i haven't seen enough of this to know if cenk is making the mistake of taking him seriously or playing along, but people need to clue in - he's a troll.
regarding the polling, you have to keep in mind that there is very little freedom of expression in the "muslim world", however you define it. it's kind of like how stalin had a 99% approval rating. if you put that kind of poll in action in saudi arabia or iran, it's going to be interpreted as a government witch hunt for non-believers. if you ask these questions amongst recent emigrants, the fear has yet to wear off, and you get the same kind of response as you'd get from polish immigrants while the soviet dictatorships were still in power.
see, and here's the thing: i think harris knows this and rather than temper the results to counteract for the bias he's exploiting them for profit.
so, unfortunately, cenk can't seem to get his head around the idea of there not existing a total ordering on the messianic religions - that they can be generally roughly the same and totally different in different ways at the same time. this is actually why i don't watch his show. he's not so good at subtlety of thought. kind of an oaf sometimes. it's not really a debate that's going on here....
he almost made a good point about religion being used by states rather than the other way around, which is a point i've never seen harris acknowledge. but, again, i think he realizes that acknowledging it would take some edge out of his position. i'm hoping they get to this point because it's the proper way to deal with sam harris.
he suggests that oppression against homosexuality wouldn't happen if it weren't in the book. yet, it wasn't put in the book by accident. if it were taken out of the book somehow, the elite would write a new book. as the religion is pushed down, you don't change things by stamping out the religion, you change things by stamping out the hierarchy that pushes the religion down.
Dana Zikas
Without realizing it i think youve just supported Harris' position regarding the "real" mainstream of Islam. These polls also were conducted in more open societies of Indonesia and Turkey, not merely thought-police states like Saudi Arabia and Iran. So your point is that these polls of adherents are skewed because theyre all too terrified of telling the truth because of...ummm...THE APPLICATION OF ISLAMIC LAW???
deathtokoalas
religions have historically been systems of totalitarianism designed specifically to uphold statist control. that's as true in indonesia, china, uganda, the united states or russia as it is in saudi arabia. that is and always has been the liberal position on religion.
but, the control is more violent in islamic societies, so you can't go around asking them what their views on religion are. i means, it's exactly what isis is doing. they're not just killing christians and yazidis, they're also slaughtering the shia as "heretics", often with little more evidence than a passport or a place of birth. if they were to get a hold of a study like this, the respondents would be systematically targeted. and, note that iraq was a secular society before the catastrophe happened.
so, somebody phoning you up and asking you what your interpretation of islam is is consequently - rationally - to be interpreted as a matter of life or death in the responses. do 90% of muslims believe apostates should be killed, or are 90% of muslims afraid of telling an interviewer their thoughts on the matter should they become the murdered heretic?
it's important to realize the difference, because it converts people living in muslim countries from backwards savages into repressed victims.
i'm not agreeing with sam harris at all, i'm merely stating the liberal position that he routinely mischaracterizes.
MathVids4All
simple question - do specific beliefs manifest as specific actions? If your answer is yes, then you align with Harris. If your answer is no, then you align with the "Liberal" apologists who deny that religious people actually believe the things they claim to, or that their beliefs have any influence on their actions.
deathtokoalas
again, you're constructing a straw man in misrepresenting the views of "liberals" on the topic. this straw man is what defines harris' position.
in order to understand how religion affects somebody, you need to look at a broader picture, the most important aspect being the social and economic conditions the individual is living in. as stated famously, religion is the opiate of the masses. it is the drug that gives the poor solace.
now, of course, the exact reaction is dependent on the nature of the nonsense, but nobody is going to deny that. what liberals will do is point out that the root cause of the violence is the levels of social inequality that produce the desperation, and that if the inequality was abolished then what was in the books wouldn't matter.
the liberal position consequently reduces - and always has reduced - to the position that the way to abolish religion is to abolish poverty first, and the state second.
so, do i think people actually believe this stuff? some do, others don't.
generally, i don't think the people organizing the religions believe the stuff - the bankers, the princes, the pastors, the rabbis, the imams, etc. their role is to control people. generally, they're nihilists. they push the belief system that serves as a means to an end. the nature of what they're pushing matters, but they pick what they want to push; the debate misses the point about religion being a system of hierarchical control.
do i think the victims of religion believe in it? i think it provides them with something to hold on to in an otherwise difficult existence.
i recently lost my father to cancer. he was a pretty rational guy through most of his life, but he started turning to what more or less reduces to magical potions near the end. i couldn't take any of it seriously, but what do you tell a terminal cancer patient? "don't eat the mushrooms, dad. the mushrooms won't help. accept your death.". it's harsh. but, did he believe the mushrooms would help? it's hard to say. on some level, i think he probably did. he had to put his faith somewhere.
if there was a cure to this disease, i wouldn't be asking these questions. and, if we can reverse poverty i think we'll stop having to ask questions about whether believers really believe or not, too.
it's a question of separating between the rulers and the ruled, and you could say the same thing about any other system of control. you could say the same thing about democracy. the senate house leaders, the president and the people that pay them out have no actual delusions about democracy, and don't really believe in it's application. yet, they stand on the podium and yell it out. do the people on the ground believe in what they say? on some level, sure.
