and then I had to stop watching YouTube videos.

00:10:10.280 You literally just got off the internet.

00:10:12.220 I'm like not – I'm not kidding.

00:10:13.760 I don't have – there was like no moment.

00:10:16.380 I just got less interested in it and I think more interested in politics.

00:10:20.320 The one thing that might have like saved me is that I got out of this well before it became really popular.

00:10:28.340 Oh, really?

00:10:28.940 The peak of New Atheism was probably like the early Reddit era of like 2010 to 12.

00:10:36.660 And I had been not interested in it for a couple of years by then.

00:10:40.700 You were an atheist from New Atheism. 0.96

00:10:42.460 This is something we'll talk about in a future episode.

00:10:44.420 But that's when you start to see the split where the reactionaries sort of break off and become a force on the American right.

00:10:53.500 This was actually very important in my sort of philosophical coming of age in that I do think there's like a little reply guy in me that just wants to be right about everything.

00:11:02.640 Like that's what drove my libertarian phase.

00:11:04.820 But I also try to be nice.

00:11:07.020 And like my politics are also very informed by like trying not to ruin people's day or just be shitty to people.

00:11:13.340 and so much of the stuff that was coming out of new atheism was just mean right like obviously

00:11:19.360 organized religion these are institutions that have done major harm but like on an individual

00:11:24.800 level a lot of people just believe things that aren't true but aren't really trying to force it

00:11:29.620 on anybody and it's a driver of meaning in their life and it's like why is it so fucking important

00:11:34.500 to you to take that away from people i think that's a good framing for some of what i want

00:11:39.260 to accomplish in this episode the atheist community ended up being a community of like 0.99

00:11:46.720 just the blandest losers on earth but they had this one one claim to superiority right they were 0.99

00:11:54.460 like we are the more rational ones people who believe in religion are dumb and sam harris is 0.99

00:12:01.140 sort of the final boss of these guys like he's very smart he's very good at debating like really 0.96

00:12:08.260 really talented at it he also believes in his own intelligence so much that he considers it to be a

00:12:16.400 substitute for actual expertise yeah it's incredible and i find that i find that very

00:12:20.440 fascinating in and of itself but also as a sort of like microcosm of the broader movement right

00:12:26.580 and this is where we segue into the portion where i explained that jesus is god how funny would it 0.82

00:12:33.040 be if we just if we just did a fucking like an insane clown posse reveal where we're just like 0.99

00:12:38.020 We're Christians. 0.99

00:12:39.360 What we were actually zinging in the opening was Jesus Christ into your hearts.

00:12:44.460 You know who else had a podcast?

00:12:46.420 What do you think about it?

00:12:48.180 Let's talk about the book here.

00:12:49.740 One thing to mention before we really get going here is that Sam Harris frequently responds

00:12:56.420 to his critics.

00:12:59.340 The only time he doesn't is when he believes that they are arguing in bad faith.

00:13:03.980 And what he defines as bad faith is basically if they are mean to Sam Harris. 0.99

00:13:10.200 If they're like, Sam Harris is an asshole and here's what he said. 0.98

00:13:13.900 Then Sam's like, no, I will not be responding to this indignity. 1.00

00:13:18.920 And so to avoid a response, I'm just going to say, Sam Harris, you are a weird racist 1.00

00:13:25.840 bitch in my view. 1.00

00:13:29.180 I love the idea of including a trigger warning in all of our episodes specifically for the 1.00

00:13:33.860 authors we're talking about. David Brooks, tune out. One of Harris's opening chapters is called

00:13:39.240 The Nature of Belief. And the premise is basically that society privileges religious belief by making

00:13:46.160 it uncouth to criticize. But we should be free to criticize religious belief the way we would

00:13:51.120 any other belief. Sure. So I'm going to send you a little bit. Is this going to be one of those

00:13:56.560 episodes where we're just like, he's right, but he's an asshole? No, this will be this moment 1.00

00:14:00.400 right now will be the last time we have that thought. He says, to be ruled by ideas for which

00:14:08.640 you have no evidence and which therefore cannot be justified in conversation with other human

00:14:12.660 beings is generally a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly there

00:14:17.780 is sanity in numbers and yet it is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal

00:14:23.140 in our society to believe that the creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is

00:14:27.460 demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain

00:14:32.280 tap in morse code on your bedroom window and so while religious people are not generally mad

00:14:37.460 their core beliefs absolutely are oh this is the hitchens thing we're just like too many words

00:14:42.640 to say something basic and it's also just kind of mean spirited classic new atheism right faith is

00:14:48.580 a cop-out and we should evaluate religious claims on their own merits and when we do we realize they 1.00

00:14:54.220 are stupid. But there's actually an interesting academic debate underlying this. One of Harris's 1.00

00:15:01.900 biggest critics on these points is Scott Atran, an anthropologist. He is an expert. He's had a

00:15:07.220 couple of debates with Sam Harris, both written and in person. So Harris is saying that religious

00:15:13.080 belief is an attempt to describe the world. And therefore, we can essentially confront religion

00:15:18.780 in the marketplace of ideas like we would any other belief, right?

00:15:23.500 Atran doesn't totally disagree that religious beliefs serve to make sense of things that

00:15:27.980 we don't understand.

00:15:28.760 But he also argues that religious belief is functionally an evolutionary byproduct that

00:15:34.900 strengthens social cohesion.

00:15:36.520 People participate in religious acts and rituals together, which develops trust and community

00:15:42.940 and establishes social bonds.

00:15:45.140 The outlandishness of much of the religious doctrines and rituals actually serves to accentuate those bonds.

00:15:53.460 So what Atran and other anthropologists are pointing at is that the reason that religious belief isn't as susceptible to rational analysis as scientific beliefs is that they aren't really serving the same purpose.

00:16:05.080 And part of why this is important is that it's necessary to understanding when and why religion produces violence, which is a huge focus for Harris.

00:16:17.520 Harris claims that it's the doctrines themselves, right?

00:16:20.800 The holy books are violent.

00:16:22.980 They endorse violence and therefore people read them and commit violence.

00:16:29.020 But Atran says not really.

00:16:30.940 What's happening is that violence and the willingness to do violence serves as a source of community and interpersonal bonding that feeds into itself and develops into extremism.

00:16:43.300 Sure.

00:16:43.460 I wanted to bring this up because this is emblematic of a big picture critique of Harris's work.

00:16:51.040 There's this vast literature about the function of religion psychologically, sociologically, and he just does not engage with it at all.

00:16:59.260 Right. Of course.

00:16:59.740 There is a really interesting conversation to be had here about why religion develops, how it builds community, how it can create conflict.

00:17:06.680 But Harris is not interested in it because it would undermine his thesis.

00:17:10.320 Maybe if he started to engage with it, he would realize that he's out of his depth and can't actually talk about these things with any authority.

00:17:16.440 I will say another thing that has become a huge red flag for me, and I think the new atheism thing was the first time I noticed it, was people like Sam Harris who think that they can sort of rational mind or like IQ their way into correct beliefs without engaging with the actual evidence.

00:17:33.720 If you're good enough at logic, you don't need to know things.

00:17:37.020 You can just figure it out.

00:17:38.380 Exactly.

00:17:38.720 That is the core principle by which Sam Harris lives, even if he doesn't recognize it.

00:17:44.360 It's also the core principle by which the Slate Star Codex guy lives.

00:17:49.620 I've always said that one of my major assets is that, like, I'm not that smart and I'm not that good at debating, but, like, I'm willing to read stuff.

00:17:56.900 And most of the, like, opinions that I come to are like, well, I read up on this and one person is lying about this debate and one person isn't.

00:18:02.920 But, like, it doesn't take a lot of, like, quote unquote intelligence to do that.

00:18:06.720 That's interesting.

00:18:07.280 I always thought you could benefit from being more smart.

00:18:10.300 Thank you.

00:18:11.380 You have said that to me in private numerous times.

