Why Sam Harris is a racist asshole

Sam Harris is another atheist racist asshole.  Who knew?  Recently, on Bill Maher's show - I've known Maher to be a toad for a while now, pretty much the distilled essence of everything I loathe about liberalism in America - Harris got into it with Ben Affleck about Muslims.  One of the things Harris said is that you can blame all Muslims, more or less, because they support the radicals who support the terrorist.

He said imagine a series of concentric circles.  (He's used this "argument" a number of times.)  In the innermost circle, you've got terrorists.  In the second circle, you've got radicals who give intellectual, material and moral support to terrorists.  In the third circle, you've got run of the mill Muslims who give intellectual, material and moral support to the radicals - and through them, to the terrorists.  THEREFORE, it's okay to hate all Muslims.

Okay, I'm going to mention, first, that in that second circle you've got to include the US government.  The US government gives tremendous, incredible support to the Wahabbist absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia.  In turn, Wahabbists give tremendous support to terrorists (including the 9/11 terrorists, I should add).  In turn, that puts American citizens in the third circle, since we give support (through taxes, if not ideologically) to the US government that supports the regime in Saudi Arabia!  (Further, in the past, we have directly supported guys like Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.  Really, the US government is in Harris's second circle and we are in the third!)

But put that aside for the next bit of reasoning, which is: it's possible to use this technique in a lot of different ways.

So, let's imagine those same three concentric circles.  In the first circle are "people who engage in illegal military actions" - the US government.  The second circle is, then, "people who give material, intellectual and moral support to those illegal military actions".  Let's call them the politicians, businesses, writers and such who have supported illegal military action abroad.  Sam Harris, for instance, falls in this group.  The third circle is everyone who gives support by association to the second circle - which would be pretty much everyone in the United States as well as the citizens of countries like Great Britain and Denmark.

Some Americans who object to the war might also object to being in the third circle.  They might go, "Hey, I'm against these illegal wars and bombing campaigns!"  Absolutely, sure.  But Harris's reasoning doesn't allow for that from Muslims, so why should anyone allow it for you?  That you're an American of principled conscious is utterly irrelevant to why people should hate you!

Some people might also go, "Chris, those categories seem awful arbitrary and really broad."  Again, true, but so what?  If you accept Harris's reasoning, then you accept arbitrary creation of sweeping categories for the purpose of condemning people.

Another person might also go, "Why stop there?  Draw more circles!  In Harris's diagram, add a fourth circle where religious people support religious expression and say kill all religious people, too!  Draw a fifth circle for agnostics and atheists who support Christmas give material support to religion and kill them, too!"

Harris's reasoning (insofar as one might call it that) is deeply, profoundly specious.  I mean, from his tete-a-tete with Affleck, at one point he said that 78% percent of British Muslims thought that the guys in Denmark who published those racist cartoons should be prosecuted.  Harris goes on, in the same breath, to suggest that 78% of British Muslims therefore support terrorism!  I think it is important to point out, here, that both GB and Denmark have anti-hate speech laws.  So in Harris's mind, British Muslims who objected to the racist caricature of Islam and considered it hate speech THEREFORE support terrorism.  This is intensely silly reasoning.  It's so silly that it baffles me how an intelligent person could say it in public, excepting racism.  When you add in racism, it makes perfect fucking sense.

So then this same dude goes on to create these broad, ignorant categories as if they were some kind of PROOF, objective proof, that people should discriminate against Muslims.  And this isn't racist because . . . he drew a chart?

(At one point, he also said Affleck didn't understand his reasoning.  Well, duh.  Ben's a bright, not racist, principled man.  Harris's reasoning makes no fucking sense so of course Affleck didn't understand it!  I'm sure it would have been much clearer if Affleck spoke racist.)

But this guy, who thinks that 78% of British Muslims support terrorism because they were offended by racist cartoons, is making these arbitrary categories, ignoring how he participates in the very categories he draws, for the purpose of further discrimination and military action against Muslims.  He equally stops drawing those arbitrary circles when they might effect him is simply icing on his racist cake - they are drawn and interpreted to keep his own hands clean!

What I'm saying here is that Harris full of shit and a racist asshole.

Googling "sorcery drugs" and the weird fundie Christian BS I found

I recently had opportunity to google the term “sorcery drugs” because I am running a role-playing game which will feature a magical drug.  (FYI, if you google "magic drug", you basically get a ton of stuff about mushrooms.) It was pretty interesting. For a number of years, I have broadly theorized that the hostility that our society has towards psychedelic drugs is because they give a feeling of spirituality that religion doesn't; therefore, religion is threatened by psychedelic drugs because if you can get a more legitimately spiritual feeling LSD or psylocybin than religion, well, why the hell do we need popes and reverends and priests?

