Reza Aslan, Ben Affleck, Bill Maher and Sam Harris walk into a bar... (Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about)

[Juma]

What everyone gets is that you are not a person of nuances. That for you it is black or white. I'm done with you. Bye.

No, not "everyone" gets that, just a handful of Harris fanboys who have to spring to his defense any time he's mentioned. What I posted was not cherry picking, and pointing this out does not indicate any lack of nuance. It's basic logic.

Besides, I gave a pretty clear example of why Harris' argument is disingenuous bullshit (his handwaving defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali), but you weren't able to respond to that either.

You have not. You are simply handwaving, expecting someone else will do the job for you.

 

[Warpoet]

You have not. You are simply handwaving, expecting someone else will do the job for you.

Then surely, you can step the fuck up and explain where I'm wrong:

Particularly amusing is that he has the balls to call on Ayaan Hirsi Ali as an example of someone unfairly accused of Islamophobia, when she is a vile bigot who advocates stripping all Muslims of their constitutional rights because of the threat they pose, making her a textbook example of Islamophobia, who, like Harris, has countless fanboys that can't handle the truth.

Or did you just want to post inane one-liners in defense of your idol and not actually deal with any points you don't have an answer for?

 

[barbos]

"You mean you?"

Me, and people who youtube their criticism of Reza Aslan.

Leave the thread.

You don't give orders here. But here's a better idea than yours: if you don't have a valid reason for necroing a thread a year after the fact, then don't fucking do it.

That was a suggestion. The video I posted was from last august or even newer.

 

[braces_for_impact]

This is what I was talking about earlier. I'm sorry Warpoet, but you do your position no credit with the way you respond to people. Your hate, arrogance and self righteousness simply dripping with condescension only serves to shut down discussion on the topic. You sound as rabid as any white supremacist or peddler of hate. I don't know, perhaps that's your goal. Is it your view that people shouldn't even be discussing these issues? You assume you know people's hidden motivations (almost always racism) and honestly, you sound like Donald Trump. Immature and falling back on insults. Telling people not to resurrect threads while complaining simultaneously that people aren't to give you orders. Calling people names like twat, asshole, etc. Calling people's posts "silly bullshit." You constantly deflect criticism with insults, shift goalposts, and and act as if you have areas of expertise where you have only an opinion like every one else.

You're no "Warpoet". You're a self-righteous bully.

 

[Warpoet]

I should hardly need to point out the irony of someone whining about me using ad hominem attacks, and in the process posting a long-winded, incoherent ad hominem.

You're correct that I'm oftentimes a dick to people and speak to their underlying motives (usually not racism, by the way, but a more generalized dislike of anything Mooslim, a very common sentiment on this board and present in this very thread). I've never denied any of this. It happens moreso on the internet, but that's because people are more likely to show their true colors here, and so I respond accordingly. What you omit is that I'm right far more often than I'm wrong. In fact, when I do point these things out, they're generally self-evident.

Take you for example: the problem here is that I've obviously gotten under your skin by attacking Harris, and since you can't address the substance of anything I've said, you resort to ad hominem. Were I attacking, say, Reza Aslan in the same manner, and adopting the same tone with other posters defending him, I'm guessing I wouldn't hear a peep out of you. Likewise, if the forum were littered with posts from idiots maligning/otherizing, say, black people, Jews or homosexuals in the manner some posters here routinely speak of Muslims/brown people, and I responded the same way, there'd be far less cauterwailing about my tone.

So yes, I use ad hom a lot, but the difference is it's always backed up by sound argumentation, unlike the above which is just a waste of bandwidth. And it's not changing any time soon, at least not on your account, so if you don't like it you can fuck right off.

 

[barbos]

Sure, there has been oil for millions of years. That's why the Muslims conquered 90% of all the Christian Mediterranean, steamrolled northern India, etc. Oil! Let's not forget the Esso Standard Oil-financed Crusades!

That's quite a tired old discourse, blaming all evil in the world on one portion of it. It's the modern, Communist-inspired version of the noble savage. The West is to be blamed for everything. No one is responsible for their assholery because it's all imported from the Prime Mover of all wickedness in the world.

You do understand that the modern history of Western encroachment into the region begins in about 1938 with the discovery of large amounts of oil in Saudi Arabia?