00:18:13.540 Got him, folks. Got him. I am going to send you the opening paragraph of this book edited for

00:18:23.560 brevity by me. It says, the young man boards the bus as it leaves the terminal. He wears an

00:18:29.640 overcoat. Beneath his overcoat, he is wearing a bomb. The bus is crowded and headed for the heart

00:18:34.620 of the city. The young man smiles. With the press of a button, he destroys himself, the couple at

00:18:39.620 his side and 20 others on the bus. The young man's parents soon learn of his fate. Although

00:18:44.340 saddened to have lost a son, they feel tremendous pride at his accomplishment. They know that he has

00:18:49.280 gone to heaven and prepared the way for them to follow. He has also sent his victims to hell for

00:18:53.780 eternity. It is a double victory. The neighbors find the event a great cause for celebration

00:18:58.560 and honor the young man's parents by giving them gifts of food and money. This is all we know for

00:19:03.600 certain about the young man. Why is it so easy then? So trivially easy? You could almost bet

00:19:08.640 your life on it easy to guess the young man's religion. This man is a Scientologist who took

00:19:14.640 a stress test before boarding the bus. Interesting how I described in detail a scenario specifically

00:19:19.980 designed to evoke a certain image, and then that image was evoked. You ever think about that?

00:19:24.980 Wow. Islam crushed with logic. A young man boards the mentions of a tweet by a female 1.00

00:19:30.620 journalist. He corrects her on a trivial factual point orthogonal to her argument. Do I even need

00:19:36.260 to tell you that that man is a sam harris podcast listener there's something very funny about just

00:19:42.680 being like as a justification for racism being like a man commits a crime he has a tattoo with

00:19:52.180 spanish words he says essay out loud uh interesting how i know his race immediately

00:20:01.760 A man hosts a podcast and is obsessed with Eric Adams.

00:20:04.960 That's right.

00:20:06.120 He's a heterosexual in New Jersey.

00:20:07.820 So he is using this to highlight two persistent themes of the book.

00:20:13.780 One, religious dogma is uniquely capable of driving people to commit heinous acts. 1.00

00:20:20.700 And two, Islam is a uniquely violent religion that we should be focused on. 1.00

00:20:26.740 First, let's talk about what Harris presents as the dangers of religious dogma. 1.00

00:20:33.160 The argument is that the biggest danger posed by religious belief is that it can create people with unshakable certainty in their beliefs who cannot be reasoned with because their beliefs weren't built on a foundation of reason to begin with.

00:20:46.880 At one point, he says, before you can get to the end of this paragraph, another person will probably die because of what someone else believes about God.

00:20:54.460 Okay.

00:20:54.900 This is, I think, how Harris is addressing what you said, which is basically why be mean about this?

00:21:02.660 Why bother people who aren't harming other people?

00:21:05.580 What he's saying is that downstream of any religious belief is extremism.

00:21:11.180 As soon as you accept that you can put rationality to the side, suddenly you are on a slippery slope to extremism.

00:21:20.100 Yeah, this is kind of one of the main problems with Sam Harris, is that he thinks that religious

00:21:24.460 belief is totally distinct from other things that people believe with no evidence.

00:21:30.140 Like millions of people read their horoscope every week.

00:21:33.420 You know, people don't do that because like they've read a Cochran review that says that

00:21:37.100 this framework aligns with the evidence.

00:21:39.080 They do it because it feels true.

00:21:41.140 And that's a belief that has essentially never resulted in any extremism.

00:21:46.580 And then on the other side of the equation, the most important driver of terrorism in the United States right now is misogyny and racism, right?

00:21:53.700 We have all these racially motivated mass shootings.

00:21:56.380 But Sam Harris does not consider those to be an important threat because he's like, oh, well, they're not religious.

00:22:03.060 The rise of secular violence in this country is something that the new atheists could have never predicted, right?

00:22:11.300 Because they don't have a framework for describing how violent movements originate, spread, and manifest in actual violence.

00:22:21.920 All they have is a theory about religion and doctrines and how people can be impacted by doctrines.

00:22:28.940 So let's talk a little bit about how shallow this is.

00:22:32.160 I'm going to send you another little bit here.

00:22:34.640 He says,

00:22:35.800 The most monstrous crimes against humanity have invariably been inspired by unjustified belief.

00:22:41.700 This is nearly a truism.

00:22:43.380 Genocidal projects tend not to reflect the rationality of their perpetrators

00:22:46.960 simply because there are no good reasons to kill peaceful people indiscriminately.

00:22:51.520 Even where such crimes have been secular,

00:22:53.520 they have required the egregious credulity of entire societies to be brought off.

00:22:58.840 Consider the millions of people who were killed by Stalin and Mao.

00:23:01.880 Although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality,

00:23:04.640 communism was little more than a political religion oh so now he's doing the thing where

00:23:10.060 it's all religious even when it's not religious yeah very obvious bait and switch right he wants

00:23:15.740 to say that religion is responsible for the most monstrous crimes against humanity but that's

00:23:20.620 obviously not true the great crimes of the 20th century were committed by secular states so

00:23:25.640 instead he's like they were inspired by unjustified belief and then he says that communism was sort of

00:23:32.260 like religion. But then it's like what you're actually saying now, I guess, is that like

00:23:35.960 believing strongly in things is bad. Well, yeah, then write your book about unjustified beliefs

00:23:41.180 then. It always feels like Harris and the other new atheists are spending a lot of time dancing 1.00

00:23:44.940 around this pretty obvious question of how many wars are actually caused by religion. And this is

00:23:50.820 part of an ongoing segment we have on If Books Could Kill called We Don't Have to Have Abstract

00:23:56.680 arguments about this because there's actual data. There's a volume called the Encyclopedia of Wars

00:24:02.820 by Charles Phillips and Alexander Axelrod. And they attempt to survey the major conflicts from

00:24:09.580 about 8,000 BC through the time of publication, which was the time of the first edition was 2004,

00:24:16.220 which is when the end of faith came out. They catalog about 1800 wars, and they characterize

00:24:20.920 about 7% as religious.

00:24:24.060 Okay.

00:24:24.280 Now, obviously, you know,

00:24:25.180 you can probably pick around

00:24:26.820 the edges of their characterizations.

00:24:28.780 Yeah, we don't want to do a pinker here

00:24:30.300 and be like,

00:24:30.900 the exact body count of religion

00:24:32.520 is this.

00:24:33.680 And the exact body count

00:24:34.920 of communism is this.

00:24:36.400 Like, we've talked off the show

00:24:38.440 about like, 0.98

00:24:38.860 this is just a fucking bizarre project. 0.92

00:24:41.000 But also like, yeah, 0.98

00:24:41.920 if you're going to say

00:24:42.680 that religion is the source

00:24:44.520 of most killing and war, 1.00

00:24:46.320 then like, yeah,

00:24:46.820 we're going to check that.

00:24:47.780 Yeah, when you're dealing

00:24:48.400 with a number like 7%,

00:24:49.820 like fine, double it.

00:24:50.920 It's still a small percentage.

00:24:53.900 And then you have the fact that even religious wars could arguably be reframed as non-religious, right?

00:25:00.340 Right.

00:25:00.580 But I think bottom line, historically, we're talking about pretty low numbers for expressly religious wars.

00:25:06.320 I also feel like if you're looking at conflicts taking place up to 10,000 years ago, it's also tricky to classify those as distinctly religious or distinctly non-religious just because, you know, state institutions were so different throughout most of human history.

00:25:20.920 Religious institutions were extremely different throughout human history.

00:25:24.620 You can look at almost any conflict and say that it's religious or say that it's not religious. 0.82

00:25:32.000 The murkiness of all of these concepts kind of reveals how silly his entire project is. 0.84

00:25:36.700 I think so too. 0.78

00:25:37.420 Yeah, I think that's right.

00:25:38.600 And, you know, again, these guys present themselves as like beacons of rationality.

00:25:43.200 Right, right. 1.00

00:25:43.780 So now let's talk about what Harris characterizes as the unique danger of Islam. 1.00

00:25:50.340 This is where we're going to focus a lot of the episode because, A, it's a huge and common

00:25:54.620 critique of his book, and B, being Islamophobic in public is the bulk of Sam Harris's career.

00:26:01.760 Yeah, at this point.

00:26:02.800 And Anti-Woke, if you listen to his podcast, he brings everything back to like, well, why

00:26:07.640 won't the college students let you say it?

00:26:09.580 I tried.

