A Most Dangerous Enemy (Part I)

Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith, a book highly critical of religion, which argues that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. He has written a very important article for the LA Times that deserves to be read in its entirety. The article asserts that Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists. Excerpts:

I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received . . . with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But . . . liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right. . . A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. . . we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

[Muslim] extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet. . .liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.