Reza Aslan vs. Sam Harris

The other day, I came across a discussion between Reza Aslan and Sam Harris. The debate took place on 25 January 2007 at the Los Angeles Public Library, and was broadcast on C-Span2’s BookTV.

I’ve enjoyed books by both men. I’ve often recommended Aslan’s No God But God as the best book I’ve read about Islam, and I thought Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith were two of the better recent books about atheism, faith and reason.

It was startling how poorly Aslan fared against Harris. It was simultaneously disappointing and fascinating to see such an intelligent and erudite figure fall so deeply into sloppy thinking and blithering irrelevance in his attempt to defend religion and faith. Harris emerged as undeniably the tighter, clearer thinker on the subject.

The clips below omit the first part of the program. Click here to see the full discussion. It’s about ninety minutes long, and well worth watching in its entirety. Scroll down for my comments.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Harris scores early with a cogent point about radical Islam: “I think we have to admit to ourselves that we are confronting the behavior of a death cult among millions and millions of Muslims, not 10,000 who went to training camps in Afghanistan. We are confronting an endorsement of this kind of behavior and a reflexive political solidarity, where Muslims side with other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior, simply because they’re other Muslims. We can’t deny the problem while trying to encourage a more benign face of the religion.”

Aslan falls back on the lame defense that he’s better qualified than Harris to make judgments about Islam — if you can’t answer the argument, insult your interlocutor — and counters: “Statements like ‘There are millions of Muslims who have this sort of death cult’ are profoundly inaccurate and are based on nothing except your sort of general impression of a region and of a religion that you have a very surface understanding of.”

In fact, Harris’ assertion is based on solid polling data, and he points that out. “It’s not even close to a minority,” he continues. “Even if it were only five percent of the Muslim world that was radicalized (by my lights), that is still a problem we have to talk about soberly. I mean, still, we’re talking about 75 million people.”

“Certainly,” replies Aslan, “and I don’t think anybody would say that it’s not a conversation that we need to talk about.”

Harris’ assertion about “millions and millions” of Muslims, far from being “profoundly inaccurate,” is perfectly accurate, and Aslan fails both in his attempt to discredit Harris and in his attempt to ignore the data.

Later, Aslan says, “Both of those comments, that the difference between Judaism, Christianity and Islam is that Judaism and Christianity have gone through some sort of reform and so that it’s tempered its violent aspects and Islam hasn’t – both of those statements are false.”

Aslan is referring here not to anything Harris said, but to a remark by moderator Jonathan Kirsch. His response is inexplicable except as reflexive bluster. In No God But God, Aslan himself says that Christianity was ultimately tempered by the violent and generations-long process of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and that Islam is now undergoing the same process. Even stranger, Aslan continues:

I don’t find any kind of tempering in the extremism with which Christianity or Judaism deals with the issue. The sole – or not sole, but certainly the most – significant factor in the way that one understands one’s religion, the way one interprets one’s religion, is not the religion itself, it’s your social context. So, we apparently forgot about the eighties and the movement of liberation theology in Latin America, a very Catholic, deeply, deeply Christian conception of Jesus as warrior in which priests themselves were forced to take up arms in the name of the liberator Jesus and murder opponents in that sense. Very few people, I think, would have blamed that – would have blamed Catholicism or Christianity upon those things.

Well, which is it? Is the concept of Jesus as warrior one that’s “very Catholic, deeply, deeply Christian” or is it one very few people would associate with Catholicism or Christianity? Aslan tries to have it both ways: Christianity is often violent, just like Islam; therefore, neither Christianity nor Islam is really violent.

In Part 2, beginning at about 9:23, Aslan tries to make the point that religious violence isn’t really, or distinctively, religious at all, that religious radicals “have used the language of religion … to give voice to that resistance; in very extreme and very unusual cases that identity, that attack on an identity, that language, leads to horrific acts of violence. … Again, I think that that’s a real, it’s a real sort of oversimplification of a very complex issue that has much more to do with one’s identity than it does to with one’s faith.”

Note this point well. Aslan claims here that the overtly religious actions of overtly religious people, and the overtly religious motives behind those actions, are not ultimately religious at all. Rather, they’re part of “a very complex issue” of which religion is only a part, and not even the most important part.

It always interests me how religious people ascribe the good actions of the faithful to religious faith, but always try to dissociate those same believers’ evil actions from religion, even when the faithful themselves ascribe both their good deeds and their bad deeds to their faith.

Terrorism, religious persecution, wars of religion, the Inquisition, the Crusades, the witch hunts — all the atrocities committed by religious people for religious reasons — are, we’re told, not really religious acts at all. They’re purely secular acts, with purely worldly explanations, and have nothing to do with religion. Funny how nobody ever says Catholics build hospitals, or Muslims give to charity, because of “social context.” Religion, it seems, is good by definition. Good deeds are religious deeds, and evil done from religious motives is non-religious by definition. This kind of barefaced lying does nothing to credit its supporters or their religions.