00:26:10.060 I tried to listen to a couple episodes just doing my diligence here, and my God.

00:26:15.680 Dude, I know.

00:26:16.300 I know that he's a very popular podcaster.

00:26:18.020 He's probably more popular than us. 0.99

00:26:19.120 So maybe I shouldn't talk shit. 1.00

00:26:20.260 That's a reason to talk shit, Peter. 1.00

00:26:21.520 We're punching up. 1.00

00:26:22.340 That's true.

00:26:23.020 We're punching upwards.

00:26:23.520 Yeah, I do want to say this. 0.98

00:26:24.960 He sucks at podcasting, dude. 0.99

00:26:26.440 It's so fucking boring. 1.00

00:26:27.260 Dude, oh my God, I know. 0.95

00:26:28.580 The only, I think I was just telling you about this, but I heard him laugh on that podcast

00:26:34.960 once and it was when his guest was going on a wildly transphobic rant.

00:26:40.240 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:40.680 A man who never laughs. 0.97

00:26:42.300 And then this guy was just like, trans women aren't real. 0.98

00:26:45.660 And Sam Harris is like, oh, oh, you are killing me. 0.97

00:26:49.820 You have three cheese puns per episode and then you'll be a real podcaster. 0.99

00:26:53.400 Get on our fucking level. 0.99

00:26:55.580 So let's get into the racism, the Islamophobia. 1.00

00:26:59.820 I want to avoid a defamation lawsuit.

00:27:02.100 So I can't say that he's objectively racist.

00:27:04.800 So what I will say is that if there is an omnipotent God, he believes that Sam Harris is racist.

00:27:11.740 endorsing violence towards muslim people is probably harris's most consistent output over

00:27:18.340 the span of his career and seeing as we are currently mid-genocide a genocide that sam

00:27:23.080 harris supports possibly more than anyone yeah it's wild listen to yeah maybe a good time to

00:27:29.220 visit some of the most common arguments about islamic violence so are we just skipping all

00:27:34.420 the stuff where he's like christianity is not real because there's just like it bores us both

00:27:38.080 There's actually not that much of it in the book.

00:27:40.760 Wait, really?

00:27:41.340 Christianity is like a side discussion in the end of faith.

00:27:45.860 Not true of the other new atheists.

00:27:48.860 They focus on Christianity a little bit more.

00:27:52.220 But Harris uses Christianity almost as like a jumping off point for talking about Islam. 0.99

00:27:58.600 He's much more interested in talking shit about Muslims than anything else. 0.97

00:28:03.420 So it's not like he was hiding his Islamophobia under these arguments about like the George W. Bush administration evangelicals. 0.99

00:28:09.440 It's like it was always there like right up front.

00:28:11.480 There are almost expressed defenses of George Bush himself as a person in this book.

00:28:19.100 And we're going to talk about them. 0.92

00:28:20.520 So Harris is arguing that Islam is a unique danger in this world because Islamic doctrine is uniquely violent and the fact that we see terrorism disproportionately coming from Muslim groups now proves that.

00:28:38.260 I will say I am not going to get into like here's what Islamic doctrine actually says.

00:28:43.260 I don't think that there are like correct or incorrect interpretations of religious doctrine exactly.

00:28:48.520 I think that it's very obvious that people interpret doctrines in different ways and that trying to prove that there is a correct one to prove that all religious people either do or should view it like – view it a certain way is just a fundamental mistake.

00:29:06.640 If there's one thing we know on this show, it's that everyone hates reading.

00:29:11.000 And so any holy book of any religion, most of the adherents of the religion have not read it.

00:29:16.040 So it's kind of pointless to do like chapter and verse.

00:29:19.800 OK, but let's steel man.

00:29:20.900 Let's steel man his argument a little bit before we get into this.

00:29:24.200 I think what he is going to what he would respond, that might be true, that basically

00:29:28.700 no one reads these books, that everything's up to interpretation.

00:29:31.400 But the fact that the doctrine is violent in reality allows for people who do read the

00:29:37.740 book to interpret it correctly as such. 0.98

00:29:41.060 And so in a sense, even if most Muslims don't end up going down this path, the doctrine is facilitating some people to do it, right? 0.93

00:29:49.360 I think that's what he would say. 0.96

00:29:50.460 That's true of every religion that like if you look at the text, a lot of it was written at a time when like retributive justice was the norm.

00:29:56.880 And so this eye for an eye stuff is everywhere in organized religion.

00:30:00.720 Well, I'm going to send you another bit.

00:30:02.540 Are we debating right now, Peter?

00:30:03.760 Is it happening?

00:30:04.560 No, I'm putting a stop to this right now.

00:30:06.360 i'm going to send you another bit this in two parts okay he says i suspect the starting point

00:30:14.320 i have chosen for this book that of a single suicide bomber following the consequences of

00:30:18.340 his religious beliefs is bound to exasperate many readers since it ignores most of what

00:30:23.020 commentators on the middle east have said about the roots of muslim violence it ignores the painful

00:30:27.220 history of the israeli occupation of the west bank and gaza it ignores the collusion of western

00:30:31.620 powers with corrupt dictatorships it ignores the endemic poverty and lack of economic opportunity

00:30:36.340 that now plague the Arab world. But I will argue that we can ignore all of those things or treat

00:30:41.880 them only to place them safely on the shelf because the world is filled with poor, uneducated, 0.91

00:30:46.900 and exploited peoples who do not commit acts of terrorism. And the Muslim world has no shortage 1.00

00:30:51.500 of educated and prosperous men and women suffering little more than their infatuation 1.00

00:30:55.720 with Quranic eschatology who are eager to murder infidels for God's sake. We are at war with Islam. 1.00

00:31:02.420 Okay, so he's like, ignore all of the context. 1.00

00:31:04.660 It turns out that Muslims are just more violent than every other religion. 0.99

00:31:09.320 And if you follow this logic, he's saying that there are poor, uneducated, and exploited people who do not commit terrorist acts and that that proves that terrorist acts aren't caused by those things. 1.00

00:31:21.080 Right.

00:31:21.360 This is my favorite type of logical error.

00:31:23.820 The error is so bad that the reasoning can be completely flipped.

00:31:27.540 Right. 1.00

00:31:27.700 Like there are Muslims who do not commit terrorism. 0.96

00:31:30.200 therefore Islam cannot be the cause of terrorism. Same logic. And also it's also, I mean, I know 0.98

00:31:36.780 this is unfair to criticize the book for what he does now, but his whole thing with like Trump

00:31:40.640 driven violence is like, well, what about the lack of economic opportunities? The men who are

00:31:45.680 frustrated at all the feminists telling them that they can't be what they want to be anymore. And

00:31:50.380 that's why they're committing violence. Like he's making excuses for this kind of thing in other

00:31:53.800 contexts. The end of good faith. Got him. Got him good. The Mike and Peter story.

00:32:00.200 Harris says to attribute territorial and nationalistic motives to Osama bin Laden seems almost willfully

00:32:07.460 obscuritanist since Osama's only apparent concerns are the spread of Islam and the sanctity of Muslim

00:32:14.380 holy sites. Now, first, this is dumb because Harris is implying that we can fully understand 0.93

00:32:20.220 what drives someone to do something based on what they say their motives are, which we can't 0.71

00:32:25.540 reliably do. But also, Osama bin Laden wrote a whole letter about his reasons for attacking

00:32:31.800 the United States. And the very first reason is, quote, because you attacked us and continue to 0.62

00:32:38.160 attack us. Right. Again, you're seeing Harris just sort of wade into an extremely complex topic,

00:32:44.260 stroll right past everyone with actual expertise, and just announce that he has figured this all 0.98

00:32:49.380 out using logic he's basically just like look at the guy he's a muslim right like so first he's

00:32:56.480 just wrong as soon as he makes a verifiable claim right here are osama bin laden's stated motives 0.98

00:33:02.960 he's wrong about it and second there are researchers who study this shit right uh there 0.98

00:33:09.820 are researchers who actually sit down and talk to jihadi terrorists and ask them about their 0.99

00:33:15.240 motivations. Scott Atran wrote a whole book on this called Talking to the Enemy, where he chronicles

00:33:20.360 his interviews with accused terrorists. He spoke with detainees who had joined al-Qaeda to fight

00:33:26.040 in Iraq. Almost all of them were motivated by their desire to avenge crimes against Muslims.

