Sam Harris

A conversation with the Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris has been posted on RichardDawkins.net

Available here:  http://richarddawkins.net/article,2025,THE-FOUR-HORSEMEN,Discussions-With-Richard-Dawkins-Episode-1-RDFRS

Sam - you mentioned at the end of the first video that it would surprise you to hear that the reason that Muslims in America aren’t radicalized because we honor faith in our discourse.

I think first of all that that is demonstrably false, particularly in the way that the government media has portrayed Muslims in general.

I also would be willing to bet that the degree of radicalization is a proximity thing; the reason that radical Islam is the norm is because Saudi Arabia (probably the most fundamentalist government in the world) has an enormous amount of money from their oil supplies.  The fantastic amount of petrodollars available to them allows them to control the dawa, the Muslim call to faith which of course was based their strain, Wahabbism.  In the 70s they were basically able to swamp Muslim immigrant high rise communities in European Cities with Korans and other related literature. 

Now this is conjecture on my part but given the conflict between the United States and the Muslim communities over Isreal, as well as the semi-antagonistic nature of the OPEC nations, it’s probably no surprise that not only were there not as many Muslim immigrants to the US but also that the Saudis never really had a chance here.

If you want a good book about Political Islam I recommend Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam by Gilles Kepel, which is where I pulled the non-conjecture parts of this post.

The video was great, I wish I was half as articulate as you guys in real life.

“A solitary who casts his writings before the
public without any one to advertise them, without any party ready
to defend them, one who does not even know what is thought and said
about those writings, is at least free from one anxiety—if he is
mistaken, no one will take his errors for gospel.” - From the introduction to “Emile’ By JJ Rosseau.

An advantage of being less intelligent, and I think this is a neglected facet on the whole, is the greater reliability of our incompleteness in comprehension.  One of many neglected advantages of the less intelligent.

Frequently in the ascent, always with others to look up to, contemplating their unfolding wisdom to know and value their correction:  Unequal to their knowledge of the scope of our ignorance.  But also unequal to our prudence in being ignorant of the scope of our forgetfulness.

But if the Four Horsemen have clearly seen through the mistakes of religion, they must be mindful of their(pl) characteristic ubiquity.  The publication, and the recurrent nature of errors of cogitation. 

This is a dialectical irony four horsemen either grapple with a hermeneutic subtlety to unfold in time, or which they have wilfully neglected.

“...by our books or some other process of reasoning ...
to be shown the contradictions internal to their faith, or the contradiction between their faith and what we know to be true of the universe.”
Italic tags added.