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Sam Harris is a prominent example. Even defends torture. How very Enlightenment of him.
Yes, some Christian radicals WOULD do those things if they had permission. Some do it without permission. The problem with radical Islam is that brutality and savagery are part of its very fabric. As Sam Harris likes to say (and I'm paraphrasing), "what would X group do if it could do anything in the world it wanted to do?" I think Daesh has made it very clear what it would do if it was completely unfettered, and it's not a pretty picture.
Radical Christians? They'd shut down all the Planned Parenthoods and make the Bible the only textbook used in school. Don't get me wrong; I think these are terrible ideas that should never ever come to pass. But they are a far cry from executing people for being "apostates," which is a stated goal of Daesh. Another goal: the keeping of slaves. I think most Christians have abandoned this idea by now (I said "most."
Daesh is absolutely clear on the reason and need for holding humans in slavery. And we are talking about A LOT of people here who would be executed or made into slaves if Daesh could do anything it wanted. I dislike radical Christians intensely, but you cannot create true equivalence here.
One must separate the ideas from the people that hold them. Radical Islam is a barbaric idea. That doesn't make all Muslims barbarians. That's a false equivalence.
And I think that is the point that many New Atheists are trying to get across. The ideas are the problem.
Along with that is the fact that free speech means just that. Some speech may offend some people. That's the way things go. There's a world of difference between saying "I wish he would not say those things" and saying "He is not allowed to say those things."
If God is so picky about what is said about him, he can come down and do something about it himself.
Not all of us Warren. 
Last edited Sat Dec 12, 2015, 08:01 PM - Edit history (3)
First thing, I'm an atheist. I specifically said I'm condeming "new atheists" which is a particular movement.
On DU, many of us don't like it when people engage in blanket hatred of the world's 1.6 billion Muslims. That's just plain old bigotry.
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Examples of "new atheist" bigotry:
Here's professional liar, "new atheist" and neocon darling, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an employee at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI):
http://www.salon.com/2014/08/04/ayan_hirsi_ali_bibi_netanyahu_deserves_nobel_peace_prize_for_gaza_campaign/
Asked whom she admired, Ali — who once called Islam a “nihilistic cult of death” — included Netanyahu on a list featuring her husband, Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, as well as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Princeton professor Bernard Lewis. Ali said she admired Netanyahu “because he is under so much pressure, from so many sources, and yet he does what is best for the people of Israel, he does his duty.”
“I really think he should get the Nobel Peace Prize,” Ali added. “In a fair world he would get it.”
Here's an interview of Ayaan Hirsi Ali:
https://reason.com/archives/2007/10/10/the-trouble-is-the-west/1
Hirsi Ali: Only if Islam is defeated. Because right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.
Reason: Don’t you mean defeating radical Islam?
Hirsi Ali: No. Islam, period. Once it’s defeated, it can mutate into something peaceful. It’s very difficult to even talk about peace now. They’re not interested in peace.
Reason: We have to crush the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims under our boot? In concrete terms, what does that mean, “defeat Islam”?
Hirsi Ali: I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they’re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, “This is a warning. We won’t accept this anymore.” There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.
Reason: Militarily?
Hirsi Ali: In all forms, and if you don’t do that, then you have to live with the consequence of being crushed.
Reason: Are we really heading toward anything so ominous?
While Sam Harris was interviewing openly racist and neocon promoter, Douglas Murray, on his podcast, Sam Harris said:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/11/24/jebus-sam-harris-again/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+freethoughtblogs%2Fpharyngula+%28FTB%3A+Pharyngula%29
"Given a choice between Noam Chomsky and Ben Carson, in terms of the totality of their understanding of what’s happening now in the world, I’d vote for Ben Carson every time. Ben Carson is a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, Ben Carson does not…the fact that he is a candidate for president is a scandal…but at the very least he can be counted on to sort of get this one right. He understands that jihadists are the enemy."
Sample of Sam Harris quotes:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Sam_Harris
"Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death."
"Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas."
"I am one of the few people I know of who has argued in print that torture may be an ethical necessity in our war on terror."
"The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists."
"To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization. We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been hijacked by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran.”
"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."
"Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies."
"In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so (LIE). Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal."
"We cannot let our qualms over collateral damage paralyze us because our enemies know no such qualms. Theirs is a kill-the-children-first approach to war, and we ignore the fundamental difference between their violence and our own at our peril. Given the proliferation of weaponry in our world, we no longer have the option of waging this war with swords. It seems certain that collateral damage, of various sorts, will be a part of our future for many years to come."
but it hardly seems worth replying to as if you'd said something either intelligent or reasonable.
Still,