00:33:32.380 Every single person he spoke to cited Abu Ghraib as one of their motivating factors. Atran and

00:33:37.100 other researchers have found that disproportionate numbers of violent jihadis are recent converts

00:33:41.800 who actually have fairly minimal knowledge of Islamic doctrine

00:33:45.840 to the point where some researchers found that many jihadis they spoke to

00:33:48.980 didn't know the basics of daily prayer.

00:33:50.860 Oh, that's interesting.

00:33:51.440 These are not devout Muslims who are convinced by doctrine to become violent. 0.98

00:33:56.100 It's the other way around. 1.00

00:33:57.040 They are motivated by the prospect of violence 1.00

00:34:00.220 and they are sort of operating through the vessel of Islam. 1.00

00:34:04.820 And also, of course, we shouldn't take at face value

00:34:06.420 what these people say their motivation is either.

00:34:08.560 No.

00:34:08.640 Everyone's motivation for doing basically anything is complicated.

00:34:12.480 And so you can't just say, oh, it's the religion that is bad.

00:34:15.020 I am going to introduce you to a rhetorical tactic that Sam Harris loves. 0.85

00:34:20.320 I am calling it the coward's hypothetical.

00:34:23.780 Ooh.

00:34:24.500 I thought it was going to be pause for three minutes before speaking so that I've forgotten

00:34:27.880 what you're actually responding to by the time you talk.

00:34:29.660 This is a classic Harris move.

00:34:31.620 He is confronted with a really complex question that he is absolutely not capable of answering.

00:34:37.520 And then he deflects by immediately redirecting the conversation to a hypothetical thought experiment.

00:34:43.480 I'm going to send you his argument.

00:34:46.280 This is him addressing the issue of collateral damage by the American military.

00:34:52.900 He says, what we euphemistically describe as collateral damage in times of war is the direct result of limitations in the power and precision of our technology.

00:35:01.020 To see that this is so, we need only imagine how any of our recent conflicts would have looked if we had possessed perfect weapons.

00:35:08.560 Weapons that allowed us to either temporarily impair or kill a particular person or group at any distance without harming others or their property.

00:35:16.140 What would we do with such technology?

00:35:18.120 Consider the all-too-facile comparisons that have recently been made between George Bush and Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden or Hitler, etc.

00:35:25.620 How would George Bush have prosecuted the recent war in Iraq with perfect weapons?

00:35:30.360 Would he have targeted the thousands of Iraqi civilians who were maimed or killed by our

00:35:33.860 bombs?

00:35:34.560 Would he have put out the eyes of little girls or torn the arms from their mothers?

00:35:38.660 Whether or not you admire the man's politics or the man, there is no reason to think that

00:35:43.020 he would have sanctioned the injury or death of even a single innocent person.

00:35:46.860 What would Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden do with perfect weapons? 0.66

00:35:50.120 What would Hitler have done? 0.66

00:35:51.400 They would have used them rather differently. 0.88

00:35:53.280 You might think that we've committed horrible deeds, but imagine a world where magic exists.

00:35:58.900 Not so horrible now, are we?

00:36:00.980 This is, again, his weird rationality thing.

00:36:02.760 He's like created this scenario, but like this is not smart.

00:36:05.400 This is not like a real argument.

00:36:07.020 I mean, it's a bizarre hypothetical.

00:36:09.720 If I was straight, Peter, do you know what a good boyfriend I would be?

00:36:12.000 Do you know how nice to women I would be? 0.84

00:36:13.520 I would not be an incel if I was straight. 1.00

00:36:15.340 And if you were gay, Peter, you'd be a real dick about it. 1.00

00:36:18.260 What? 1.00

00:36:18.800 That is true, though.

00:36:19.540 That does feel true.

00:36:20.300 I do actually feel that very strongly.

00:36:21.440 The issue here is that just for example, the United States government has thousands of

00:36:26.940 times over, pulled the trigger on bombs, knowing that civilians would die. That is a moral choice.

00:36:33.320 You can defend that moral choice, or you can just pivot to a hypothetical situation

00:36:38.360 that dodges the issue, right? The coward's hypothetical. I believe that this will catch on. 0.55

00:36:44.820 It's also, it's like you're looking at two scenarios in which the leaders of countries

00:36:48.180 have killed people. And you're like, well, one of them doesn't count because he would behave

00:36:52.120 differently in a different world. And one of them is like even worse because he'd behave even worse

00:36:56.460 in a different world.

00:36:57.720 We'll circle back to this in a second.

00:36:59.220 I just wanted to give another example of him doing this

00:37:02.360 to prove that this is not the only time.

00:37:05.100 This is from his debate with Scott Atran,

00:37:07.780 where Atran had pointed to some data and information

00:37:10.800 showing why he doesn't think that Islamic doctrine

00:37:13.180 is driving terrorism.

00:37:15.040 So for example, he talks about how the history 0.89

00:37:17.260 of suicide bombing is largely secular

00:37:19.440 and how secular and Christian groups in Palestine

00:37:22.400 have also engaged in terrorism.

00:37:23.980 for example. Here is Sam responding to that. Are we going to watch a clip?

00:37:29.560 Watching a clip.

00:37:31.780 That troubles me because this is what I think. If the Quran was exactly the way it is, 1.00

00:37:37.700 but it contained a single extra line, and that line read, if you see a red-haired woman 0.98

00:37:44.240 on your doorstep at sunset, cut her head off. I can tell you what kind of world we would live in. 0.99

00:37:52.260 We would live in a world where red-haired women would be found murdered in the Muslim world. 0.92

00:37:59.400 And we would also live in a world in which apologists for Islam would look at that behavior and say, 0.85

00:38:08.520 that has nothing to do with Islam.

00:38:11.080 There was a news story yesterday about a Mormon man who killed his wife, and she had red hair.

00:38:18.260 Many of those women whose heads were found in the bag in Baghdad

00:38:22.040 were not actually redheads, but some were strawberry blonde.

00:38:27.100 We would hear about women who were shot and not decapitated,

00:38:31.120 and decapitation is the only thing that is sanctioned in the Quran.

00:38:33.840 I mean, this is the kind of gymnastics we would be faced with.

00:38:39.960 Oh, boy.

00:38:40.880 You can tell on Scott's face that he's just like, 1.00

00:38:42.880 can you believe this shit? 1.00

00:38:44.060 It literally is not an argument. 1.00

00:38:45.820 Scott Atrain is, you can't, of course, you can't hear it, but he is just like tapping

00:38:49.860 his fingers in like a really annoyed way. 0.93

00:38:52.640 Like, get me the fuck out of here.

00:38:54.120 But this is also like, I think Sam Harris thinks this is like a good argument. 0.65

00:38:57.100 I think he thinks he's like facts and logicing.

00:38:59.600 Here's the thing about Sam Harris.

00:39:01.180 If he were to read a book telling him to go skeet shooting with puppies, I can tell you

00:39:08.580 what kind of world we would live in.

00:39:09.940 We would live in a world where Sam Harris skeet shooted puppies all day long.

00:39:14.820 And the apologists for Sam Harris, the Sam Harris subreddit, would love it.

00:39:20.460 I want to circle back to his whole perfect weapon thing.

00:39:23.040 What would we do with the perfect weapon? 0.89

00:39:24.620 What would Osama bin Laden do?

00:39:26.920 One issue with that is that collateral damage isn't the only type of war crime that Western

00:39:34.820 militaries have committed.

00:39:37.080 Yeah.

00:39:37.560 There are also situations where Western militaries just engage in murder.

00:39:41.480 An obvious, famous example, the My Lai Massacre, where American troops in Vietnam tortured and murdered about 500 villagers.

00:39:50.060 Sam Harris is smart enough to recognize that this is bad for his argument.

00:39:54.940 And so he tries to respond to that counterargument.

00:40:01.600 I want to hear how it doesn't count.

00:40:02.880 I want to hear how it doesn't count.

00:40:03.440 I'm sending it to you.

00:40:04.620 He says, this is about as bad as human beings are capable of behaving.

