Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins write an open letter to the atheist community and apologize for their poor social science in statements on religious violence, and the furthering of a clash of civilizations narrative. They call for a more nuanced and fair understanding of Islam.

I don't really have much to say about people in cults. It's not even really the topic at hand because the power dynamic is really different than in larger religions. But my main point is this:

People bring a lot of different stuff to their faith for a lot of reasons. There's the old /r/atheism joke, "God's word just happens to coincidentally sound exactly like your opinion." But it's true. "God's word" is vague enough that it could be almost anything you want it to be. And religious texts are varied enough and vague enough that hardly anything is set in stone and could not be interpreted differently. Does Allah want us to kill all infidels or does he abhor the harming of innocents? Both, sort of. And what constitutes "innocent"? Am I an innocent because I've never hurt anyone? But my tax dollars go toward funding the drone program my government has used to kill innocents. Am I still innocent?

This is one example but it's my point. You bring to your faith whatever you want to bring. The places we see extreme Islam being practiced are typically politically unstable countries with developing economies which have a history of colonialism. But guess what: you'd see the exact same stuff no matter which faith took hold there because of the factors I listed. Because any of the major religions are vague enough to be able to justify violence in its name (and throughout history, it has been used to justify violence).

But we know this. Look around your country. I live in the U.S. and the amount of different Christians there are here are innumerable. There are fundamentalists who reject evolution. There are fundamentalist who accept evolution and hate gays. There are Christians who want to help gays but believe it is is morally wrong. There's everything in between because a huge variety of factors goes into forming these views and a person's faith adapts to suit them.

Blaming Islam for the tumult in the Middle East implicates completely innocent and peaceful peoples and groups them in with violent extremists. It promotes a "clash of the cultures" narrative which discourages critical examination or empathy, and perhaps most perniciously, absolves us of our role in the tumultuous violence in the Middle Eastern region. As long as we can blame Islam, as a faith, for ISIS, we never have to ask ourselves why no matter how many times we destroy extremist sects, another pops up to take its place. And why they never run out of recruits that hate the U.S. Most powerful western governments have directly contributed to the violence in the Middle East, and many (my government included) continue to contribute.

This will be my last response, because like I said earlier, these arguments will go on forever if you don't just stop responding at some point.

/r/BadSocialScience Thread Parent