Name: Joe Rogan Experience #410 - Sam Harris
Uploaded: 2013-10-31T03:10:42.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #410 - Sam Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-10-31. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #410 - Sam Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2013-10-31. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #410 - Sam Harris

tell me what's up for folks who were just tuning in on uStream we just started
talking about uh
sam harris the big big fat islamophobe what is that man is that because they're
brown is that
because people are trying to be like super progressive is that what whoops yeah
um it's
it's a very dangerous irony and double standard it's really it's one of the
most disturbing
phenomenon i think uh just to be found on the landscape now it's a um for folks
tuning in on
uStream just to keep you up to date um we were talking about how you can make
fun of christianity
with no problem whatsoever make fun of mormonism nobody cares but if you make
fun of islam progressive
people will call you islamophobic yeah it's a combination of very
understandable fears of racism
and xenophobia so we have this we're obviously trailing a legacy that we should
be mortified by
this either a legacy of slavery and colonialism and um and all of that is
something we should we should
have a critical distance from and not want to recapitulate in any form and so
it's it's it's
important to be mindful of that obviously but there's this this um combination
of of white guilt
and political correctness and just sheer stockholm syndrome in some people that
has made it impossible
to criticize islam without being branded a racist and islam traditional if you're
not going to buy
traditional then conservative you're not going to buy conservative then extremist
there's some version
of islam that is the most odious ideology operative now it's just it is uh
leading directly to the
immiseration of millions of people and the moment you try to uh really draw a
straight line and and myriad
straight lines exist between that phenomenon and the actual doctrine of islam
the actual idea said
handed down from muhammad you're accused of of bigotry and you're you're put
right next to michelle
bachman and anyone anyone else on the on the right who who obviously you can't
uh you can't ally with in
any sense um so it's it's it's it's very um it's very troubling because because
you have
those whole websites and magazines like salon and and um alternate and even the
nation that just
reflexively demonize anyone who has said anything about islam the religion that's
negative and that's
it's a double standard we're going to have to overcome salon goes hard they go
hard with
progressive silliness i mean they they got mad at pat and oswald for making a
joke about someone making
a joke about chinese accents like it was so stupid it made them look so petty
pedantic and silly it's
just like what are you guys doing like there's a lot of like real issues going
on in the world there's
a lot of real things to think about in this day and age yeah i i wrote a blog
post about malala yosef sai
the uh the 16 year old girl who was at 15 shot by the taliban and was up for
the nobel prize which
she didn't win uh but should have and my my blog post was totally praiseworthy
of her i said she's
the best thing to come out of the muslim world in a thousand years she should
have won the nobel prize
she's elegant eloquent and brave and um and the headline in salon was sam harris
slurs malala
and my slur was not uh basically accepting her view of islam as the canonical
islam because she's not
an atheist and and they thought i was sort of co-opting her as an atheist which
i obviously wasn't doing
so it's just it's incredibly frustrating because so many smart people or
otherwise smart people
are taken in by this because people really want to believe that all religions
are the same and that
people everywhere are the same and want the same things and if we just got our
act together on the
world stage if we just if we just cease to exploit people and we cease to be
selfish and we just and
when we we pulled back all the drones everyone would behave the same way we
would have rational actors
everywhere and there's just no evidence for that and there's there's just as
much evidence as you
could possibly want to find for the antithesis which is there are some people
who are in a death cult
who are certain of paradise and very eager to get there uh and they're not
there's no talking to
them and then there's a there's a a a much vaster number of people around them
who support them who
are not jihadists but who are basically aligned with them in terms of their
worldview so um you know we
have to win a war of ideas and we have to win uh a war and uh we have to be
honest about it
yeah we we certainly do and there's this weird thing going on right now in saudi
arabia where
women are protesting uh the the uh right to drive they're all driving and this
is a big issue and
it's crazy that in 2013 and that is directly related to religion oh yeah yeah
and it's it's incredibly
edgy and risky to do it's just amazing to get if you're a woman to get behind
the wheel of a car in
saudi arabia is a um a life disorienting risk you know to to to make that kind
of social protest
um i mean so if at best they're behind us by whatever 50 years 75 years in
certain social
um epiphanies you know so so if you roll back the clock in the u.s and look at
racism we don't
really have the same analogous religious um brainwashing but but if you look at
racism in
the u.s and what was going on in the in the teens and 20s and 30s is just unthinkable
now i mean just
lynchings and and uh newspaper editorials that were starkly racist i mean there
are newspaper editorials
not op-eds but actually the editorial of the new york times and the la times uh
in 1910 1915
that read exactly like a kkk pamphlet i mean just just mind-boggling so at at
the very least we have
societies that have to catch up uh in their attitudes towards women and
homosexuals and
uh pluralism and atheism and and uh we have to facilitate that process by not
