It was a long and meaty debate by talk-show standards, which is to say it was short and stupid.
Ben Affleck, Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Nicholas Kristof and Michael Steele spent several minutes debating Islam on Maher’s HBO show last week, and the debate among the liberals in the bunch got pretty heated.
I don’t subscribe to the old rule that you should never argue about religion, but watching this exchange you begin to see the point of it. Both sides illustrated how these arguments often go wrong.
Maher and Harris were saying that their fellow liberals don’t criticize Islamic radicalism and illiberalism enough. Harris, an author of atheistic polemics, said that criticism of “the doctrine of Islam” shouldn’t be “conflated with bigotry against Muslims as people.”