Harris against “moderation” in religion
31 March 2005 by RonVery nice little column in the The Times (of London) on “The virus of religious moderation” by Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason). Here’s some snippets, for a taste of it:
…one wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it… It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith… religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at any time in the past… religion has been the explicit cause of millions of deaths in the past decade… many people of goodwill now counsel “moderation” in religion…. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don’t want anything too critical to be said about people who really believe in the God of their forefathers because tolerance, above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world - to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish - is antithetical to tolerance as moderates conceive it. …If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith… Words like “God” and “Allah” must go the way of “Apollo” and “Baal” or they will unmake our world.
Go read it.
1 April 2005, on 11:55 am
It’s an excellent point. However, the idea of tolerating other peoples beliefs has generally been of great benefit to those of us in the athiest camp, because we’re easy targets for anyone, but letting people believe what they want and letting them DO what they want are different things. Really, it should be the responsibility of the mocerates in these camps to clean up or expel the fanatics. Simply telling them all to give it up and be rational won’t work, it’ll just enflame them. The point that they’re acting like silly children in a fantasy world is apt, but we have to remember that they’re also in the majority in most places and tend to be politically powerful and willing to take up arms to defend what they believe, whether from legislative action or a strong social movement. It’s a real problem, that doesn’t yield to simple solutions, but a wider recognition that religion is a blight on human society is a good first step.