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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
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