What I am claiming is that fundamentalists have gained extreme power following these encroachments, like installing the Shah and invading Iraq and supporting a monarchy in Saudi Arabia.

This isn't about blaming all the evils in the world on US. It is about assigning the US the blame for the rise in fundamentalist power that happened following it's misguided attempts to use force to control oil in the region.

The fact that Islamic fundamentalists exist is not the fault of the West. The fact they have so much power in the region is.

So what do you suggest West should have done once oil was discovered?
Occupy the region and then exterminate locals?

 

[TSwizzle]

So yes, I use ad hom a lot, but the difference is it's always backed up by sound argumentation,.

No it isn't. Your frothing at the mouth, expletive filled rants are all wind and pish and back up nothing. I doubt anybody takes you seriously.

 

[ronburgundy]

Let me preface by saying that nothing I argue below supports particular policy positions taken, either actually or as strawman, by Harris et al..

The OP is correct that the divide about religion among "secularists", "atheists" and "liberals" is largely the divide between those who approach it scientifically and those who approach it as might be typical in the Humanities. But the OP is wrong that the Science perspective in only concerned with the literal truth of religion's cosmology. The science perspective is also and even more concerned about truth about religion's societal and moral impact, which is also a scientific question and one that Humanities is not equipped to deal with. The scientific perspective includes the more rigorous and valid elements of social science within psychology, sociology, history, and political science which converngently support the claim that at the heart of Islam are ideas that, whether the ideas are taken literally or metaphorically, promote "Illiberality and intolerance", including anti-reason, anti-equality, anti-liberty, and pro-authoritarianism.
This conclusion is supported by the most valid data and basic theories from the relevant social sciences.

In contrast the OP author's and "Humanities" perspective that rejects this claim on a scientific question of fact is, like much in the Humanities, based in emotion, political bias, made up nonsense, and active disregard for valid empirical evidence. They stake claims about empirical issues based upon "evidence" with all the same invalidating qualities of isolated anecdotes, and when they make reference to actual social science it is almost always either centuries out of date or selectively from the weakest and least validated sectors of social science. For example, they still refer to and teach Freud, Jung, and their Psychoanalysis as if their ideas were ever empirically grounded and not largely invalidated by the subsequent century of actual psychological science. A study of 150 top colleges found that they teach an average of 11 courses that mention "psychoanalysis" in their formal course descriptions, with 10 of 11 being courses in the Humanities (and the 1 within Psychology typically is a critical and not promoting view of the practice and Freud's claims). The Humanities clings to them because they like the narrative they tell and don't care about whether they distort the realities about the actual nature and causes of various psychological and social phenomena.
The same is true with their apologetics for Islam and religion in general. They take positions on questions that are scientific and factual issues based not upon concern for what the actual answer is, but on what answer tells their preferred narrative.

The OP author unwittingly reveals the biased motives of this perspective when he/she says:

Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew.

IOW, just like the liberal guilt that makes white liberal deny clear factual realities about race and crime rates in favor of an "it all due to racist cops" narrative, they deny clear facts about the intolerant, authoritarian nature of Islam and monotheism in favor of a preferred narrative that simple-mindedly blames the rainbow-unweaving and party crashing "science" for the replacing existential poetics of true art and Romanticism with crass and emotionally vacuous commercialism.

They equate the rejection of religion with a rejection of art, metaphor, and appreciation for the aesthetic features that religion shares with humanistic expression in general. That misses the point entirely, which is that the problem with religion is precisely that it asserts be more than another humanistic expression in the pantheon, but stakes claims to not only cosmological realities, but to moral and political dictates. That is what defines them as a religion rather than another work of fiction with a sizable fanbase. The problem with Abrahamic religions is that they are mostly about the evils of those who treat them as fiction, no matter how great, and that even as fiction, their central hero is as immoral and abhorrent as a villain could be by post-Enlightenment standards.

 

[Factinista]

Let me preface by saying that nothing I argue below supports particular policy positions taken, either actually or as strawman, by Harris et al..

