Making Sense with Sam Harris - #6 — The Chapel Hill Murders and 'Militant' Atheism

Episode Date: February 18, 2015

Sam Harris responds to the charge that "militant" atheism is responsible for the murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you a triple murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, committed by a person named Craig Stephen Hicks, who is still alive. This was not a suicide murder. So undoubtedly, we'll one day hear what his conscious motives were, but he killed three young people, apparently over a parking space. At least that was the subject of their dispute.

But he happens to have been a person who identified as an atheist on his Facebook page and expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about me. I'm actually not sure. But he was self-identified as an atheist and critical of all religion, apparently, on his Facebook page. And because the victims of this crime were Muslim, it is now being widely described as a hate crime. And it, in fact, is being described as a symptom of a problem that we have in the atheist community, a problem of militancy, a problem of anti-Muslim bigotry. And many people are claiming that I am somehow responsible for this, both for the

background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing to be accused of. So it seems to me there's a fair amount of moral confusion here, and also just factual confusion about the reality of human violence in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people were killed in the very prime of their life, at the beginning of their adult lives, and they were by all accounts marvelous people. I can only imagine, in fact, I can't imagine the grief of their parents and their loved ones. So there's absolutely nothing in my work or in my mind that is supportive of a crime like this. And I would have hoped that could go without saying. I think in this context, it probably can't. Nevertheless, the deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, where the

daily behavior of a group like ISIS has been astonishing to witness. You can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism. But of course, the analogy between militant atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one. It is an anti-analogy. It is false in every respect. Atheists are simply not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. Now, there may be atheists who do terrible things, but there's no atheist doctrine or scripture. And insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments, insofar as

they're atheistic, only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There's no argument in atheism that suggests that you should hate or victimize or stigmatize whole groups of people as there often is in revealed religion. And what we're seeing is that people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and the usual suspects, the bevy of apologists for theocracy in the Muslim world, are using this very real tragedy in Chapel Hill to try to stoke a kind of mob mentality around an imagined atheist campaign of bigotry against Muslims. It's an incredibly cynical and tendentious and opportunistic and ultimately dangerous thing to do. Of course, people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan

are alleging that there's some kind of double standard here, that atheists are so quick to detect a religious motivation in the misbehavior of Muslims worldwide, but when it comes to their own, well then they discount the role played by atheism. But this is just a total misrepresentation of how an atheist like myself thinks about human violence. It is simply obvious that some instances of

Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior, and to my knowledge I never have. And insofar as I'm ever confused about the religion of Islam for that behavior. And to my knowledge, I never have. And insofar as I'm ever confused about the source of Muslim violence, well, then I apologize in advance for that confusion. But the problem, of course, is that there are teachings within Islam that explicitly recommend, in fact, demand violence in certain circumstances. Circum, circumstances which we in the 21st century, if we are decent human beings, will recognize as being morally insane. Apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, merely holding hands with a man who is not your blood relative or husband,

if you are a woman unlucky enough to be born in a country like Afghanistan. These are rather often killing offenses. And the link between the doctrine, as it is understood by Islamists and jihadists at this point, and the behavior is explicit, it's logical, it is absolutely unambiguous. And yet this doesn't prevent people from denying it at every turn. Now there is no such link between atheism or secularism and violence of any kind in any circumstance. There's nothing about rejecting the truth claims of religious dogmatists.

There's nothing about doubting that the universe has a creator that suggests that violence in certain circumstances is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo or to ISIS, as insane as that sounds, are really trivializing a kind of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world. And ironically, it is violence whose principal victims are Muslim. I would also point out that the idea that there's some kind of epidemic of hate crime against Muslims in the United States is totally at odds with the facts. You need only check the FBI website and you'll see that there is no such wave

of religious bigotry directed against Muslims or directed against anyone at all, in fact. Hate crime is a very rare offense. Five people were murdered on the basis of hate crime in 2013. And when you look at the hate crimes directed at people based on religious bigotry, the crimes against Jews based on anti-Semitism outnumber the crimes against Muslims five to one. And this is every year, and this is even in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So if we're going to be concerned about hate crime in the US, we should be concerned about anti-Semitism before we worry about anti-Muslim hate crime. And the level of anti-Semitism in the US is minuscule when you're talking about violence against persons. And I wouldn't say the same thing of France, but in the US

it is virtually a non-problem, especially when you compare it to the tens of thousands of ordinary murders and rapes and aggravated assaults that happen on the basis of purely interpersonal violence. People are saying that this could not possibly have been a triple murder born of a neighbor's dispute over a parking space. But this is the most common form of interpersonal violence. It never makes sense on paper. You're talking about people who fail to regulate their emotional states, and they have, in the U.S., ready access to

weaponry that makes it incredibly easy to kill someone impulsively. So hate crime per se is not a major problem, and the people who are trying to whip up a frenzy of concern over the ambient level of bigotry and intolerance and violence against Muslims in the U.S. are really trying to engineer a kind of moral panic designed to distract people from the real problems that Muslims face, and that we all face, frankly, which is this basic incompatibility between a seventh century theocracy and our

collective aspiration to build a truly pluralistic and global civil society. You can understand this all through the lens of free speech, right? This is where, this is all you need to consider a phenomenon like Charlie Hebdo or the satanic verses. And for some reason, people on the left have aligned themselves with theocrats and people who are truly intolerant, intolerant of the very liberal values that apologists for Islam think they're enunciating. As I've said before, tolerance of intolerance is just cowardice. And it's a cowardice that's increasingly consequential. So this analogy between so-called militant atheism and militant Islam

is essentially a moral hoax. The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas and their results in the world and hating people as people because they belong to a certain group or because they have a certain skin color or because they came from a certain country. There is no connection between those two orientations. The latter is, of course, bigotry, and I would condemn it as harshly as anyone would hope. But criticizing ideas and their consequences is absolutely essential. And that is the spirit in which I have criticized Islam in various flavors and Christianity and Judaism and Buddhism and all of these criticisms are different because these belief systems are different. So that's the distinction that one has to recognize. And the clarity of that distinction leads to a kind of experience in the world that our critics seem to not imagine.

If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at of experience in the world that our critics seem to not imagine. I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at samharris.org.