Many people mischaracterize what Sam Harris said at the beginning of End of Faith, and it’s understandable because many haven’t actually read the book. Also, the quote they pick on is fairly near the beginning. Around page 194, he gets into the subject again, and it’s clear he doesn’t support this stuff. Also, with the millions of words he’s written and said, it’s the only thing people can find. There is nothing from Dawkins at all that promotes violence. Hasan, on the other hand, has not been so circumspect in his statements. There is a lot of what I consider hate speech from him. There is good stuff too, which I freely acknowledge.

Also, all journalists misrepresent, deliberately or otherwise, all the time. The answer is to call them out, show where they’ve gone wrong etc, like the way Werleman has been destroyed because of all his idiocies and plagiarism. Hasan thinks there should be a special case when it is Muslims who are misrepresented. The penalty for such journalists is that if they keep making such errors, they won’t be able to find a job. None of us like it when a group we’re associated with is misrepresented, and it is wrong that it happens, and it is a form of hate speech, but the sort of regime Hasan wants instituted is not the way to go imo.

Hi Heather,

1) I am a computer scientist, logic is my forte, and I still stand by my claim that religion wasn’t the reason ISIS killed the hostages. The fact that most of them were non-Muslims has no relevance. If some guy goes out on the street and randomly starts firing, and he hits and kills 20 black people, it doesn’t imply that he killed those people because they were black – it might just have been that the people walking past at that time happened to be black. Similarly, the majority of hostages they have are non-Muslim, if they had Muslim Western hostages too, they would also kill them.

2) You wrote in a previous article (in the comments): I really don’t like the idea of silencing anybody, but with freedom of speech and a public platform comes responsibility. Hasan is extremely intelligent and knows the effect what he has to say will have on some people”. And I agree with you, when you are someone who others listen to, then you have a responsibility to ensure that what you say isn’t used to breed hatred. Why then should Dawkins and Harris also not have the same responsibility? Why are they happy to promote ideas that are biased, and simplified to such a degree, that one can actually classify them as factually incorrect?

As for Sam Harris, what you wrote doesn’t address the misconception. There is no “misconception” – Harris said that if ever Islamists acquired nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, then a first-strike against them with nuclear weapons would be justifiable even though it would be a crime as it would kill tens of millions of civilians. Even Jerry Coyne doesn’t deny that Harris said this – what Coyne writes is “Another philosophical thought experiment, as are most of the statements that Savage uses to paint Sam as a genocidal maniac”.

You said you share this view – but this is however extreme apologism on both you and Coyne’s part. Firstly, Harris is using the term Islamist interchangeably with terrorist – this is simply nonsense. You can have genoicdal Islamists and you have have pacifist Islamists. Secondly, thought experiments are extremely important when it comes to judging what we really believe in. You can only truly judge what principles someone stands for when they are put in positions they do not come across every day. Most people in the West say they do not believe in the deliberate killing of civilians – but as I said, this isn’t true. Most people in the West don’t believe in deliberately killing civilians because they don’t need to deliberately kill civilians to ensure their survival. If however their very existence was in threat, they would say the deliberate targetting of civilians is justifiable … just like Sam Harris has done.
Of course, many people don’t want to say that killing civilians can be justifiable, because then it shows that we are not THAT different from terrorists, because what you will find is that many terrorists find the only way they can ensure the survival of their people is by killing civilians. So, yes, I can see why so many of us are happy to be so dismissive of thought experiments.

3) I have also just noticed that you wrote something totally wrong about Mehdi Hasan. You wrote in your article: “That would be the same Mehdi Hassan who wrote that journalists should face sanctions if they write articles that criticize Islam”. This is completely untrue – he has said absolutely nothing of the sort. Go and read the article you linked to again – in the article, he talks about sanctions against journalists who MISREPRESENT portrayals of MINORITIES. So say for example, a non-practising Muslim male goes and rapes a woman, and the article is referring to him as a Muslim male, even though his religion doesn’t have any relevance here – he doesn’t even follow it. This is a form of hate-speech, and Hasan thinks this should be penalised. This is absolutely not the same thing as saying journalists who criticise Islam should face sanctions.

Now I don’t think you were intentionally dishonest, I just think this shows how our judgement of people can be clouded depending on whether we agree with their way of thinking or not.

4) I have an active interest in military, so I know very well the capabilities of the US military, and knowing this capability, I can say with 99.9% conviction that it is impossible for them to wipe out ISIS within a week unless they resorted to using nuclear or chemical weapons.