The OP is correct that the divide about religion among "secularists", "atheists" and "liberals" is largely the divide between those who approach it scientifically and those who approach it as might be typical in the Humanities. But the OP is wrong that the Science perspective in only concerned with the literal truth of religion's cosmology. The science perspective is also and even more concerned about truth about religion's societal and moral impact, which is also a scientific question and one that Humanities is not equipped to deal with. The scientific perspective includes the more rigorous and valid elements of social science within psychology, sociology, history, and political science which converngently support the claim that at the heart of Islam are ideas that, whether the ideas are taken literally or metaphorically, promote "Illiberality and intolerance", including anti-reason, anti-equality, anti-liberty, and pro-authoritarianism.
This conclusion is supported by the most valid data and basic theories from the relevant social sciences.

In contrast the OP author's and "Humanities" perspective that rejects this claim on a scientific question of fact is, like much in the Humanities, based in emotion, political bias, made up nonsense, and active disregard for valid empirical evidence. They stake claims about empirical issues based upon "evidence" with all the same invalidating qualities of isolated anecdotes, and when they make reference to actual social science it is almost always either centuries out of date or selectively from the weakest and least validated sectors of social science. For example, they still refer to and teach Freud, Jung, and their Psychoanalysis as if their ideas were ever empirically grounded and not largely invalidated by the subsequent century of actual psychological science. A study of 150 top colleges found that they teach an average of 11 courses that mention "psychoanalysis" in their formal course descriptions, with 10 of 11 being courses in the Humanities (and the 1 within Psychology typically is a critical and not promoting view of the practice and Freud's claims). The Humanities clings to them because they like the narrative they tell and don't care about whether they distort the realities about the actual nature and causes of various psychological and social phenomena.
The same is true with their apologetics for Islam and religion in general. They take positions on questions that are scientific and factual issues based not upon concern for what the actual answer is, but on what answer tells their preferred narrative.

The OP author unwittingly reveals the biased motives of this perspective when he/she says:

Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew.

IOW, just like the liberal guilt that makes white liberal deny clear factual realities about race and crime rates in favor of an "it all due to racist cops" narrative, they deny clear facts about the intolerant, authoritarian nature of Islam and monotheism in favor of a preferred narrative that simple-mindedly blames the rainbow-unweaving and party crashing "science" for the replacing existential poetics of true art and Romanticism with crass and emotionally vacuous commercialism.

They equate the rejection of religion with a rejection of art, metaphor, and appreciation for the aesthetic features that religion shares with humanistic expression in general. That misses the point entirely, which is that the problem with religion is precisely that it asserts be more than another humanistic expression in the pantheon, but stakes claims to not only cosmological realities, but to moral and political dictates. That is what defines them as a religion rather than another work of fiction with a sizable fanbase. The problem with Abrahamic religions is that they are mostly about the evils of those who treat them as fiction, no matter how great, and that even as fiction, their central hero is as immoral and abhorrent as a villain could be by post-Enlightenment standards.

A well thought out post I heartily agree with, I'd like to pick into the "racist cops" thing but that's for another thread.

Here I think is the crux of the discussion, and here I quote Sam Harris directly.
"So “Islamophobia” must be—it really can only be—an irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified fear of certain people, regardless of their ethnicity or any other accidental trait, because of what they believe and to the degree to which they believe it. Thus the relevant question to ask is whether a special concern about people who are deeply committed to the actual doctrines of Islam, in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, is irrational, disproportionate, and unjustified.

Contrary to Greenwald’s assertion, my condemnation of Islam does not apply to “all members of a group or the group itself based on the bad acts of specific individuals in that group.” My condemnation applies to the doctrines of Islam and to the ways in which they reliably produce these “bad acts.” Unfortunately, in the case of Islam, the bad acts of the worst individuals—the jihadists, the murderers of apostates, and the men who treat their wives and daughters like chattel—are the best examples of the doctrine in practice. Those who adhere most strictly to the actual teachings of Islam, those who expound its timeless dogma most honestly, are precisely the people whom Greenwald and other obscurantists want us to believe least represent the faith.
"
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/response-to-controversy

It should be clear to anyone paying attention that the fundamentals of Islam, and really all faith based religions, are NOT GOOD. It is most easily summed up in the experiment of Palestine. The Christians of Palestine are just as, if not more, oppressed than the Muslims in that region. Yet there have only been 1 or 2 Christian suicide bombers and scores and scores of Islamic ones. If Christianity were equally as bad as Islam we would have far more Christian suicide bombers.

