Reading my copy of the great Theodore Dalrymple’s essay collection “Not With a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline” last night (Mrs. Dreher: “Oh, honestly. You are the only person who would read such a thing at bedtime.”), I ran across the following startling passage in a 2007 review essay of several New Atheist books:

[Sam] Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.

It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”

Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.

Harris responded by saying, in part, that lots of respectable people loved his book, so what’s the problem? (I’d say that if people weren’t horrified by this sentiment, then we have a bigger problem than Sam Harris.) He also said that Dalrymple cherry-picked that passage out of context. It’s hard for me to imagine any context in which it wouldn’t be alarming to say that it can be okay to kill someone for what they think. You can be a foaming fundamentalist fanatic without believing in religion one bit.