==
i'm still not done watching this yet, but cenk has articulated himself a little better as it goes on and touched on a lot of these points.
you want to look at religion as a catalyst in violent behaviour. the ireland/palestine conflict is actually a good example, because you couldn't possibly compare the "oppression" that catholics in ireland experienced to the fucking oppression that palestinians experience, and yet you see them adopt roughly the same tactics. how about the guy that set himself on fire in tunisia? or the people committing suicide in greece? or the violent attacks in ukraine? but in all these circumstances what you have is an economic basis.
from what i know about cenk, he's not going to want to align himself firmly with this kind of marxist interpretation of history, but it's really almost always the right approach. even with historical jihad. i don't think anybody really takes this idea of religious zealotry driving the muslim expansion seriously anymore - it's generally explained in terms of a marginalized population taking advantage of two collapsing empires, to the point that the old narrative is largely even discarded as "racist" (although i think that's a bit of a provocative exaggeration). now, yes, there's been some whitewashing of history: the muslims had a three front invasion of europe happening through spain, italy and the balkans so the crusades were far from unprovoked aggression. but the crusaders spent as much time attacking the byzantines as they did attacking the muslims. even with the crusades, the primary example of religious zealotry, the religion was largely an excuse to carry out geostrategic manoeuvres.
in situation after situation, the economics and politics of the situation really dominates. you're hard pressed to find much of any example at all where religion acts as a better explanation - except as a means of convincing people to die for the rulers.
even isis is being funded by incredibly wealthy interests in saudi arabia. all the propaganda, all the training camps - this stuff costs money, and the people paying for it have interests they're promoting. you hear periodic reports that explain that large amounts of the foreign fighters don't even know what theatre they're fighting in. they think they're fighting the jews rather than stamping out a regime that is unfriendly to saudi interests.
i've never seen anybody argue that the actual fighters don't believe the religion, but it's a relatively trivial point when you put it into the context of what's actually happening. if you want to make the argument "this wouldn't happen if they didn't have religion as a tool of control", you have to weigh it against all the other tools of control and conclude that it's probably not true. "this wouldn't happen if people weren't in desperate situations" is probably the better approach, because there's always some way to take control of people that have nothing to lose.
MathVids4All
As for your views, I see a number of problems. If you look at the private words and consistent behavior of people such as Osama bin Laden, it is plainly evident that although control may have been one thing that was on his mind, it is impossible for him to have been the secular nihilist like you think he is. Moreover, if poverty is the driver, then why would Osama bin Laden leave a wealthy, privileged life in order to live in the caves of Afghanistan and fight Soviets as a rebel? The only thing that makes sense is if he actually believed in paradise as he claimed to.
deathtokoalas
well, my understanding is that osama didn't really give up much luxury - he had people waiting on him, as a south african aristocrat might. i don't think you can really read that much into a preference for the bush over the palace. but, for that precise example, there's vendettas and whatnot involved, as well. if you take it back to the question of why he got involved in the mujahideen in the first place, it's clear the answer is control over afghanistan. i mean, for all the rhetoric of expelling the atheist communists, there's a tax base waiting once the situation stabilizes itself. i think there's been substantial naivete on that point from all angles.
i also think there's a certain cultural basis that goes beyond the religion that we're really not that far removed from in the west. we still have a house of lords in britain, for example. but the conqueror-prince has extinguished itself here, while it hasn't quite extinguished itself yet in the arab lore.
if you do the thing that nobody in the west wants you to do - actually analyze al qaeda's demands - you realize that it's really just a spin on the anti-colonial struggle that's defined 20th century global politics. you need to take the stuff about the caliphate back to promises the british made during world war one (they were supposed to set up an arab caliphate in exchange for fighting against the turks), but at the end of the day the reality is that the caliphate is really little more than the indigenous form of government in the arab world. the stuff about getting american bases out of saudi arabia isn't really much different than kicking the british out of india, it just has a different spin to it. and, who denies that the western-backed dictators in the region are legitimately tyrants? if you really disassemble it carefully and rationally, what you get out of al qaeda is the perfect example of a nationalist or anti-colonialist struggle interpreting itself through it's indigenous culture, which happens to be islam. it's just that you have to work through incredible amounts of propaganda to get yourself to that point.
you could throw the counter-argument out there: if he really believed in heaven, why did he hide in a cave for ten years and deny responsibility for the attacks the west claimed he was responsible for? why didn't he blow himself up instead of paying or coercing people to do the work for him? there's another layer of complexity there in trying to determine which accusations are valid and which aren't, but at the end of the day the actions simply don't suggest somebody with an unwavering belief in an afterlife - they suggest somebody with an ability to manipulate people into doing what he wants.
just to clarify: i'm not taking a conspiratorial view. but the reality is that the state department never presented a case against al qaeda for 9/11. whatever evidence exists remains classified. further, he repeatedly denied responsibility. so, in that situation (according to western customs, at least), the proper approach is "innocent until proven guilty". that trial simply never happened. so, was he hiding and denying because he was falsely accused or because he feared the consequences? neither is the action of a fundamentalist.
i'll just point out the obvious: terrorist groups usually take responsibility for their attacks. generally, they're political statements. knowing that a specific group is behind a specific action is the entire point of the action in the first place. so, it's....curious...that al qaeda never took responsibility for these attacks.