I'll agree Harris doesn't merit enough influence to US or Israeli aggressions, but the responses by Islamists and Jihadists to those aggressions are couched in the logical consequences of Islam. Just as Americans react to perceived aggressions by clinging to their guns and faith, so do Muslims. It just happens they have a book that is harder to rationalize with modern sentiments of morality.

 

[blastula]

Maybe you should stop foaming at the mouth over your personal dislike of Aslan and examine the issue rationally. Here are several comments on the article your video is sourced from:

Since i was Reza's thesis adviser at the Univ of California-Santa Barbara, I can testify that he is a religious studies scholar. (I am a sociologist of religion with a position in sociology and an affiliation with religious studies). Though Reza's PhD is in sociology most of his graduate course work at UCSB was in the history of religion in the dept of religious studies. Though none of his 4 degrees are in history as such, he is a "historian of religion" in the way that that term is used at the Univ of Chicago to cover the field of comparative religion; and his theology degree at Harvard covered Bible and Church history, and required him to master New Testament Greek. So in short, he is who he says he is.

...

The author needs to understand that the study of Religion falls under The Department of Sociology, at many schools.
As was noted in the article, the title of his dissertation is "Global Jihadism as a Transnational Social Movement: A Theoretical Framework".
It is, clearly, a study of religion, in a sociological framework (as it should be)

Further, if you'd care to open up the dissertation, you'll note the first point in the abstract denotes that the work has a religious, rather than societal or cultural basis.

Here it is:
1. Appealing to a set of familiar symbols (in this case, religious, rather than cultural or societal) to construct a collective identity that transcends all cultural, national, ethnic, and gender boundaries, with the aim of mobilizing individuals to rise up and effect radical social change.

Green (or her producers) either did what they set out to do (a hit job to rile up viewers) or failed to perform even the most basic research, like the author above.

Unfortunately, this article misses the forest, for the trees, and does little more than parse words, while missing the essential meaning behind them.
C'est la vie.

...

My father was the chairman of the Religious Studies Department at Boston University. His specialty was what he referred as the "life world" that gave rise to Christianity--exactly the focus of Aslan's new book. My father always referred to his field of study, which by any measure was historical, as the sociology of religion. These attempts to discredit Aslan are simply silly.

So the picture appears to be much more complicated than your narrative allows, and largely boils down to the question of what threshold of academic work gives you the right to call yourself an authority on a given subject. Whether you like Aslan or not, he certainly has lots of credentials relevant to this area, and so calling him a fraud is fucking stupid.

And you still haven't answered my question - who gives a shit, outside of a handful of people with an axe to grind against the man (like you)? And how the hell does his being Muslim matter when Christians write books about other religions all the fucking time?

Yet the book was widely panned by NT scholars who usually cited poor engagement with current scholarship, indicating he did overstate his credentials. For example, Reza Aslan—Historian? - Elizabeth Castelli

 

[Warpoet]

Yet the book was widely panned by NT scholars who usually cited poor engagement with current scholarship, indicating he did overstate his credentials. For example, Reza Aslan—Historian? - Elizabeth Castelli

There is a world of difference between accusing someone of doing lackluster research and accusing them of wholesale fraud. The latter is hyperbolic nonsense, and hence it only appears to be coming from people with axes to grind against Aslan. Nobody else particularly cares.

 

[Warpoet]

It is most easily summed up in the experiment of Palestine. The Christians of Palestine are just as, if not more, oppressed than the Muslims in that region. Yet there have only been 1 or 2 Christian suicide bombers and scores and scores of Islamic ones. If Christianity were equally as bad as Islam we would have far more Christian suicide bombers.

That's some pretty questionable logic you're using there. First of all, your claim that there have been "1 or 2" Christian suicide bombers requires a source; actual research indicates that secular groups have had a significant presence with regard to suicide attacks in Palestine, and quite a substantial number of suicide attacks elsewhere in the region have been carried out by secular groups, who could easily have used Christians as suicide bombers. But even if there have never been any Christian suicide bombers, ever, it doesn't prove that Islam is "worse," since A) suicide bombing is a crappy metric for judging how bad a religion is, since it is a relatively new phenomenon that is primarily meant to terrorize rather than destroy; Christians have certainly murdered on a much larger scale than any terrorist organization, and cited their religion as a justification, and B) there are obvious sociopolitical reasons why Islamic terror groups in the Mideast would be more likely to gain traction, or to choose pious Muslims as candidates for martyrdom.

