I have been looking for a way to start blogging for some time now. Some entry point that will allow me to create an initial posting that expresses some of my basic premises on life and politics.

Well, Sam Harris has given me such an opportunity with his article “Widespread Ignorance” (http://www.alternet.org/story/23964/). For those who aren’t familiar with Sam Harris, he recently published a book titled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. You can read all about this book on Mr. Harris’s Web site, http://www.samharris.org/, where, of course, you will find ample praise of the book as well as links to where you can buy a copy.

The article in question – which bears an Indy Media copyright – is headed with the following teaser:

“Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. And since Bush's endorsement of 'intelligent design,' the battle between faith and reason is growing stronger.”

I’m sure you get the point. Americans are ignorant. What’s more they’re religiously irrational, and George W. Bush is leading this national lack of reason straight to.... Well, I guess it can’t be hell within this context.

To Mr. Harris’s credit, he does recognize elsewhere that it isn’t just Christianity that produces such irrationality. I would suspect that very few Iranians, for example, have access to courses on evolutionary theory. What’s more, the majority of Iranians apparently not only believe in one Satan, but two: the Great Satan and the Little Satan.

Harris also acknowledges that it is not just belief in God that results in beliefs that defy rationality. Had a poll been conducted in the Soviet Union 60 years ago, for example, the vast majority of the adult population would undoubtedly have acknowledged their firm belief in evolution – Lamarckian evolution as revisited by Lysenko under the “gentle persuasion” of Josef Stalin.

But, on the balance, Harris blames what we normally call religious faith for the irrationality. He goes even further claiming that the “contest between faith and reason is zero-sum” and advocates lifting the “taboo…[on] criticiz[ing] a person’s religious beliefs”. (Presumably he advocates removing this taboo only in America. Similar taboos do not seem to exist in most parts of the Muslim world.)

So what’s the alternative to faith that Harris offers? Well, it’s a world of facts supported and substantiated by evidence presented by sane individuals. That is, as Harris states:

“Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn't; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn't. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort.”

If we were to only accept that side of the “zero-sum” game that stood up to reasonable evidence needed to substantiate “truth-claims”, I fear that we would be inevitably drawn to the conclusion that human existence boils down to eating, defecating and fornicating. Not a very meaningful existence, is it? Yet this is precisely what many “progressives” and “rationalists” like Harris must ultimately accept as truth. (Well, blogging may also be our purpose in existing.) When push comes to shove, we all hearken back to R. Crumb’s 1960s comic character Mr. Natural who, when asked what it all means simply replied: “Don’t mean shit!”

No wonder so many of those “progressives” whom I have known throughout my adult life have been overly concerned with eating, defecating and fornicating and in deriving the maximum pleasure out of each. And as we baby-boomers get older, it gets harder and harder to do any of these three things well.

Just to make things clear, I’m not religious, although I do take quite a few things on faith. Like there being some kind of meaning in human existence. On the other hand, I don’t insist that fornication lead to procreation, nor do I believe in a God that despises homosexuals. Further, I’m not sure that there is really a “soul” or that, as Harris asserts, that it is an obviously irrational thing to believe that this “soul” enters the zygote making “blastocytes…the moral equivalents of persons”. I just don’t think that abortion is simply a trivial matter between a woman and her body, or that there aren’t consequences of this action. (By way of comparison, you might want to take a look at Harris’s abovementioned Web site and check out the forum discussion on circumcision. It’s interesting that many who are so eager to vacuum out a “blastocyte” are equally adamant about retaining a couple of millimeters of skin on a baby’s penis. But then getting in the way of culinary, digestive or sexual pleasure is always problematic in a progressive, rational world.)

So where does all this lead me. Actually, Harris has helped me understand something that has alluded me for some time. That is the question of what it is that allows so-called “progressives” to identify so strongly with the most reactionary force on the planet today: radical Islam. It certainly isn’t rationality or reason, and that is what the article was so clear in pointing out, and why I am so grateful to Harris. Indeed, I now see that it is the inherent nihilism that must result from standing on the “rational” side of the zero-sum divide between reason and faith that is so attracted to the fatalism – the ma sh’allah – of radical Islam, creating, as a result, the current climate of terrorism and its apologists.