Sam Harris responds to the charge that “militant” atheism is responsible for the murder of three Muslim students in North Carolina. Note 2/18/15: Here was Reza Aslan’s response to this podcast: Starting to get creeped out by how obsessed Sam Harris is with me & @ggreenwald -as tho we’ve given him a 2nd thought http://t.co/RSbvjck96Q — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015   @neiltwit @ggreenwald @SamHarrisOrg oh no was I mean to your Sam? did I hurt your feelings? — Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) February 18, 2015   Very interesting. Aslan writes articles about me, hires people to write even longer ones (Nathan Lean is the editor-in-chief of Aslan Media), continually mentions me and distorts my views in his press appearances, and tweets about me with abandon—and he believes that I’m obsessed with him. It is safe to say that I would never mention Aslan again if he stopped spreading lies about me.—SH Audio Transcript: As many of you know, there was recently a triple-murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, committed by a person named Craig Stephen Hicks. He is still alive—this was not a suicide-murder—so, undoubtedly, we’ll one day hear what his conscious motives were. He killed three young people, apparently over a parking space. That was the subject of their dispute. But he also happens to be a person who identifies as an atheist on his Facebook page, and he has expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about me, I’m actually not sure—but he was identified as an atheist and appear to be critical of all religion, according to his Facebook page. And because his victims were Muslim, this is now being widely described as a “hate crime” and as a symptom of a problem we have in the Atheist community—a problem of “militancy” and of anti-Muslim “bigotry.” And many people are saying that I am somehow responsible for this—both for the background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing to be accused of. It seems to me that there’s a fair amount of moral confusion here—and also just factual confusion about the reality of violence in the U.S. and elsewhere. But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people were killed in the very prime of their lives—at the beginning of their adult lives—and they were, by all accounts, marvelous people. I can only imagine—in fact, I can’t imagine—the grief of their parents and loved ones. So there’s absolutely nothing in my work—or in my mind—that is supportive of a crime like this. And I would have hoped that could go without saying—but I think in this context, it probably can’t. Nevertheless, the deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, or the daily savagery of a group like ISIS, has been astonishing to witness. You can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism. Of course, the analogy between “militant” atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one—it is an anti-analogy, being false in every respect. Atheists simply are not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. There may be atheists who do terrible things, but there is no atheist doctrine or scripture, and insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments—insofar as they’re atheistic—only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There’s no argument in atheism that suggests that you should hate, or victimize, or stigmatize whole groups of people, as there often is in revealed religion. And yet people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan, the usual suspects—the bevy of apologists for theocracy in the Muslim world—are using this very real tragedy in Chapel Hill to try to stoke a kind of mob mentality around an imagined atheist campaign of bigotry against Muslims. It’s an incredibly cynical, tendentious, and ultimately dangerous thing to do. Of course, people like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are alleging that there’s some sort of double-standard here: atheists are quick to detect a religious motivation in the misbehavior of Muslims worldwide, but when it comes to their own, they discount the role played by atheism. But this is just a total misrepresentation of how an atheist like myself thinks about human violence. It is simply obvious that some instances of Muslim violence have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam—and I would never dream of assigning blame to the religion of Islam for that behavior. And, to my knowledge, I never have. Insofar as I’m confused as to the source of Muslim violence—well, then, I apologize in advance for that confusion. But the problem, of course, is that there are teachings within Islam that explicitly recommend, in fact, demand violence in certain circumstances—circumstances that we in the 21st century, if we’re decent human beings, will recognize as being morally insane. Blasphemy, apostasy, adultery, merely holding hands with a man who is not your blood relative or husband if you are a woman unlucky enough to be born in a country like Afghanistan—these are often killing offenses. And the link between the doctrine—as it is understood by Islamists and jihadists—and the behavior is explicit, logical, and absolutely unambiguous. And yet this doesn’t prevent people from denying it at every turn. There is no such link between atheism and violence of any kind, in any circumstance. There is nothing about rejecting the truth claims of religious dogmatists, or about doubting that the universe has a creator, that suggests that violence in certain circumstance is necessary or even acceptable. And all the people who are comparing these murders to Charlie Hebdo or to those committed by ISIS, as insane as that sounds, are trivializing a form of violence that threatens to destabilize much of the world. And, ironically, it is violence whose principal victims are Muslim. I should also point out that the notion that there is some kind of epidemic of intolerance against Muslims in the United States is totally at odds with the facts. You need only check the FBI website and you’ll see that there is no such wave of religious bigotry directed against Muslims, or against anyone at all. Hate crime is a very rare offense—five people were murdered due to hate crime in 2013. And when you look at the hate crimes directed at people based on religion, the crimes against Jews based on anti-Semitism outnumber the crimes against Muslims five-to-one—and this is every year, even in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So, if we’re going to be concerned about hate crimes in the U.S., we should worry about anti-Semitism before we worry about anti-Muslim hate crime—and yet anti-Semitism is a miniscule source of violence here. I wouldn’t necessarily say the same thing of France, but in the U.S. it is virtually a non-problem—especially when you compare it to the tens of thousands of ordinary murders and rapes and aggravated assaults that are not ideologically motivated. Many people are saying that these murders in Chapel Hill could not have possibly have been inspired by a dispute over something so trivial as a parking space. But this is the most common form of interpersonal violence—it never makes sense “on paper.” We’re talking about people who fail to regulate their emotions and who have, in the U.S., ready access to weapons that makes it incredibly easy to kill other people impulsively. Hate crime per se is simply not a major problem, and those who are trying to whip-up a frenzy of concern over the ambient level of bigotry and violence against Muslims in the U.S. are trying to engineer a kind of moral panic, designed to distract people from the real problem that Muslims face—and that we all face, frankly—which is this basic incompatibility between 7th century theocracy and our collective aspiration to build a truly pluralistic and global civil society. You can view all of this through the lens of free speech. All you need to consider is a phenomenon like Charlie Hebdo or The Satanic Verses. And, for some reason, people on the left have aligned themselves with theocrats and those who are truly intolerant of the very liberal values that apologists for Islam think they are enunciating. As I’ve said before, tolerance of intolerance is just cowardice. And it’s a form of cowardice that is increasingly consequential. So the analogy between so called “militant” atheism and militant Islam is nothing more than a moral hoax. The thing that very few people seem able to distinguish, and the distinction that Greenwald and Aslan obfuscate at every opportunity, is the difference between criticizing ideas