The first post is titled “Let Us Reason”. It does nothing of the sort. It creates a specious argument that the Greek word pharmakia is identical to “sorcery”. This sorta ignores that the Greek word for sorcery is “μαγεία”, or “mageia” from which we get the word magic, duh, going way back to the Persian priestly caste, the magi. Pretty much all the Greek words for magic have this root. The word for drugs (φάρμακα), is etymologically unrelated to the word that Greeks, ancient or modern, used for magic.

However, crazy fundie Christian websites rarely use something as irrelevant as facts deter from their screeds.

If it was just one website, I wouldn't give a damn. But the second page is “does sorcery refer to drug use – Bibleforums Christian Message Board” and then “Drugs and Sorcery in the Last Days”. Then, “Drugs and the Bible” then “Psychotropic Drugs = Pharmakia = Sorcery – Talk Jesus”. Then, a little hidden, is “Pharmakeia: the Abuse of Drugs” but the Google highlight reads “Pharmakeia (sorcery) . . .”, and then “Drugs & the Christian – The Victorious Network” . . .

I think I've made my point. When you google “sorcery drugs”, the first page is almost entirely discussion about how taking psychedelic drugs, in particular, is the same as Biblical sorcery.

As I said, this is linguistically ridiculous. While medicine and magic, in primitive societies, has considerable overlap, the Greek word for sorcery has no particular magical connotation. It's a bunch of bullshit. The ancient Greeks knew medicinal drugs had no particular connection to sorcery. Not to go too much into ancient Greek magical beliefs, but they heavily involved invoking gods in distinction to medical drugs which worked regardless of beliefs, prayers or invocations.

It also demonstrates the theological preposterousness of any Biblical interpretation. What they're grappling with is intoxication. The Bible is pretty much against intoxication but all the Biblical references are pretty wine-based. You read the Bible in a fairly literal sense, the only mind-altering drug they mention is wine. It's like the Iron Age Hebrews were ignorant of any other mind-altering substance. So, a fairly “normal” reading of the Bible could easily lead one to think that the only drug that the Bible talks about is wine while it is equally clear that one can be intoxicated through numerous channels.

So what is a crazy Bible person to do? The less crazy of them would go, “Well, the Bible was written by Iron Age people ignorant of drugs other than wine, but the reasoning for forbidding intoxication should logically extend to all intoxicants”. But this creates a problem for people who think the Bible is a divine work (not to mention the bit in Genesis when God says that we own all the plants and stuff). While it's true that Iron Age Hebrews were ignorant of the numerous ways to get intoxicated, GOD would be in on all the ways one can can get fucked up. Yet, the Bible is written as if no one involved had any idea that there were other intoxicants. To admit that one must extend the reasoning of the Bible towards things about which the Bible does not say sorta says that God wrote a shitty book that didn't take into account future discoveries of intoxicants, that the Bible is not perfect because God knew that you could get fucked up on cannabis, mushrooms and eventually stuff like LSD and MDMA. If you believe that the Bible is perfect, this is a problem.

Not to mention that it's just a little stupid because none of us speak classical Greek. Even if the words for drugs and sorcery, in the Greek language, were the same two thousand years ago, it's just idiotic to try to say that ancient Greek drugs/sorcery have more than a trivial similarity to modern drug culture, pharmacological or black market. So what if a dead language used as one word something that we not have two words to describe? As Nietzsche said, it is interesting that when God wished to speak, He learned Greek and did not learn it better. To wit, the problem of interpretation inevitably remains. Presumably God would know that two thousand years later that classical Greek would be as dead as Elvis and He would see to it his sacred, perfect book did not degrade in meaning as time passed. Yet, it has. It isn't like it would have been a real problem for the Bible to say “sorcery, including the consumption of any intoxicants . . . .” The Bible is not that clear, though. It is written as if the writers honestly do not know there are other intoxicants than wine.

It's much easier, then, to say that the Bible is TOTALLY RIGHT by equating a Greek word for drugs to also mean sorcery. That way, the Biblical injunction against magic applies to drugs THEREFORE the Bible is still perfect.

This is clearly tortured reasoning, but if you're a believer in the inerrant truth of the Bible, you've got to do a lot of weird things to justify your beliefs that run contrary to reason and fact. The truth is there are dozens of drugs that can give a person a spiritual experience vastly more significant than any amount of religion. Most people can pray for a thousand years and never get the same feeling as a few hundred micrograms of LSD. This is profoundly subversive to an organization that is ideologically so delicate that they try to argue that the Greek word for drugs is the same as sorcery.