Dear Angry Lunatic: A Response to Chris Hedges

[SecularMotion]

Over at Truthdig, the celebrated journalist Chris Hedges has discovered that Christopher Hitchens and I are actually racists with a fondness for genocide. He has broken this story before—many times, in fact—but in his most recent essay he blames “secular fundamentalists” like me and Hitch for the recent terrorist atrocities in Norway.

Very nice.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-chris-hedges/

Edit to update link

[CrawlingChaos]

1. Chris Hedges' article was excellent

Sam Harris' response was little more than a collection of slurs and childish insults.

I see a lot of ugliness coming from the New Atheist movement and the momentum behind it is disturbing. I'm grateful to Hedges for speaking out so eloquently.

[Goblinmonger]

2. You liked the old atheists that did talk about such things better.

I get that. But get used to the fact that atheists are no longer happy to stay in the closet. Many, many people said the same things about Bertrand Russel when he was writing. I realize he was a big ol' meany, too, but people got used to it.

It really doesn't cease to amaze me that people will hop on the "I hate Harris" or Dawkins bandwagon but really don't take on the really evil Christian fuckers who do a lot more harm. Hell, if you even say anything about the pope being a douchebag for the child rape scandals, you are hopped on for Catholic bigotry. But let's all call Sam Harris an asshole.

[Goblinmonger]

3. Oh, and are you frickin' kidding me?

Hedges lies continuously about what Harris has said and you call that "excellent." How is Hedges not engaging in "slurs and childish insults"?

[skepticscott]

4. I can easily understand why you sympathize

with Hedges so readily. You both seem to have the same talent for blatant intellectual dishonesty.

[rug]

5. I don't know about Harris, but Hitchens certainly cheered a western invasion of Arab countries.

Fairly close to racism.

[CrawlingChaos]

7. Harris is just as bad

Here's a little something from Sam Harris that must have made Dick Cheney's whole day:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/in-defense-of-torture_b_8993.html

Hedges talks about the hateful caricatures of Muslims, and he's so right. It is ugly, it's deceitful and it's racist. Here's Richard Dawkins spreading the hate:

http://youtu.be/LhYus6TiGEE

[rug]

8. Good grief. He wrote that in the midst of it too.

[struggle4progress]

6. I don't always agree with Hedges, but at his best he is insightful and thought-provoking, whereas

Harris is always merely shallow

It is true that Hedges once trained in theology, but a few years back I posted here at DU some excerpts from an essay of his in which he said he didn't think belief in G-d was very important -- although he did regard a personal sense of sin as important: his point, of course, was the centrality of the problem of self-righteous hubris

Hedges says some quite intelligent things in this essay that Harris so strongly dislikes:

... We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the publication of the King James Bible. The concept of “the chosen people” was quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.

Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the “chosen people.” They advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—that this call for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine will. But schemes for universal human advancement, no matter what language is used to justify them, are always mythic. They are designed to satisfy a yearning for meaning and purpose. They give the proponents of these myths the status of soothsayers and prophets. And, when acted upon, they fill the Earth with mass graves, bombed cities, widespread misery and penal colonies. The extent of this fundamentalism is evident in the strident utterances of the Christian right as well as those of the so-called New Atheists ...

Harris in response says: ... Chris Hedges seemed to make a career out of ... asserting ... that ... I call for ... nuclear first strike on the ... Muslim world ... Harris gives examples such as Hedges saying ... Sam Harris, at the end of his first book, asks us to consider a nuclear first strike on the Arab world ... Then to disprove this, Harris quotes himself: ... the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own ... This is vintage Harris: he has the depth of a passionate but intellectually mediocre sophomore on a high school debate squad