Why religion is fading in the West

[FarrenH]

120. Dawkins has said some horribly sexist things

I mean, I actually really like his science writing. I've got about 3 of his books. It's not like I have a grudge against the guy or anything. But he has a horribly sexist streak. I've read his offensive comments on PZ Myers blog (who coincidentally is an old online friend of mine from now defunct atheist forums). And it's noteworthy that Myers, who he has long been chummy with, has also called him out on it.

Harris has written essays rationalizing torture. He has written articles downplaying Apartheid in Israel. He has written essays justifying wars of aggression. Harris' views, while not entirely aligned with every foreign policy decision of the last twenty years, have generally tracked closely enough to state positions or the positions of the powerful in the West to reveal a pattern. One that rightly leads critics like Chomsky to accuse him of following "the religion of the state".

It's not just "criticizing religion". Harris frames and contextualizes his criticisms of Islam in particular according to the dominant narrative of an economic-elite serving corporate media in the state in which he finds himself. He holds the killing of tens by poorly equipped guerillas as deserving greater moral sanction than the killing, injuring and ongoing oppression of millions through state sponsored violence, because "motive". He casts suicide bombing, a tactical instrument pioneered by Zen/Shinto practitioners in WWII in the Pacific and Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka, as a quintessentially Muslim tactic revealing Muslim attitudes to human life. Despite the fact that in the half century the tactic has been employed by a few Muslim groups, less than 1,000 of the world's 1.x billion Muslims have participated in it. It is disingenuous in the extreme to suggest Harris is simply "criticizing religion".

Also, he's thrown around a few sexist intimations of gender essentialism ("that estrogen vibe&quot .