Yes, Reza,  this is a good one.  Finally someone who understands that “sacred texts” are not always taken literally.  It is something an adolescent can understand,  but somehow there are those to whom that simple idea seems lost.  You tell them that,  they say “sure, I understand that”,  and then they are right back at it,  quoting and characterizing the writings as “teaching X”.

an account that ignores overwhelming evidence that believers interpret religious doctrine and scripture different ways in different contexts

via Atheism, Islam and liberalism: This is what we are really fighting about – Salon.com.

And O’Hehir also writes about the “religious faith” of atheists,  which is something I have maintained all along,  and is something the “New Atheists” just hate,  and always vehemently deny (since to them,  that is tantamount to the ultimate insult,  to dare to call them “relgious”.  You might as well call them an idiot, as far as they’re concerned).

On the other hand, Harris’ belief that reason and science can (or someday will) supply a transcendent, religion-like experience that satisfies the human yearning for spirituality, while relinquishing all claims to metaphysical truth, is almost charming. That’s an article of faith if I’ve ever heard one, and one that rests on what St. Augustine would have described as a theological heresy – a misguided faith in the perfectibility of man in this fallen world.

Then ,  he makes the key point,  which is something I have often said to people in the context of this debate:

I would argue that people who line up on opposing sides of the Harris-Aslan feud over religion and Islam represent fundamentally different worldviews, in ways they themselves may not recognize

Absolutely.

Harris’ conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example.

Another gem.  This guy has covered all the bases as far as I’m concerned.

People who barely speak the same language talking past each other, either making grand claims that refute themselves or raising legitimate questions that the other side ducks.

And BAM!,  he hits the nail on the head in describing the arguments that take place,  like in the comments on a ThinkProgress article about that “Maher-Harris-Affleck” episode of  Maher’s “Real Time” HBO  show.

And this is an AWESOME insight about the increased blurring of the line that so much of Western Christianity has done which further muddies the waters here:

It [Western Christianity]  traded in God for Snooki, swapped transcendent meaning and social cohesion for a vision of Enlightenment that started out bubbly and gradually went flat, like a can of week-old Mountain Dew. It’s not the kind of trade you can undo.

And this ,  on the “unintended side effects” of this “fear tactic” (however unconscious as a “tactic” it may be)  :

[Harris] and Maher have provided covert aid and comfort to bigots who firebomb mosques or beat up “Muslim-looking” people at the mall, while officially being horrified by such hateful actions.

But finally here,  O’Hehir steps into another problem,  and commits what I think is a key error that helps fuel this debate:

But Harris and Maher and other prominent anti-Muslim voices are right about one thing: Western leftists are often reluctant to criticize Islam, and it isn’t entirely healthy.

Here we get into that area of social psychology where we analyze (or DONT analyze)  how the “problems” are “of Islam” or “of religion”  or just simply the usual problems of EVERY person,  religious or not:  like what one does with their anger, rage over injustices done,  ability to understand different cultures,  propensity to be “propagandized”,  the extent to which one is shaped by socio-political forces to adopt a certain ethic.  All of these are mixed in with the “religious” population,  and “religious people” are often just as susceptible to putting nationalism over theology,  and therefore to confuse the two and reshape their theology in the image of nationalism.  \

But then he is right back into my camp again with this:

Despite right-wing claims to the contrary, any number of imams and Islamic community leaders have spoken out against the likes of al-Qaida and ISIS and Boko Haram.

And another point completely lost in this seemingly endless run of “Islamaphobia”:

Harris must be aware that Middle Eastern nations have repeatedly been subjected to humiliating wars of invasion, conquest and expropriation that have killed millions of people. They play no evident role in his thinking about the state of Islam, which he appears to view as an unchanging entity.

Absolutely. If we can engage in just a minimum of “what would any of us be like if we were in the shoes of millions who have been on the receiving end of decades of military and economic exploitation by Western powers (usually in the quest of oil control)?  I often find myself thinking that Western conservatives,  who tend to be the more virulent Islamaphobes,  wouldn’t themselves be “Jihadists” if they had been born into and raised in a culture constantly hounded and occupied and plundered by the interests of foreign, greedy, culturally insensitive powers. Just look at the numbers of economically struggling, right wing “Tea Partiers” in the U.S.

The influence of the culture is nowhere more apparent than in the American Muslim communities.  The devout Muslims I have met are anything but this “violence-happy strain” that Harris and Maher are constantly warning us about ,  who are “exposed to these teachings”  (again,  “these teachings” are their “literalist” renderings gleaned from “their studies” that tell them that the religion if Islam itself teaches that violence is acceptable. But if they take a gander at the Bible,  they also find things like “Blessed is he who dashes their little ones against the rocks”,  and yet this is not taught as an exemplary passage in the Bible to even fundamentalist Christians.  Biblical scholars will talk about the social and political context in which this kind of expression emerged,  and render far different lessons from it that actually critique the kind of thinking that would take this passage as a call for violent reprisal.

Excellent article.