Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing

the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense

Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to

add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads

on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.

So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

As many of you know, there was recently a triple murder in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

by a person named Craig Steven Hicks, who is still alive. This is not a suicide murder.

So undoubtedly we'll one day hear what his conscious motives were, but he killed three young

people. Apparently over a parking space, at least that was the subject of their dispute,

but he happens to have been a person who identified as an atheist on his Facebook page and

expressed admiration for people like Richard Dawkins. He might have said something about

me. I'm actually not sure, but he was self-identified as an atheist and critical of all religion

apparently on his Facebook page. And because the victims of this crime were Muslim, it

is now being widely described as a hate crime. And in fact, it is being described as a symptom

of a problem that we have in the atheist community, a problem of militancy, a problem of anti-Muslim

bigotry. And many people are claiming that I am somehow responsible for this, both for

the background problem and for the murders themselves, which is quite an amazing thing

to be accused of. So it seems to me that there's a fair amount of moral confusion here, and

also just factual confusion about the reality of human violence in the US and elsewhere.

But the first thing to say is that I feel nothing but horror over this crime. These people

...