00:40:08.740 But what distinguishes us from many of our enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us.

00:40:14.960 The massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment of shame for the American military.

00:40:20.260 Even at the time, U.S. soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of their comrades.

00:40:25.340 One helicopter pilot who arrived on the scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine

00:40:29.480 guns against their own troops if they would not stop killing villagers.

00:40:33.320 As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and

00:40:38.060 murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not. You might argue

00:40:43.920 that I am also a murderer, but I want to be clear that the fact that I am a murderer makes me very

00:40:50.340 sad. And that's the difference between me and you, buddy. The thing is, I do actually think that on

00:40:55.320 some level, this probably does make a difference, right? Like there's institutional safeguards

00:41:00.100 against this kind of thing. Right. But he's also not doing the empirics to say, well, this is

00:41:05.560 actually what happened there, that like the My Lai Massacre was such an outlier and the people

00:41:09.680 who did it were so thoroughly condemned and punished that we really can sort of write it

00:41:14.240 off as a fluke event. This is just, this is one example of Harris not knowing shit about history. 0.98

00:41:23.140 Current Affairs wrote about this passage. First of all, the military tried to keep all of this 0.97

00:41:28.340 quiet. Okay. But once the story broke, the helicopter pilot who Sam references, who tried

00:41:33.840 to restrain the other soldiers during the My Lai Massacre, was ostracized.

00:41:38.260 He received death threats from all over the country when the story became public.

00:41:41.920 The perpetrators, on the other hand, received outpourings of support.

00:41:46.340 There were marches in support of Lieutenant William Calley, who ordered the massacre.

00:41:51.320 Politicians across the country spoke out in support of him, not just right-wingers.

00:41:56.020 Jimmy Carter created a state holiday in Georgia to celebrate him.

00:41:59.520 Oh, my God.

00:42:00.240 The entire ordeal resulted in one conviction of Calley himself.

00:42:05.480 None of his subordinates who followed his orders were convicted.

00:42:08.520 The public outcry in support of Calley was so significant that Nixon had him removed from prison and put under house arrest.

00:42:16.060 He served a few years primarily under house arrest and then was paroled.

00:42:20.720 Wait, wait. Can I do – can I channel Sam Harris here?

00:42:23.860 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:24.500 OK. OK. Long pause. Long pause.

00:42:27.060 But still.

00:42:28.420 But still.

00:42:29.740 America, but still.

00:42:31.980 Look, I mean, this is just say what you want about it.

00:42:34.860 This is not the output of a society that strongly condemns such actions, right? 0.87

00:42:44.000 Meanwhile, there's also numerous examples in America of Muslim communities actually

00:42:47.840 reporting people who are radicalizing to the authorities. 1.00

00:42:50.520 Right. 0.76

00:42:50.800 On the other side of the equation, he's like, well, Muslims don't care about terrorism. 0.99

00:42:54.260 And that's also not fucking true. 0.99

00:42:55.820 Right. 0.99

00:42:55.980 And that, by the way, is a claim that he expressly makes where he's like, Muslims don't speak

00:43:00.600 out about this.

00:43:01.380 And it's just like, what are you talking about?

00:43:02.860 And then if you're like, well, what about this Muslim that spoke out? 0.84

00:43:04.680 He's like, ah, but still.

00:43:06.320 Like, it's not a serious argument.

00:43:08.900 His arguments about the dangers of Islam are mostly just hypotheticals and anecdotes.

00:43:15.260 He does occasionally cite some polling.

00:43:17.500 He discusses the Pew What the World Thinks in 2002 poll, which surveyed over 38,000

00:43:24.480 people.

00:43:24.840 There was one question that they asked only of Muslims, quote, some people think that

00:43:29.560 suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in

00:43:33.420 order to defend Islam from its enemies.

00:43:36.040 Other people believe that no matter what the reason, this kind of violence is never justified.

00:43:40.260 Do you personally feel that this kind of violence is often justified to defend Islam, sometimes

00:43:44.600 justified, rarely justified, never justified?

00:43:46.940 So that is the question asked by Pew.

00:43:49.980 And I'm going to send you a chart of the country by country results.

00:43:55.600 Okay.

00:43:56.500 So Lebanon, 73% yes.

00:43:58.760 Ivory Coast, 56% yes.

00:44:00.300 Nigeria, 47% yes.

00:44:02.360 Jordan, 43% yes. 0.96

00:44:04.320 And Uzbekistan is the lowest.

00:44:06.260 Isn't this actually evidence of like how diverse the Muslim world is that you get this vast range of answers? 0.99

00:44:10.960 Harris says these are hideous numbers. 1.00

00:44:13.440 And I think that he's right in the general sense that these results are disconcerting. 0.99

00:44:16.500 But what he's trying to show is that Islam is driving terrorism and sympathy for terrorism. 0.76

00:44:22.760 And what you clocked immediately is that there's a massive gap between different Muslim countries here.

00:44:29.700 Uzbekistan is at the bottom of this chart with only 7% of people saying that suicide bombing in defense of Islam is justifiable.

00:44:38.180 You compare that with Lebanon above 70% saying it's just justifiable.

00:44:42.340 You're talking about a massive gap, which seems to suggest that this is driven by geopolitics, right?

00:44:48.540 The highest support for suicide attacks is Lebanon.

00:44:51.340 What's happening in that region in 2002 is the second intifada, right, where there are suicide attacks being used against Israel, Lebanon's biggest geopolitical enemy.

00:45:00.880 Also, the next two highest countries are Ivory Coast and Nigeria.

00:45:04.320 Right.

00:45:04.660 So it's just kind of an interesting mix.

00:45:06.820 When Sam Harris replicates this chart in his book, he leaves out Uzbekistan.

00:45:11.060 I don't really know why. 1.00

00:45:14.840 Whites. 0.98

00:45:15.980 Whites. 0.99

00:45:16.840 It's baffling. 1.00

00:45:17.580 I like, again, we're taking the long way to the conclusion that like a religion of 1.3

00:45:22.080 billion people is like pretty diverse.

00:45:25.480 It's like, okay, breaking news. 1.00

00:45:27.340 So that question was only asked of Muslims, of course.

00:45:30.440 In 2011, Gallup did a global survey titled Views on Violence, where they asked people

00:45:35.560 their thoughts about violence targeting civilians, either where it's the military doing the

00:45:40.620 targeting or individuals. And what they found was that acceptance for targeting civilians was not

00:45:46.640 linked to religion, not linked to religiousness. People who said that religion is an important part

00:45:51.440 of their daily lives are on average about as likely to support attacks on civilians as those

00:45:56.320 who don't, which doesn't speak to the motivations of terrorists directly, but it is evidence that

00:46:01.300 general religiosity is not correlated with support for extremist violence. On top of that,

00:46:07.620 people in Muslim countries were less likely to think that attacks on civilians were justifiable.

00:46:13.880 What's more, the people who are most likely to believe that the military targeting and killing

00:46:19.620 civilians is justifiable are, drum roll please, Americans. 49% of Americans think that the

00:46:28.600 military intentionally killing civilians is at least sometimes justified. I also want to point

00:46:34.380 out, Americans in the survey, more likely than people in Muslim countries to say that

00:46:38.260 civilian attacks on other civilians can be justified.

00:46:41.140 So even when we're talking about individual attacks, things that look more like terrorism, 1.00

00:46:45.320 Americans more supportive than people in Muslim countries. 1.00

00:46:48.380 That is actually fucked up. 1.00

00:46:49.180 I think one interpretation of this is just that like American morality is fucked and 1.00

00:46:54.540 it's worse than other countries. 0.98

00:46:55.900 Another way to look at it is that Americans see this stuff and they, for geopolitical

00:47:01.500 reasons are not picturing themselves being attacked. Whereas people in other countries

00:47:06.780 are more likely to be like, oh, that's about me. That's about my family getting attacked.

