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Sam Harris: Yet another liberal mugged by reality
Sam Harris is - or at least was - becoming a liberal icon. After all, he has done virtually everything right, in the eyes of the left.His best-selling book on religion, "The End of Faith," was heavy on Christian-bashing, no doubt to the delight of his American audience. He wants the rich taxed more, gays free to marry and drugs decriminalized. It's a wonder he's not on tour with George Soros. So when a friend sent me a piece Harris penned for the Los Angeles Times last fall, I was ready to chuckle and dismiss it. Then I read it. Here was the liberals' liberal explaining that his Times' piece "may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that `liberals are soft on terrorism.' It is, and they are." It seems Harris has come to a shocking, for him, conclusion about liberalism, after actually being in contact with said individuals when his book made the best-seller lists. "(My) correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of the world - specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith," Harris wrote. In other words, Harris woke up one day and realized that today's version of liberalism thrives on illogic and a "debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities." In the very next paragraph, Harris notes the absurdity of that dogma: "I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off journalists before this fantasy will dissipate." Harris attempts - as he did in his book - to equate all religious dogma, saying that none affords any opportunity for rational discourse or leeway for disagreement. That's a tough sell in these modern times, as one religion more than any other seems to have a lock on savagery in the name of its prophet. But Harris has made a career out of being an atheist, and so he's almost professionally required to lump all people of faith into the same pot. Setting that incongruity aside, let's just note that Harris isn't a conservative atheist, so maybe his words concerning what he repeatedly calls the "failure of liberalism" won't fall on deaf, progressive ears. Posted by: trailing wife 2007-05-28 |
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