Episode 6b: "The Secular Gaze"

At long last, the fabled second segment from our most recent episode! We discuss Mohammad Hassan Khalil's excellent book, Jihad, Radicalism, and the New Atheism. Khalil persuasively argues that the New Atheists — a group of "rationalist" critics of religion who hold that Islam commands its adherents to kill unbelievers — uncritically adopt the radical, aberrant understanding of key concepts like jihad and martyrdom put forth by figures like Osama Bin Laden. We talk about the book and then broaden the discussion: why is it that Western societies insist that a religion must be a list of beliefs backed by decontextualized scriptural citations? How might we complicate the secular understanding of religion? All that and more on this week's LITERALLY EVERYTHING.