00:47:11.440 Right. We're thinking like Pakistani drone strike type stuff. Right. That's what Americans would

00:47:15.620 have been thinking. I'm not trying to be like, aha, Americans, we are the actual worst ones. 0.92

00:47:21.720 Right. I think that this is the output of circumstance in either case. And the bottom

00:47:27.660 line to me is that when you try to use actual data to analyze Harris's thesis here that Islam

00:47:33.980 is more inherently dangerous, not so strong. Yeah. Not so good. I think what it points to is 1.00

00:47:38.780 how facile his argument is, right? Because you could write a whole book about how Americans

00:47:42.480 are uniquely violent and like Americans shouldn't get visas to visit other countries because like

00:47:46.320 look how much gun violence they have and look how much they support terrorism, etc. Those things are 0.62

00:47:50.620 products of like various cultural and political historical factors. It would be really silly to

00:47:55.640 to say that like Americans are just inherently more violent than other groups. Because yeah,

00:48:00.000 I think this whole thing of like saying this group sucks because of this poll that we took, 0.71

00:48:04.120 like public polling is notoriously very bad. And what people report their beliefs are very

00:48:09.180 different than what they are in reality. So kind of all of this stuff is pretty facile.

00:48:12.600 But because Sam Harris is using it as evidence, you can marshal the same kind of evidence to

00:48:18.140 smear almost any group by just like cherry picking out statistics and public polls.

00:48:22.120 I want to do a case study.

00:48:23.680 Let's talk about airport security, Michael.

00:48:26.660 After the book was published, Harris became an advocate for what was basically just like

00:48:30.840 neoconservative foreign policy.

00:48:32.960 Nice.

00:48:33.260 He wrote a lengthy defense of the use of torture and interrogations that stirred up a ton of

00:48:37.220 controversy.

00:48:38.120 A few years later, he wrote a similar post titled In Defensive Profiling, where he makes

00:48:44.720 the argument that airport security in particular should engage in profiling.

00:48:49.500 He says, quote, we should profile Muslims or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably

00:48:54.340 be Muslim and we should be honest about it.

00:48:56.860 He or she could conceivably be Muslim.

00:48:58.880 I love that.

00:48:59.500 The basic argument he makes is the same as every conservative after 9-11, right? 0.98

00:49:04.460 We know that people most likely to be terrorists are Muslim. 0.98

00:49:08.440 Makes sense to just target Muslims for additional security screening rather than waste time 0.95

00:49:12.700 screening every elderly woman who we know is extremely unlikely to commit terrorism.

00:49:19.000 And what is to blame for the lack of profiling in our current system?

00:49:27.240 He says this.

00:49:49.000 if she didn't want to. He ends up getting a response from Bruce Schneier, a security expert

00:49:54.960 who has written about profiling. And then the two have a lengthy email exchange, which they publish.

00:50:00.120 I love that every single one of these is like, he says some shit, and then someone who actually 0.98

00:50:03.820 knows about the topic, like weighs in. And then a quote unquote debate ensues between someone who 0.99

00:50:09.120 knows things and someone who doesn't know things. This is also a great example. And I think the

00:50:15.060 most egregious example of something that has happened multiple times, which is Sam Harris 0.99

00:50:18.940 having an email debate with someone, getting his shit kicked in, but not realizing it and 0.97

00:50:24.240 publishing it. I think that a lot of people who oppose profiling at the airport, for example, 0.97

00:50:31.100 basically argue that profiling discriminates against Muslims and therefore it erodes social

00:50:37.460 trust. It is unfair to innocent Muslims, et cetera, right? What Schneier says is you can put

00:50:43.400 that aside, and profiling is still not effective. The way he describes it is that all security

00:50:49.600 decisions are a cost-benefit decision. If you use profiling, in some ways you make the system more

00:50:55.520 efficient, but you actually create other costs that end up outweighing the benefit. I'm going

00:51:00.920 to send you a little bit. To implement this system, you're going to have to make this profile

00:51:04.620 explicit. You're going to need a precise definition for Muslim, and it needs to be a definition that

00:51:09.660 can be taught to the TSA screeners written down in the standard operating procedures manual found

00:51:14.080 at every TSA checkpoint. I believe that once you start trying to specify your profile exactly,

00:51:19.200 it will either encompass so many people as to be useless or leave out so many people as to be

00:51:24.000 dangerous. That is, I can't figure out how to get your error rate down. So basically, I have thought

00:51:30.160 about this for more than 90 seconds, and here's what I actually think. Yeah, so in lay terms,

00:51:35.360 what this means is that it's easy to say that we should screen Muslims more, 0.97

00:51:40.180 but you can't literally do that.

00:51:42.220 You don't know who is actually a Muslim.

00:51:44.280 All you can do is screen for people who look Muslim to you,

00:51:47.620 which mostly just ends up meaning people who are either dressed in Muslim garb

00:51:51.660 or just look Arab, which one, does not include all Muslims,

00:51:56.340 and two, can be easily gamed by terrorists.

00:51:59.800 It's very well known that terrorist organizations adjust to profiles.

00:52:03.280 So Schneier pointed out that, for example, in 2004, Chechen rebels conducted suicide bombings of two Russian airliners and the bombers were women.

00:52:13.780 Why were they women?

00:52:14.600 Because they realized that men were getting more aggressive screening.

00:52:18.020 Right.

00:52:18.240 Schneier's broad argument is that even though it can feel counterintuitive, simple randomized security screenings are actually more efficient and therefore better at catching terrorists because they are easily implemented and they cannot be gamed.

00:52:32.660 He gives a really interesting example of how counterintuitive security measures can be.

00:52:38.240 It's a frequent complaint from pilots that they have to go through security screening.

00:52:43.000 That's because it's sort of absurd, right?

00:52:44.800 It doesn't matter whether a pilot has a bomb.

00:52:46.820 He can literally crash the plane when he wants to.

00:52:49.780 So it's inefficient to screen pilots, right?

00:52:53.140 That is sort of a fact in a vacuum.

00:52:55.740 So let's say you decide not to.

00:52:58.560 How do you do that?

00:52:59.740 You can't screen for wearing a pilot's uniform because anyone can buy one of those.

00:53:04.140 You'd have to give pilots a special ID, which then you have to manufacture.

00:53:09.040 And once you do, now you have to worry about them being forged or stolen.

00:53:13.040 You have to develop procedures that account for that.

00:53:16.020 And then you have to worry about someone slipping a bomb onto a pilot's person, for example.

00:53:21.360 By the time you're done implementing this idea and handling all these variables,

00:53:25.940 it would have just been more efficient to screen pilots like they're anyone else, right?

00:53:30.160 I actually learned something in this episode, Peter.

00:53:32.200 I can't believe it.

00:53:33.040 The Sam Harris episode.

00:53:34.200 There's also an interesting case that Schneier references.

00:53:37.460 In the late 90s, the FAA, the Aviation Administration, implemented a system called CAPS,

00:53:43.300 Computer Assisted Passenger Screening.

00:53:45.360 Basically, it analyzed passenger data.

00:53:48.200 It created a risk profile, and that helped determine whether additional screening would

00:53:52.480 be effective.

00:53:53.000 In 2002, some programmers put together an algorithm that showed how the system could be easily gamed by terrorists.

00:54:00.520 Essentially, terrorists could probe the system by sending operatives on test flights.

00:54:06.680 You see who gets flagged and then you wait to find people who are not flagged.

00:54:12.260 And once you've identified those people, you use them as your operatives because people who are not flagged by the system are unlikely to be flagged in the future.

00:54:22.020 The algorithm they made basically showed that this very simple exploit made the system less

00:54:25.980 effective than random screenings.

00:54:27.540 This is Sam Harris having like Elon Musk disease.

00:54:30.040 He's like, there's this thing that kind of seems unintuitive or illogical to me.

00:54:34.800 And like, I can fix it with 10 seconds of my brain.

00:54:38.160 And then people who actually know why the system was designed that way, like slowly

00:54:42.560 explain to him why it may look strange, but it's actually relatively sophisticated and

00:54:47.100 it's being done for a reason.

00:54:48.480 And then he just rejects it like a transplant.

00:54:50.480 Right.

00:54:50.880 Because like how does Sam Harris respond to this?

00:54:52.800 Well, he doesn't because over the course of this debate, Sam never actually absorbs this point.

00:54:59.920 And he has not absorbed it to this day.

00:55:02.320 He has never absorbed the point that the reason you use a randomized system isn't because everyone is equally likely to commit an act of terrorism.