To suggest that simply comparing the numbers of suicide bombers between faiths "proves" which is inherently worse is reductive reasoning, and a pretty good illustration of why Harris and his ilk are generally ignored by people who take the issues seriously.

 

[barbos]

Reza Aslan is nothing but a rather eloquent blowhard who promotes his retarded books.
Personally I doubt he believes any of that shit himself, it's all about money for him.

 

[Warpoet]

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Now that we have talked about the book ZEALOT and whether or not Aslan lied on his resume, about how much we love or hate Sam Harris, what does any of that have to do with this?

NOTE: I am not saying I totally agree with the article or even the quote below (not even sure this is the right forum to put it in), but this is something that needs to be thought about and talked about

Indeed, I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize. I’m not talking about East vs. West or Muslim vs. Christian, and still less about lily-livered p.c. “progressives” vs. courageous contrarian truth-tellers, or however Bill Maher would like to phrase it. And I don’t precisely mean the difference between people of faith and the atheistic or irreligious. Those are facets of the dispute that are largely obvious. In a conversation between Richard Dawkins and Pope Francis (and I’d definitely pay to watch that), both would politely acknowledge that they hold divergent views about the fundamental nature of reality. What I really mean is the difference between humanities majors and science majors.

That may sound like crude or facetious shorthand, but I believe it contains a genuine insight. Given that I clearly belong to one of these tribes (you get only one guess), it’s entirely likely that I will mischaracterize the other one. Such is the nature of the epistemological division. When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work. Harris’ conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example. One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth-claims of religion are actually true; the other side says that question doesn’t even matter, and then wonders what “truth” is, anyway. It’s the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague.

What we see in discussions about religion in general and Islam in particular is a version of the same problem: People who barely speak the same language talking past each other, either making grand claims that refute themselves or raising legitimate questions that the other side ducks. I fall much closer to the Ben Affleck-Reza Aslan camp than to the tough-talkin’ pseudo-liberalism of Harris and Maher, as it slides toward a justification of permanent drone war and universal anti-Muslim profiling. But both sides engage in oversimplifications and ideological short cuts that seem like efforts to conceal what this debate is really about. Despite all its remarkable accomplishments, Western culture feels guilty and ill at ease. It traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew. It’s not the kind of trade you can undo.

At this point, Harris and Maher have become war trolls and fellow travelers of Dick Cheney, without even realizing it. It’s a sad fate for Maher, who was an acrid voice of resistance under the Bush administration. As for Harris, he has played an elaborate intellectual game of bait-and-switch since at least 9/11: He makes inflammatory comments about how we must wage war against Islam, or about the need to consider a nuclear first strike against a Muslim nation, and then backs away, protesting that he’s been taken out of context and actually thinks those things would be dreadful. He and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions. They’re analogous to polite Southern whites of 1955, who did not personally use the N-word and found the Klan distasteful, but who never questioned the fundamental rightness of white supremacy.

But Harris and Maher and other prominent anti-Muslim voices are right about one thing: Western leftists are often reluctant to criticize Islam, and it isn’t entirely healthy. This reluctance stems from many understandable causes: from sheer politeness, from a desire to promote harmony rather than discord, and from an eagerness not to come off as smug, xenophobic blowhards, the way Maher and Harris so often do. Of course the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world do not support terrorism; that hardly need to be said. Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, any number of imams and Islamic community leaders have spoken out against the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS and Boko Haram. As Aslan has repeatedly observed, Islam looks very different in different countries, and like any other major religion it has many competing and overlapping currents. A Muslim woman cannot drive a car or go outdoors unaccompanied in Saudi Arabia, but she can go to the beach in cutoffs in Istanbul or go dancing all night in Dubai.