While they pretend to respect all religions, religious liberals like Aslan actually approach the subject of religion with a thorough disrespect for their own co-religionists. The faith and beliefs of the religious have, they say, nothing to do with “real” religion. In their view, religion is not what it seems to be; it is not what its adherents believe it to be or what they experience it to be. It’s something more rarefied, more subtle, less down-to-earth and less quantifiable than the religious beliefs and expressions we see on the ground. In a passage written by Aslan and read by Kirsch at the beginning of the discussion, Aslan comes very close to admitting that religion is something that’s — well, not quite real:

Religion is not concerned with genuine history but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born. Whatever truths they convey have little to do with historical fact. To ask whether Moses actually parted the Red Sea or whether Jesus truly raised Lazarus from the dead or whether the word of God indeed poured through the lips of Muhammad is to ask totally irrelevant questions. The only questions that matter with regard to religion and its mythology is What do these stories mean?

He wants us to believe that the very nonsense atheists object to isn’t really religious at all. It’s incidental, having nothing to do with the essence of religion. In making the claim, Aslan insults the millions (billions?) of believers who think it does matter, and matter in an eternally significant way, whether the Qur’an is the word of God, or whether God gave his law to Moses on Sinai, or whether Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. In attempting to defend religion, Aslan comes very close to defining it out of existence, telling atheists and believers alike that religion isn’t what they think it is.

He makes this claim explicit in Part 4, beginning at about 4:05:

We’re tossing this word religion around a lot; we should figure out what we mean when we say it. Religion is the language through which one describes sort of the transcendence, and by transcendence I don’t mean anything more complicated than that which lies beyond our material realm, our experience of the material realm. We need a means through which we can describe this, through which we can express it, to ourselves and more importantly to one another, and religion provides that language. Religion is not something you believe in or you don’t believe in. That again, I think, is a misunderstanding of what religion, the function of religion, and it is a misunderstanding that is primarily found amongst people of religion.

(Emphasis added.)

It would be easy to go on and on about Aslan’s fuzzy thinking on the subject of religion and transcendence, but I’ll spare you. What it comes down to is that whatever nonsense and immorality, whatever monstrous evil you find in any religion or any scripture, it’s all good, because the only thing that really matters about religion is the experience of the transcendent. Belief is irrelevant. Religious ritual and practice are irrelevant. Religion is a profoundly good thing because all the evil aspects of religion that we can actually observe aren’t really religious at all. The real essence of religion is nothing but the experience of the transcendent.

Near the end of the discussion, Aslan adds:

Nor, for that matter, as you seem to suggest a little bit, does our knowledge of the mechanism through which one experiences these transcendant realities, the fact that we know how it happens, we understand sort the the chemical framework that creates kinds of quote-unquote religious experiences, that does not make those experiences any less real, particularly since nothing exists in reality that is not the sum of these chemical experiences. I think we should be very careful about saying, well, science has explained mysticism as A, B, and C in the brain. So? I don’t see how understanding how something works makes it any less real.

The important thing, Harris answers, is not whether it’s real, but whether religion really helps us to understand it:

The issue is that there is no reason for us to have this denominational language. If we’re in the business of simply describing transcendent experience – how we have them, what they’re like, what is reasonable to conclude on their basis, (neurochemistry is a part that, but I agree with you it does not subsume the conversation) – If we’re in that business, there is no room for a Buddhist version of it, a Christian version of it, in the same way that there’s no room for Christian physics. I mean, the Christians invented physics, but physics, because it was a real domain of inquiry, floated free of its Christian roots. There’s no such thing as American science versus Japanese science. I mean, science is science, because it’s the one mode of discourse where we are rigorously honest with ourselves. Everyone is in the business of proving everyone else wrong. You can actually win points for proving yourself wrong in science. This doesn’t happen in religion, and it should, and if it did, it would have a winnowing effect that would be catastrophic for the religious enterprise, and then we would be left with mystical scientists.

I think that’s the most important thing anybody said during the whole ninety minutes, and it’d be good to leave it there, but I can’t resist backing up a bit to share another of Aslan’s thoughts, a thought quoted by Kirsch and explicitly re-affirmed by Aslan. It’s one of the most astonishing bits of idiocy I’ve ever come across:

After all, religion is by definition interpretation and by definition all interpretations are valid.

Think about that for a minute: by definition, all interpretations are valid. If you can believe that, you can believe anything. It’s outrageous bullshit, and it’s an idea no intelligent person would ever accept in any field but religion. In religion, bullshit trumps intelligence every time. Aslan dramatically demonstrates that this true of liberals as well as fundamentalists.

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