Hi AU. I’m addressing your comments out of order, so I’ll try not to miss any.
1. If a pacifist Muslim scholar was mischaracterizing atheists and secularists I wouldn’t blame him if some of his followers became violent, as long as he himself was teaching only peaceful methods of resistance.
2. I’ve written about misconception of what Sam Harris said before here.
3. I agree that killing hostages is a media tactic as much as anything else, but that doesn’t change that all except Muath al-Kaseasbeh were civilians. I feel like I know you well enough to know you weren’t justifying the murders, but many others would see what you said as an excuse.
4. If you think the US couldn’t wipe DAESH out in a week, you don’t realize just how big their military is. The graph here of their spending will give you some idea. They’re huge. They could physically overwhelm DAESH easily, although not the idea of course. I sincerely hope they don’t resort to that – I think it would be a massive error of judgment. I really hope the situation can be sorted in some way before the next US presidential election because if a Republican gets in, the world could be in major trouble.
5. Some people I agree do see atheism as a belief system. That is, imo, because they start from the assumption that Yahweh/God/Allah etc is real. As atheists do not make that assumption (we would change our minds if there was proof), our lack of belief cannot be a belief system. To us, it’s like calling “off” a TV channel. I’ve written about that a bit before too, and included the views of a few fellow ordinary atheists here.
6. I think you’re right with your sanctimony of privilege argument. All I was saying, badly, is it’s an attitude I personally try very hard to avoid.

They have announced that they don’t acknowledge the Geneva Convention

You could perfectly reject parts of The Geneva Convention, yet still believe there is such a thing as a civilian.

These names prove they don’t think there is any such thing as a civilian

No, these names just prove that ISIS know that by killing hostages, they will get MASSIVE airtime in the Western media. If no one actually cared about Western hostages being killed, if there wasn’t anything to be gained from killing them, then you can be pretty sure ISIS wouldn’t have killed most of them.

They had no justification for killing these people except their religion

But Kassig was a practising Muslim convert who wasn’t fighting against them (unlike the Jordanian pilot). Why would they kill him because of his religion?

There is no argument that can convince me that these murders were justified

I am not justifying them – but I am interested in understanding them. You sound very much like the British politicians and media right now – they have gone absolutely mental, anyone who tries to understand what might have driven someone like Emwazi to the position where he is now is immediately labelled as as “apologist for terror”.

Atheism isn’t a belief system. All it means is a lack of belief in any god or gods

I have never said otherwise. Where we do however disagree is you do not believe New Atheism can be described as an ideology, whereas I, and many other intellectuals, believe it can.

Dawkins, Harris et al are not responsible for what others do. They are responsible for their own actions

Well, they are. I am sorry, you cannot have it both ways, if a Muslim scholar who is a pacifist, is finding the worst behaviour of secular people and portraying it as this is what secularism is about, you would rightly say that this Muslim scholar is intellectually dishonest, and whilst he isn’t directly responsible for the actions of some Muslim who listens to his speeches and starts thinking secularism is terrible and therefore secular people must be attacked, he would be indirectly responsible because it was his intellectual dishonesty that influenced that Muslim to start thinking so badly of secular people.
Similarly, Harris and Dawkins are intellectually dishonest. They find the worst of Muslim behaviour that supports their view that Islam is bad for the world, and they harp on about it. They look over the nuances and simplify things. As an example, Dawkins was quick to tweet about Graeme Wood’s article that said ISIS is very Islamic. Since then, there have been numerous very well written articles that have completely taken Wood’s article apart. Dawkins hasn’t tweeted about any of these articles – I am sure he is aware of them, but these articles say that whilst it is true that radical Islam does play a part in the ideology of ISIS, there are many other external factors. Now if someone reads Dawkins and Harris and they constantly hear that Islam is really bad for the world, and this individual decides that something must be done and he decides to bomb a mosque, then Dawkins and Harris ARE partially responsible for what this individual had done, because if they had presented things in context when in came to Islam, this individual would not have ended up having such a fear of Islam that it would cause him to carry out such an act.

I don’t agree with the way you have characterized the argument into who’s better

I think you misread what I wrote. I was simply saying that if you are rich and don’t have a need to steal, it is very easy to look at someone who is poor and does steal and act sanctimonious and say “look at me, I don’t steal, look at him, he does”. Similarly, it is very easy for people from countries who have huge armies and don’t have a need to attack civilians from the enemy to say “look at us, we don’t attack civilians, look at them, they do”.

There are definitely some who would say killing millions would be a necessary evil – those a-holes are already saying it

Sam Harris has said it too. Does that make him an a-hole too?