00:55:10.140 It's because systems that profile create new vulnerabilities that aren't worth the tradeoff.

00:55:14.740 He wrote a follow-up to this debate where he said, my position on profiling is very simple.

00:55:20.400 We should admit that we know what we are looking for, suicidal terrorists, and that certain people obviously require less scrutiny than others.

00:55:26.760 We should scan everyone's luggage, of course, because bombs can be placed there without a person's knowledge.

00:55:31.220 But given scarce resources, we can't afford to waste our time and attention pretending to think that every traveler is equally likely to be affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

00:55:40.520 Right. So but still. 0.70

00:55:41.400 But still. 1.00

00:55:41.940 We need to look at the Muslims. 1.00

00:55:43.040 He's like, this is why it won't work, but we need to look at the Muslims.

00:55:45.440 That's what's so baffling is that's not the assumption that Schneier is making.

00:55:50.140 he's not saying that everyone is equally likely to be a terrorist. He's saying that if you try

00:55:56.520 to profile, it is inefficient. That's what he's saying. Also, not to get too much on my Michael

00:56:01.680 shit, but it's wild to me how these guys seem to conceive of intelligence exclusively as your own 0.98

00:56:08.920 ability to express yourself in a way that sounds smart and never in your ability to listen. 0.99

00:56:14.360 I will say this. I believe that Sam Harris has been less susceptible to audience capture

00:56:20.080 than some of his intellectual dark web peers because of his disdain for the thoughts of other

00:56:26.140 people. It's genuinely incredible how little Harris seems to process the argument that his

00:56:31.020 opponent is making here because he is obsessed with the idea that his opponents are all just

00:56:36.260 too PC. Bruce Schneier is expressly being like, I don't care about political correctness. That's

00:56:42.600 not what my argument is based off of but sam harris is like you liberal pussy yeah you must 1.00

00:56:49.020 admit that muslims are bad that's what he really wants right he wants he wants everyone to just be 1.00

00:56:54.260 like all right muslims are bad sam it's also i mean this is such a fucking obvious point to make 1.00

00:56:58.280 but it's like nowadays white supremacy is the most common ideology behind acts of terrorism 0.99

00:57:04.940 don't you say it don't you say it it's like i it's so fucking obvious to point this kind of 0.97

00:57:09.300 stuff out but it's like sam harris fits the fucking profile and yet i assume he's not promoting this 0.87

00:57:14.280 well i have another rhetorical trick that sam loves and that i have named even though it probably 0.92

00:57:18.720 already has a name you want a legacy of this podcast you want you want to like you want to

00:57:22.660 make fetch happen in various places if i give enough things little names one of them will catch

00:57:27.640 on and they'll be like peter from if books could kill thought of this you get a wikipedia entry

00:57:32.080 finally one day the president will say my name whereas all i'm ever going to be remembered for

00:57:35.580 is mispronouncing denouement yeah that's right um which by the way i uh we got a lot of complaints

00:57:40.960 about that people weren't even complaining about you anymore they were just like why didn't peter

00:57:44.840 say anything i love this like it's my this is my responsibility you're trying to coin phrases i'm

00:57:51.380 just trying to make you look bad what people don't know is that every time there's a foreign word i

00:57:55.340 have to ask you how to pronounce it um i like i if i if i said like denouement i feel like you'd be

00:58:02.100 like, that's actually the French-Canadian way.

00:58:04.640 Even you just saying it just then gave me hives.

00:58:07.180 Absolutely not.

00:58:08.160 Never on this podcast.

00:58:09.080 That's interesting because there are many things that I've heard you insist I must say

00:58:12.800 in the original German. 1.00

00:58:14.880 Fuck off. 1.00

00:58:17.380 Fuck you. 1.00

00:58:23.100 Okay, so I am calling this the provocateur's caveat. 1.00

00:58:27.280 This is where you say something that is designed to provoke controversy, but you add 0.95

00:58:31.920 the thinnest, most obviously bullshit caveat in the world that just allows you to retreat when 0.98

00:58:38.240 attacked. But then also you get to counterattack your detractors for being dishonest. Now I'm not 0.99

00:58:43.800 saying the thing that I'm obviously saying. In defense of his in defense of profiling piece,

00:58:48.560 he said, what my critics always neglect to say is that in the article in which that sentence appears,

00:58:55.400 I explicitly include white middle-aged men like me in the profile twice.

00:59:00.840 Now, I'm going to send you the quotes that he's referring to,

00:59:04.140 and you can tell me whether or not it feels like he's actually including himself in the profile.

00:59:09.100 Although I don't think I look like a jihadi or like a man pretending not to be one,

00:59:14.360 I do not mean to suggest that a person like me should be exempt from scrutiny.

00:59:18.300 And again, I wouldn't put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bullseye.

00:59:23.360 What does that mean?

00:59:24.180 Exempt from scrutiny.

00:59:25.280 Right.

00:59:25.600 What he said just now was, I explicitly include white middle-aged men like me in the profile

00:59:31.760 twice.

00:59:32.480 And then this is what he's referring to.

00:59:34.560 That's not what he's saying.

00:59:35.740 And also a system that screened every single middle-aged white man.

00:59:40.140 Non-functional.

00:59:40.660 So what you're suggesting is just screening essentially everybody.

00:59:44.020 And again, creating this huge vulnerability that all you have to do is give your bomb

00:59:47.180 to somebody who's not a middle-aged man.

00:59:48.960 The entire purpose of putting these little things into this piece is so that when someone's like, you want to discriminate against Muslims, he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:59:57.640 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:59:58.180 How dare you, sir?

00:59:59.080 He loves to just put the thinnest little caveat in like an otherwise wildly offensive take.

01:00:04.040 And then when he gets criticism, he points to it and he's like, you are being dishonest.

01:00:08.360 He can turn the argument around.

01:00:09.600 Probably the most egregious version of this is his passage from the book about Muslims having nuclear weapons. 0.90

01:00:18.980 Underneath their overcoats, like in True Lies. 1.00

01:00:22.140 I'm going to send this to you. 1.00

01:00:23.780 It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. 1.00

01:00:29.640 There is little possibility of our having a Cold War with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. 1.00

01:00:36.140 A Cold War requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. 0.94

01:00:40.680 Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States 0.55

01:00:45.280 and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched on the brink of Armageddon. 0.98

01:00:49.600 What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, 0.99

01:00:54.700 ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? 0.98

01:00:57.000 If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or

01:01:02.000 what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted conventional

01:01:06.820 weapons to destroy them.

01:01:07.800 in such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first

01:01:13.200 strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime as it would kill tens

01:01:17.940 of millions of innocent civilians in a single day. But it may be the only course of action

01:01:21.860 available to us given what Islamists believe. Oh, this is the, this is the Belai massacre 0.92

01:01:27.480 thing again. He's like, look, we did nuke an entire region of the planet, but we felt very 0.99

01:01:32.660 bad about it afterwards. We literally are so sad about this. I can't believe how sad about this I

01:01:38.180 am, but we might have to kill 10 million people. We went to the greeting card store. We bought an 0.99

01:01:44.420 I'm sorry little card. We sent it to the nuclear blast site that we created. So a bunch of people 0.83

01:01:52.000 responded to this shocked and outraged. He calls out Chris Hedges, who said that Harris was calling

01:01:57.140 for a nuclear first strike. And Harris basically says, no, no, no. I wasn't saying we should

01:02:02.380 conduct a nuclear first strike, I was saying that hypothetically, if this situation arose,

01:02:08.340 it would be logical.

01:02:09.820 And he accuses his critics of being dishonest on this point.

01:02:14.280 So he's sort of correcting that he caught his critics being a little bit sloppy.

01:02:18.540 He didn't advocate for a nuclear first strike right now.

01:02:22.540 He said we might need to do a nuclear first strike.

01:02:24.220 But we might have to, given certain developments in the future. 0.99

01:02:28.300 And the fact that these people love death so much that we just have to kill them all because we can't have a conventional, like, mutually assured destruction because they like dying so much. 0.98

01:02:39.320 So it's actually worse, Sam, what you're actually saying is worse. 0.99

01:02:42.120 This is what he loves to do.

