196

Dawkins and Harris both struggled with Islamaphobia and hiding behind a critique of Islam that leaned heavily into racism, a charge which both Dawkins and Harris were upset about. Yet... in my opinion it's not a charge that is incorrect, especially as it was their works which laid the groundwork for the "edgy atheist youtuber" movement that "somehow" manifested itself as right-wing.

For examples, here is when Richard Dawkins basically said that letting kids read supernatural fiction was dangerous because it made them less likely to understand the difference between fantasy and reality:

He suggested children should be taught scientific rigour from an early age.

“Is it a good thing to go along with the fantasies of childhood, magical as they are? Or should we be fostering a spirit of scepticism?” the Daily Telegraph quotes him as saying.

“I think it's rather pernicious to inculcate into a child a view of the world which includes supernaturalism – we get enough of that anyway.

“Even fairy tales, the ones we all love, with wizards or princesses turning into frogs or whatever it was. There’s a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog – it's statistically too improbable.”

And here is a really good breakdown from Daniel Schultz on Sam Harris' blind spots that reveal his critiques of Islam to be less biased than Harris thinks they are (it's also highly amusing that the referenced exchange was with Glenn Greenwald of all people). Emphasis is mine:

One of the critiques, advanced by Hussain against New Atheists like Harris, concerns the way in which their rational thinking is not as free from history as it presumes; on the contrary, it often exhibits the tendency to rehearse oppressive (at times racialized) features of colonial thought. Harris’ phrase “this iron age madness” functions as a clear example of the way in which he codes ‘non-Western’ as traditional, backward, and repressive, allowing the West to represent itself as modern, forward thinking, and free.

This form of reasoning confuses its descriptions with its presuppositions, using the former to covertly ground the latter.

In a notable example of such confused reasoning, Harris asserted, in a Huffington Post piece quoted by Hussain, that “the outrage that Muslims feel over US and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns.”

Here we see Harris’ assumptions: 1) theological concerns cannot provide a basis for reasonable claims; 2) theological concerns are symptoms of a mistaken (traditional, backward, culturally determined) understandings of oneself and the world; 3) non-theological (atheistic) concerns as the only kinds of concerns capable of grounding an accurate view of oneself and the world.

Harris’ assumptions mask the vast differences internal to modes of religious thought (an oxymoron for Harris) and religious life. It also obscures the fact that there might, in fact, be non-theological reasons for Muslims to feel outraged over US and British foreign policy.

Harris’ new form of atheism sounds very much like an old form of colonialism.

This is seen most clearly at those moments when Harris shows us the ethical character of his thinking. He writes, in the e-mail response to Greenwald, “one of my main concerns is for all the suffering women, homosexuals, freethinkers, and intellectuals in indigenous Muslim societies.”

Appealing to the discourse of Western moral superiority, Harris invokes their plight as a way to justify belligerent attitudes against Islam. His reasoning predicates the West as the source of salvation and precludes the possibility of thinking meaningful social transformation outside the framework of an atheistic liberalism.

When I was in college I met an exchange student from Palestine (he had to actually say he was from Jordan, but he was originally from Palestine, he lives in Jordan now), and I quickly learned that not everyone from an Islamic culture is some backwards radical religious nut. It might have behooved either Dawkins or Harris to actually meet someone from such a culture like my friend. My friend also eventually became an atheist, but he also struggled and grappled with the fact that this would be viewed damningly in his home country. The point being he was thoughtful, smart, and was able to come to his own conclusions about life, just like I was, despite being from wildly different cultures. His culture did not make him "backward" or "iron-age."