caving in when free speech issues come up so when when someone right draws a
cartoon the prophet muhammad
and people start burning embassies the move on our side can't be to apologize
for cartooning
and and to and to become self-critical and masochistic about you know why is it
that we
had these cartoonists that did this terrible thing and and uh and that's and
that's essentially what
we did and we pulled all no magazine with the exception of one uh free inquiry
in the u.s published
those cartoons they're totally benign cartoons you probably saw that are
available online but
um we we we practice self-censorship to a degree that it's just just
astonishing and and really
just harmful to to to to this um this conflict that both the hot and cold
conflict that we're having
it's caricature it's a like a caricature of uh overblown reaction that you get
from someone that
maybe was uh is put in a situation where they want to always use this as an
excuse for why things are
like it's racism man this is racism or you just hate women like there's a bunch
of these like oh
you're islamophobic it's like boom they throw that on you this wet blanket and
that it's a weird thing
because you call it a cult and i agree with you but that's a very controversial
thing to say if you say
that people get very upset with you but the reality is somebody's in a cult
okay if you got 20 different
whatever how many different religions that are practiced worldwide i don't know
how many how many
other well probably hundreds but just there's the big handful of main ones we
care about but yeah
the main ones we care about okay let's just say there's only four someone's in
a cult someone's
lying some they have four different stories so what's going on who's telling
the truth someone's
in a cult and no one's willing to admit that this of course everyone believes
the other people are in
a cult but just the cognitive dissonance allow uh involved in picking some
ancient ideology and
thinking at some point in time somebody actually had a conversation with the
divine wrote it down
verbatim it is perfect and it's never been touched by the hand of man or
distorted it's it's weird that
you get that from something like salon and that's essentially what they're
doing by calling you
islamophobic yeah they're endorsing this idea that this wacky cult that makes
you kill people
they draw a picture of their guy women aren't allowed to drive cars suicide
bombing in in this day
and age is like very very common and religious based and sure that's the most
extreme faction of
that religion and there's many people that are moderate muslims who despise
that as much as we do
but still it's it's an ideology and ideologies are real problems yeah yeah well
the the dispute is
that uh the link that i'm drawing and that many other people draw between that
behavior and the
religion is being challenged so so the people who would brand me as an islamist
islamophobe would
say that this behavior has nothing to do with islam in principle is that one
you have extremists in every
religion and they all misbehave or bad people will do bad things uh anyway and
and religion is always a
pretext uh and that is just not true the the scary phenomenon um uh i think the
most scary phenomenon
really to be witnessed anywhere is that you can have psychologically healthy
rational otherwise
competent and capable and charismatic people who have other opportunities in
life you know that the
the quarterback of the football team can become a jihadist given the right
ideas uh and it and if you
just admit to yourself that certain people actually believe in paradise and
believe that there's a
specific way to get there that entails violent defense of of the faith then it
becomes totally rational to
behave this way then you and i would be flying planes into buildings if we
actually believe this
doesn't matter what other opportunities you have in life and that the thing
that most secular liberals
can't get their minds around is that people actually believe in paradise people
actually believe that
that that a certain book was dictated by the creator of the universe and it has
provided a blueprint
uh and a moral framework um that many many people millions of people believe is
perfect and
unchallengeable for all time and then once you admit once you admit that you
just have to look at the
blueprint and this this particular blueprint says a lot about a holy war uh and
fighting the infidel and
subjugating the infidel and killing apostates so you know if you if you convert
to islam now on this show
and then by the end of the show say yeah you know i thought better of it i don't
feel like being a muslim
anymore i'm unconverting that is a crime punishable by death uh and that's just
that's not extremist
islam that's not i was in a training camp in afghanistan with 10 000 other lunatics
islam that is
plain vanilla islam uh now you can sort of dicker around the edges of that dogma
by saying you're
dead to me or no you can't go that far unfortunately not dead but you're dead
to me you can say well the
person has to speak out against the faith or repeatedly he has to be an obnoxious
apostate but
um you what you don't get are millions and millions of muslims who belong to
some bona fide tradition
of islam who say oh no apostasy is fine you should you should be free to change
your your mind about
the faith and we don't care if you were once a muslim and now you become a hindu
or you were once a
muslim and now you become a christian or an atheist that is that is fine with
us if if that existed
well then you could just point to that brand of islam and say well you go over
there guys that's the
that's the islam we should be encouraging but we have to and clearly we have to
figure out some way to
massage the faith into conformity with that kind of pluralism and secularism
but it's just not there
and for for magazines like salon to pretend that that that um killing apostates
has no connection
to the real religion of islam is just a just pure delusion and it's a dangerous
one it's it's also
dangerous just to have a very strict ideology to have a thing that not just you're
supposed to do
because the culture wants you t