I think it would be extremely helpful if people focused on the ideas being discussed here, rather than on calling you names — which is an easy way to… - Sam Harris

We spend our lives telling ourselves the story of past and future, while the reality of the present goes largely unexplored. Now we live in ignorance of the freedom and simplicity of consciousness, prior to the arising of thought.

As you know, the public conversation about the connection between Islamic ideology and Muslim intolerance and violence has been stifled by political correctness. In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed, it would seem, to protect Muslims from having to grapple with the kinds of facts we’ve been talking about. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars — deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields — who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take Islamists and jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

Although not a single leader of the Third Reich — not even Hitler himself — was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.