Ultimately it does not aid the cause of tolerance to deny that social practice in most majority-Muslim nations involves a lot of stuff that Western liberals rightly find appalling: the subordination of women, the suppression or persecution of LGBT people, extremely limited tolerance for those of other faiths (or none) and sharply restricted freedom of expression. One can discuss these troubling aspects of real-world Islam – as Reza Aslan and many other Western Muslims frequently do, in fairness – while also insisting that you can’t understand them independent of social and historical context. We don’t have to follow Maher and Harris down the rabbit hole of unjustified assumptions and disastrous conclusions: Illiberality and intolerance are intrinsic elements of Muslim doctrine, they argue, and Islam is a zone of monolithic groupthink unlike any other world religion (“the mother lode of bad ideas,” says Harris). Therefore Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out.

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/11/ath...sm_this_is_what_we_are_really_fighting_about/

 

[Factinista]

"Islam is a global cancer or disease, which must be killed or cut out." Yes, through conversation we should seek to wipe out these Medieval ideas, in so far as people actually believe them. When Nietzsche said "God is Dead" he was saying the Christian God is no longer a credible source of absolute moral certainty. It's time we set our sights on other Gods.

 

[Factinista]

Also fuck Salon, they're opinion pieces have become garbage.

 

[TSwizzle]

Also fuck Salon, they're opinion pieces have become garbage.

I think most of their stuff is just click bait now. Utter drivel.

 

[none]

It is most easily summed up in the experiment of Palestine. The Christians of Palestine are just as, if not more, oppressed than the Muslims in that region. Yet there have only been 1 or 2 Christian suicide bombers and scores and scores of Islamic ones. If Christianity were equally as bad as Islam we would have far more Christian suicide bombers.

That's some pretty questionable logic you're using there. First of all, your claim that there have been "1 or 2" Christian suicide bombers requires a source; actual research indicates that secular groups have had a significant presence with regard to suicide attacks in Palestine, and quite a substantial number of suicide attacks elsewhere in the region have been carried out by secular groups, who could easily have used Christians as suicide bombers. But even if there have never been any Christian suicide bombers, ever, it doesn't prove that Islam is "worse," since A) suicide bombing is a crappy metric for judging how bad a religion is, since it is a relatively new phenomenon that is primarily meant to terrorize rather than destroy; Christians have certainly murdered on a much larger scale than any terrorist organization, and cited their religion as a justification, and B) there are obvious sociopolitical reasons why Islamic terror groups in the Mideast would be more likely to gain traction, or to choose pious Muslims as candidates for martyrdom.

To suggest that simply comparing the numbers of suicide bombers between faiths "proves" which is inherently worse is reductive reasoning, and a pretty good illustration of why Harris and his ilk are generally ignored by people who take the issues seriously.

can't outlaw stupid, nice

 

[braces_for_impact]

I should hardly need to point out the irony of someone whining about me using ad hominem attacks, and in the process posting a long-winded, incoherent ad hominem.

An ad hominem you admit to, and feel justified in displaying because of the subject matter. Fortunately the majority of us don't think two wrongs make a right.

It happens moreso on the internet, but that's because people are more likely to show their true colors here, and so I respond accordingly.

On this we agree one hundred percent.

What you omit is that I'm right far more often than I'm wrong. In fact, when I do point these things out, they're generally self-evident.

No, this is what's called an OPINION. You are fond of using words like "self-evident", "obviously" and so on about topics that are anything but clear and succinct, except to you, because damn it, you have right on your side and people better listen to you. So keep poisoning that well, but all thinking people of intelligence can obviously see right through your transparent attempts to desperately change the subject.

Take you for example: the problem here is that I've obviously gotten under your skin by attacking Harris,

Wrong again, oh great Kreskin! I already stated that I'm not interested in a Sam Harris discussion, so I'm not going to take your bait to change the subject yet again.

So yes, I use ad hom a lot, but the difference is it's always backed up by sound argumentation, unlike the above which is just a waste of bandwidth. And it's not changing any time soon, at least not on your account, so if you don't like it you can fuck right off.

As I said, I'm glad you feel justified in your assholish behavior, and I'm sure if your goal is to really help the Muslims you claim to care about, your tone is absolutely sure to positively influence the minds of those trying to grapple with these complex issues. Well done sir!

As far as me wasting bandwidth, it's mine to waste. There are others here that think I contribute positively, and I do not seek nor desire your stamp of approval for me to continue posting, as I am sure to do. So, I'll fuck on, I'll fuck off, I'll fuck wherever I damn well please.