Harris moonlights as inquisitor as well as heretic. Without irony, he switches hats between chapters of "The End of Faith." Chapter 3 finds him complaining that the medieval Church tortured Jews over phony "blood libel" conspiracies. Then in chapter 6, "A Science of Good & Evil," he devotes several pages to upholding the "judicial torture" of Muslims, a practice for which "reasonable men and women" have come out.
Torture then and now: The difference, he tells AlterNet, is that the Inquisition "manufactured" crimes and forced Jews to confess "fictional accomplices."
But if the Iraq War hasn't been about "fictional accomplices," what has? "There's nothing about my writing about torture that should suggest I supported what was going on in Abu Ghraib," says Harris, who supported the invasion but says it has become a "travesty." "We abused people who we know had no intelligence value."
While our soldiers are waging war on Islam in our detention centers, according to Harris, our civilians must evolve past churchgoing to "modern spiritual practice," he writes. "[M]ysticism is a rational enterprise," he writes in his book, arguing it lets spiritualists "uncover genuine facts about the world." And he tells AlterNet there are "social pressures" against research into ESP.
Society is remarkably free, however, in airing justifications for putting Muslims to the thumbscrews. Harris's case for torture is this: since "we" are OK with horrific collateral damage, "we" should have no qualms against waterboarding, the lesser evil. "It's better than death." Better, in other words, than bombing innocents.
Then again, Sam Harris is not devoting his time in the media to call for an end to bombing civilians. Attacking the sacred cow of airstrikes might have been a real heresy, true to his Quaker roots but ensuring himself exile from cable news. Instead the logic he lays out -- that Islam itself is our enemy -- invites the reader to feel comfort at the deaths of its believers. He writes: "Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."
Playing his part in last year's War Over Christmas, Harris plays it safe with "Letter to a Christian Nation." The book lumbers under a title so heavy, you'd think Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote it from prison. While keeping the Christian Nation on notice that Harris remains disdainful of "wasting time" on Jesus, he now calls for something of an alliance with the Right against Muslim Arabs and the "head-in-the-sand liberals" he denounced in a recent editorial. "Nonbelievers like myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living," he writes.
Thus praising the hard Right for its "moral clarity" in the War on Terror, Harris reserves much of his wrath for nonfundamentalist Christians, whom he considers enablers of a virgin-birth sham.
There is so much morally and intellectually wrong with Harris, there will never be enough space to point out all that is wrong. It is not enough for Democracy Lover to say, "Well, you know, Harris is a hack, but he does make good points." The Nazis introduced social security, but that hardly redeems them. Harris is a Nazi, but he just replaces Jews with Muslims, and sees no reason on earth to spare them death for the crime of existing. Nothing he has ever written or said since then should ever weigh in the balance against it.
On a final note, Alternet was quite literally flooded with comments and emails after this interview was published, most of them quite violent in their attacks upon the interviewer. Of course, the interview was benign - it did nothing else than ask Harris to expand upon and defend what was already in the public realm in his published works - and when it called him on his backpedaling, his morally outrageous defense of anti-Islamic genocide, and his intellectually dubious defense of silly ideas like ESP and reincarnation, the site and interviewer were showered with abuse. It isn't enough that Harris is a cad and a fraud; he apparently has the ability to dispense his minions to attack any who might question his non-existent integrity.
He's still out there, still peddling his papers to any willing to read and listen. I find it outrageous that anyone would defend what he has to say (although not his freedom to say it). In fact, I find it outrageous that anyone would insist he be given a fair hearing at all. He doesn't deserve it. Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not A Christian, Ralph Waldo Emerson's various essays and works, Richard Rorty, even Carl Sagan - I can read these folks and listen to what they have to say because none of them endorse the murder of human beings in the name of ridding the world of religion. They did not shed their moral compass in the name of some illusory goal.
None of them were Nazis.