Obama could send the whole American military in now and wipe out DAESH within a week. He isn’t doing it, partly because he knows many innocents would be killed and the action would do more harm than good

No he couldn’t! Please, this is the kind of bravado I expect to hear at some right-wing trashy site like The Daily Mail, you’re supposed to be an intelligent liberal, let’s keep things in perspective and not get carried away by jingoism – the entire US military CANNOT wipe out ISIS within a week.

They have announced that they don’t acknowledge the Geneva Convention. These names prove they don’t think there is any such thing as a civilian:
James Foley
Steven Sotloff
David Haines
Hervé Gourdel
Alan Henning
Peter Edward Kassig aka Abdul Rakhman Kassig
Haruna Yukawa
Kenji Goto
Muath al-Kaseasbeh
Kayla Mueller
21 Egyptians murdered by beheading
Gay man thrown off roof, survived, stoned to death
and many more.

They had no justification for killing these people except their religion. There is no argument that can convince me that these murders were justified.

Atheism isn’t a belief system. All it means is a lack of belief in any god or gods. Dawkins, Harris et al are not responsible for what others do. They are responsible for their own actions. If they were calling for any form of violence, I would agree with you, but they don’t.

I don’t agree with the way you have characterized the argument into who’s better. I think it’s worse when a rich person steals because they do it from greed, not need. Personally, if a poor person has to steal to eat, depending on who they steal from, I think that’s justified. I think society should work so there isn’t anyone who needs to steal to eat.

There are definitely some who would say killing millions would be a necessary evil – those a-holes are already saying it, and they mostly come from the Christian right. Obama could send the whole American military in now and wipe out DAESH within a week. He isn’t doing it, partly because he knows many innocents would be killed and the action would do more harm than good.

I don’t think you need to bring Dawkins and Harris into the conversation for that situation

Bu I think we do. They have cult-like status amongst their “fanboys”, and their fanboys have argued endlessly that the likes of Harris and Dawkins are enlightened liberals who care about civilian life. Which I am sure they do, but would they care about civilian life if it meant the survival of their belief. No. They wouldn’t. They would say killing millions of civilians was a necessary evil – something which many Islamic terrorists say. So this whole debate about “we are better than them because we don’t kill civilians” is nonsensical – it’s like a rich person looking down on a poor person who was caught shoplifting to feed his family and saying “Send him to jail, he steals, I don’t steal” … yes, of course the rich person doesn’t steal, because he doesn’t need to.

There’s no such thing as a civilian to DAESH

Do you have any proof for this? Do you have any fatwas issued by Baghdadi, or any of the spiritual teachers of ISIS, that have said there is no such thing as a civilian?

Not so many people still think like that.

I don’t know that that is as true as you’d like to think. I suspect if rockets were regularly being lobbed at Miami from Cuba, as they are at Israel, the American public would demand that any means necessary be used to put an end to it. And any current president, or presidential candidate who didn’t commit to doing just that wouldn’t have a chance in hell of being elected, or re-elected. Most Americans I know beyond we enlightened liberal citizens of the world see one American civilian life as being worth 1000 foreign civilian lives, particularly third world civilians, and don’t feel we have any obligation to protect them from themselves, their government, or their families actions. We might sacrifice soldiers to a degree to that end, but not civilians. Just look at the number of civilians we were willing kill largely to avenge the 2400 that died on 9/11.

There’s no such thing as a civilian to DAESH – unless we accept them, we’re enemy combatants so arguing what they would do if they were in the same position as Germany during WWII doesn’t work for me. I think if they had more, and more sophisticated, weaponry they would just kill more of what we, not they, term civilians.

You’re probably right about how people would react, but I hope not. I see a lot of people protesting civilian casualties all over the world. I think these days things are a bit different because we see the suffering in a way we didn’t in WWII because of media coverage. Also, back then a lot of people thought of people from different countries, including Germany, as “not the same as us”. Not so many people still think like that.

If DAESH was as strong and active as a WWII combatant, I’m sure your assessment would be correct though. I don’t think you need to bring Dawkins and Harris into the conversation for that situation – there are plenty who would be saying it long before they did – UKIP and the GOP would be first on board. In fact the GOP are already saying it openly – I’ve heard it several times on Fox News.

There are literally tens of millions of conservative Christians in the US (and elsewhere) who think we’re in the End Times and DAESH’s activity presages the return of Jesus. Which is what DAESH thinks too. It’s just that the two groups expect a different final result. Thankfully neither are in charge. We’re probably in more danger from the Christian Right than DAESH because they have more chance of gaining power.