Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. [...] By failing to live by the letter of the texts [scripture], w… - Sam Harris

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance — and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.

By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.

The gurus I have met personally, as well as those whose careers and teachings I have studied at a distance, range from crooks who could be quickly dismissed to teachers who were brilliant but flawed, to those who, while still human, seemed to possess so much compassion and clarity of mind that they were nearly flawless examples of the benefits of spiritual practice.

[About the reactions to the attack on Israel in October 2023:] The moral, not just untenability, the abomination we're witnessing where you have the same people who are equally exercised over Halloween costumes that are cultural appropriation and their defending what happened in Israel last week. That dissonance, I think, is something we need to not lose sight of culture-wide.

A great liberal betrayal is afoot. Unfortunately, many “fellow-travelers” of Islamism are on the liberal side of this debate. I call them “regressive leftists”; they are in fact reverse racists. They have a poverty of expectation for minority groups, believing them to be homogenous and inherently opposed to human rights values. They are culturally reductive in how they see “Eastern” — and in my case, Islamic — culture, and they are culturally deterministic in attempting to freeze their ideal of it in order to satisfy their orientalist fetish. While they rightly question every aspect of their “own” Western culture in the name of progress, they censure liberal Muslims who attempt to do so within Islam, and they choose to side instead with every regressive reactionary in the name of “cultural authenticity” and anticolonialism. They claim that their reason for refusing to criticize any policy, foreign or domestic — other than those of what they consider “their own” government — is that they are not responsible for other governments’ actions. However, they leap whenever any (not merely their own) liberal democratic government commits a policy error, while generally ignoring almost every fascist, theocratic, or Muslim-led dictatorial regime and group in the world. It is as if their brains cannot hold two thoughts at the same time. Besides, since when has such isolationism been a trait of liberal internationalists? It is a right-wing trait. They hold what they think of as “native” communities — and I use that word deliberately — to lesser standards than the ones they claim apply to all “their” people, who happen to be mainly white, and that’s why I call it reverse racism. In holding “native” communities to lesser — or more culturally “authentic” — standards, they automatically disempower those communities. They stifle their ambitions. They cut them out of the system entirely, because there’s no aspiration left. These communities end up in self-segregated “Muslim areas” whe