01:02:44.100 He puts out an argument with the thinnest little caveat.

01:02:47.280 Someone ignores the caveat because the caveat is sort of not the point.

01:02:52.600 Right.

01:02:52.960 They're sort of mentally skipping over it and being like, you're talking about nuclear first strikes killing tens of millions of people.

01:02:59.220 And then he's like, as you can see, my critics are wildly dishonest.

01:03:02.920 It's like, OK, but the fundamental concern about the nuclear first strike is what you should be addressing here.

01:03:08.140 So in his defense of himself, he says, of course, not every Muslim regime would fit this description.

01:03:15.360 And then says he wasn't talking about like Pakistan and Iran.

01:03:19.080 He was talking about the Taliban and ISIS, for example.

01:03:22.220 but that's not what he said in the book he was referring to all muslim regimes it's also a weird 0.93

01:03:28.400 distinction because it's like saying we're not going to bomb idaho we're going to bomb the kkk

01:03:33.140 an action that would entail dropping a bunch of bombs on idaho right either way you're dropping 0.96

01:03:39.720 bombs on a bunch of innocent people this is also a little bit of cowards hypothetical he's just like 0.85

01:03:43.880 if they got nukes they would use them on us immediately because they are not afraid of death 0.97

01:03:48.840 and they love murder.

01:03:50.080 It is a little weird to be like, 0.66

01:03:51.880 these people are too cavalier about killing, 1.00

01:03:54.540 so we have to kill them. 1.00

01:03:55.960 If you think what I'm doing is bad, 1.00

01:03:57.940 wait until you see the thing

01:03:59.460 that I am pretending they were going to do.

01:04:01.540 That's the logic behind like most genocides.

01:04:03.720 They want to do it to us,

01:04:05.600 so we have to do it to them first.

01:04:07.760 His primary contribution to this discourse

01:04:10.300 is the idea that Islamophobia

01:04:13.360 isn't real as a concept.

01:04:15.740 It's just a weapon used by apologists

01:04:18.240 to deflect criticism of Islam.

01:04:20.800 He wrote a piece fairly recently

01:04:23.360 that sort of summarized his feelings on this

01:04:26.060 titled, What is Islamophobia?

01:04:29.280 Where he said this,

01:04:30.440 and I'm condensing a bunch here,

01:04:32.920 but I'll send it to you.

01:04:34.420 He says,

01:04:35.340 What is Islamophobia?

01:04:37.140 There's no question that the term

01:04:38.580 has been designed to confuse people.

01:04:40.840 Its purpose is to conflate

01:04:42.000 any criticism of Islam,

01:04:43.540 which is a doctrine of religious beliefs,

01:04:45.280 with bigotry against Muslims as people.

01:04:47.920 Honestly, criticizing the doctrine of Islam does not entail bigotry against Arabs or any other group of people.

01:04:53.380 It is not an expression of hatred to notice that specific Islamic ideas, in particular beliefs about martyrdom and jihad and blasphemy and apostasy, inspire terrible acts of violence.

01:05:04.520 And it's not an expression of phobia, that is, irrational fear, to notice that violent religious fanatics don't make good neighbors.

01:05:12.320 I mean, fine, sure, man.

01:05:16.360 No, absolutely.

01:05:17.460 You should be able to criticize religious doctrines without being considered a bigot.

01:05:22.040 Except as we just discussed, Sam Harris openly advocates for profiling people who, quote, look Muslim.

01:05:28.200 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:28.800 Which is discrimination against Muslims in the strictest, most literal sense.

01:05:34.140 And he's also just saying that it's like qualitatively just like a worse religion than other world religions. 0.93

01:05:38.560 Like it's uniquely violent and pernicious.

01:05:41.040 That's the thing is how many times – so I think there's two components to this.

01:05:44.880 One, Sam Harris actively lobbies for discrimination against Muslims, right?

01:05:51.040 So like if that's not Islamophobia, if that's not bigotry against Muslims, then what could

01:05:56.820 possibly be?

01:05:58.620 But then also there's a degree to which it's like, OK, you should be allowed to criticize

01:06:03.460 a doctrine.

01:06:04.560 But if you spend 20 years calling that doctrine like psychotic and bloodthirsty, like am I

01:06:10.440 allowed to draw no inference?

01:06:12.360 Is that like...

01:06:13.460 Right, right.

01:06:14.300 And just to be clear, I have barely grazed upon Sam Harris's Islamophobic statements.

01:06:22.600 In 2006, he said, quote, given current birth rates, France could be a majority Muslim country in 25 years.

01:06:30.980 And that is if immigration were to stop tomorrow. 0.98

01:06:34.640 Oh, yeah.

01:06:35.160 God.

01:06:35.400 So just to be clear, it's 2024 and France's Muslim population is like 9% of the country.

01:06:44.300 So no, when Harris in like 2012 wrote about this, it was very obvious at that point that

01:06:53.640 he was going to be wrong, right?

01:06:55.420 Yeah, yeah.

01:06:55.980 And all he said was, you know, I can't find what my source was for that, but obviously

01:07:01.360 that source was incorrect.

01:07:02.740 Like no, no acknowledgement of the fact that like he didn't check the veracity of the source,

01:07:10.500 right?

01:07:10.700 Now, this is the kind of thing that racists pretend is not racist, right?

01:07:15.240 All I'm doing is looking at birth rates.

01:07:18.320 You're doing great replacement theory, right?

01:07:20.400 You're fostering fear about a certain race becoming a majority and you're doing it using shitty statistics that any undergrad in stats would know was incorrect. 0.54

01:07:33.860 And any historian would know has been said about every immigrant group through time, right? 0.99

01:07:37.740 Like Southern Italians are going to outbreed white Americans and it never fucking happens 0.98

01:07:41.520 because as living standards go up, birth rates go down. 0.98

01:07:44.100 The only way that that's not racist is if your definition of racism is that you like

01:07:48.620 have to say out loud, these people are inferior in X, Y, and Z ways. 0.99

01:07:54.620 And that's a little awkward for Sam too, because he's also a big promoter of race and IQ shit. 0.99

01:07:59.520 Yeah, I know. 0.99

01:07:59.980 A big fan of Charles Murray.

01:08:01.240 So he does say that some races are inferior to others on a genetic basis.

01:08:08.960 So that's not racism.

01:08:10.820 This isn't racism.

01:08:12.740 Saying that we should profile Muslims at airports isn't racism.

01:08:16.120 I am genuinely curious about what he thinks racism is exactly.

01:08:20.720 I will say it's a little weird as a defense against a charge of bias to say, no, no, no,

01:08:27.060 I'm not Islamophobic. 1.00

01:08:28.160 I simply believe that this religion is bad, and I've been saying this for two decades 1.00

01:08:34.280 so that I could make the lives of adherents to this religion worse.

01:08:39.480 Right. 0.87

01:08:40.060 How dare you?

01:08:40.720 I couldn't even get into his discussions about Gaza lately, but just to give anyone who's

01:08:46.740 interested a taste, he literally said that Hamas is worse than the Nazis.

01:08:52.280 Oh, my God.

01:08:54.000 And again, why did he say that?

01:08:56.700 Because doctrinally, they are worse in his mind.

01:09:00.920 It's never the things you do in the world.

01:09:04.060 Right, right, right.

01:09:04.480 It's just the doctrine. 1.00

01:09:06.140 And anytime you step outside of the theoretical world, he looks like a dumb asshole. 1.00

01:09:11.500 I love that this is just like the dunk on Sam Harris episode. 0.99

01:09:13.860 It's not really about the book. 1.00

01:09:15.260 It's just like this guy fucking sucks. 1.00

01:09:17.220 Here's the thing. 1.00

01:09:18.140 Here's the thing about podcasting.

01:09:19.520 And Sam, listen up.

01:09:21.040 when a book is this boring and abstract and theoretical you have to step outside the book

01:09:29.380 do you have a sense of like what was actually driving him like

01:09:31.300 do you have like an origin story like why does he hate muslims so much if you watch every episode

01:09:35.960 of golden girls

01:09:51.040 Thank you.

If Books Could Kill - November 04, 2024

Sam Harris's ＂The End of Faith＂

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