As always when Sam Harris writes an article many people will compare his nonbelief in the gods of organized religions (atheism) to a sort of fundamentalism of it's own kind. This is grossly inaccurate for the following reason:

A lack of belief in a personal god who supposedly wrote a holy book chalk full of absurdities, blatant contradictions and gross immorality is not equivalent to a dismissal of any sort of spirituality or possibility of a higher intelligence or even a cosmic creative force. What it is a dismissal of is lunacy of fundamentalism.

Any sort of honest examination of personal gods the world over will reveal that the idea of an angry middle-eastern sky deity who demands animal sacrifices should be marginalized the same way UFO abduction stories are. Give one reason why such a deity does not seem just as ridiculous as Zeus. The problem is that when a modern person reads the holy books, they interpret them from a modern perspective, which was not at all how they were written to be interpreted. A day *really* is a day, not a thousand years for instance. Only severe grasping would suggest that the original story tellers meant something different. The modern person overlaps their modern enlightenment onto these scriptures and turns them into something that they were not intended to be. It is very true that a reading of the bible for instance, in it's own context without cherry picking, leads to more fundamentalism and not more open-mindedness towards other viewpoints. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" and the penalty is a brutal death- what part of this statement is open to discourse? This is not open to questions of metaphor or allegory, it is literal.

As a former fundamentalist Christian myself I am very familiar with the religious meme. Fundamentalists are duplicitious folks who masquerade as normal citizens, while in the back of their minds they are not satisfied with anything short of complete and total theocracy and diminishment of any other form of belief. The scriptures of the two major American religions make it undeniably clear that other religions are abominations. Only a completely distorted and disingenuous liberal misinterpretation of these scriptures would lead to the fantasy that we could someone have rational discourse with these people, or that plurality is possible within this matrix of absolutism.

I sympathize with Harris' views but I also think they are fundamentally wrong, egotistical, and slanderous. In an excerpt from Salon I've pasted below Karen Armstrong tells exactly why better than I could. Go to the bottom for a link to the whole text.

...Well, what do you say to the scientists, especially the Darwinists -- Richard Dawkins would be the obvious case -- who are quite angry about religion? They say religion is the root of much evil in the world. Wars are fought and fueled by religion. And now that we're in the 21st century, they say it's time that science replace religion.

I don't think it will. In the scientific age, we've seen a massive religious revival everywhere but Europe. And some of these people -- not all, by any means -- seem to be secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism. We have too much dogmatism at the moment. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. He did a couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss.

It was a very, very one-sided view.

Well, he hates religion.

Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.

This does raise the question, though, of how to read the sacred scriptures.

Indeed.

Because there are all kinds of inflammatory things that are said. For instance, many passages in both the Bible and the Quran exhort the faithful to kill the infidels. Sam Harris, in his book "The End of Faith," has seven very densely packed pages of nothing but quotations from the Quran with just this message. "God's curse be upon the infidels"; "slay them wherever you find them"; "fighting is obligatory for you, much as you dislike it." And Sam Harris' point is that the Muslim suicide bombings are not the aberration of Islam. They are the message of Islam.

Well, that's simply not true. He's taken parts of those texts and omitted their conclusions, which say fighting is hateful for you. You have to do it if you're attacked, as Mohammed was being attacked at the time when that verse was revealed. But forgiveness is better for you. Peace is better. But when we're living in a violent society, our religion becomes violent, too. Religion gets sucked in and becomes part of the problem. But to isolate these texts as though they expressed the whole of the tradition is very mischievous and dangerous at this time when we are in danger of polarizing people on both sides. And this kind of inflammatory talk, say about Islam, is convincing Muslims all over the world who are not extremists that the West is incurably Islamophobic and will never respect their traditions. I think it's irresponsible at this time.

But many people would say you can't just pick out the peaceful and loving passages of the sacred scriptures. There are plenty of other passages that are frightening.

I would say there are more passages in the Bible than the Quran that are dedicated to violence. I think what all religious people ought to do is to look at their own sacred traditions. Not just point a finger at somebody else's, but our own. Christians should look long and hard at the Book of Revelation. And they should look at those passages in the Pentateuch that speak of the destruction of the enemy. They should make a serious study of these. And let's not forget that in its short history, secularism has had some catastrophes.

Certainly, the major tragedies of the 20th century were committed by secularists -- Stalin, Hitler, Mao.

And Saddam Hussein, a secularist supported by us in the West for 10 years, even when he gassed the Kurds. We supported him because he was a secularist. If people are resistant to secularism in Iraq now, it's because their most recent experience of it was Saddam. So this kind of chauvinism that says secularism is right, religion is all bunk -- this is one-sided and I think basically egotistic. People are saying my opinion is right and everybody else's is wrong. It gets you riled up. It gives you a sense of holy righteousness, where you feel frightfully pleased with yourself when you're sounding off, and you get a glorious buzz about it. But I don't see this as helpful to humanity. And when you suppress religion and try and get rid of it, then it's likely to take unhealthy forms.

That's when fundamentalism starts to appear.

Yes, because fundamentalism has developed in every single one of the major traditions as a response to secularism that has been dismissive or even cruel, and has attempted to wipe out religion. And if you try to repress it -- as happened in the Soviet Union -- there's now a huge religious revival in the Soviet Union, and some of it's not very healthy. It's like the suppression of the sexual instinct. If you repress the sexual instinct and try to tamp it down, it's likely to develop all kinds of perverse and twisted forms. And religion's the same...

For the full text go here:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2006/05/30/armstrong/index.html