[Mb-civic] FW: Op-Ed in today's London Times

[Michael Butler]

------ Forwarded Message
From: <sam at samharris.org>
Reply-To: sam at samharris.org
Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 01:48:06 -0600
To: michael at michaelbutler.com
Subject: Op-Ed in today's London Times

Here is the latest op-ed to see the light of day, largely cribbed from my
book.  Please feel free to pass it along.
Best,
Sam



>From the Times (London)
March 19, 2005 

The virus of religious moderation
Sam Harris


PERHAPS it should come as no surprise that a mere wall of water, sweeping
innocent multitudes from the beaches of 12 countries on Boxing Day, failed
to raise global doubts about God¹s existence. Still, one wonders just how
vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world¹s
faith. The Holocaust did not do it.

 God¹s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter
how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith. In
matters of faith, we have kicked ourselves loose of the earth. Given the
degree to which religion still inspires human conflict, this is not the good
news that many of us imagine it to be.

 One of the greatest challenges facing civilisation in the 21st century is
for human beings to learn to speak about their deepest concerns ‹ about
ethics, spiritual experience, and human suffering ‹ in ways that are not
flagrantly irrational. Incompatible religious doctrines have Balkanised our
world and these divisions have become a continuous source of bloodshed.

 Indeed, religion is as much a living spring of violence today as it was at
any time in the past. The recent conflicts in Palestine (Jews v Muslims),
the Balkans (Orthodox Serbians v Catholic Croatians; Orthodox Serbians v
Bosnian and Albanian Muslims), Northern Ireland (Protestants v Catholics),
Kashmir (Muslims v Hindus), Sudan (Muslims v Christians and animists),
Nigeria (Muslims v Christians)and Iran and Iraq (Shia v Sunni) are merely a
few cases in point. These are places where religion has been the explicit
cause of millions of deaths in the past decade.

 It is in the face of such pointless horrors that many people of goodwill
now counsel ³moderation² in religion. The problem with religious
moderation is that it offers us no bulwark against the spread of religious
extremism and religious violence. Moderates do not want to kill anyone in
the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word ³God² as though
we knew what we were talking about. And they don¹t 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.

 In so far as religious moderates attempt to hold on to what is still
serviceable in orthodox religion, they close the door to more sophisticated
approaches to human happiness. Rather than bring the full force of
21st-century creativity and rationality to bear, moderates ask that we
merely relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos.

 But by failing to live by the letter of the texts ‹ while tolerating the
irrationality of those who do ‹ religious moderates betray faith and
reason equally. As moderates, we cannot say that religious fundamentalists
are dangerous idiots, because they are merely practising their freedom of
belief. We can¹t even say that they are mistaken in religious terms,
because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivalled. All we can
say, as religious moderates, is that we don¹t like the personal and social
costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. It is time we
recognised that religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and
scriptural ignorance.

 Religious moderates imagine that theirs is the path to peace. But this very
ideal of tolerance now drives us toward the abyss. Religious violence still
plagues our world because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one
another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular knowledge and
secular interests have restrained the most lethal improprieties of faith. 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.

 Moderation in religion has made it taboo even to acknowledge the
differences among our religious traditions: to notice, for instance, that
Islam is especially hostile to the principles of civil society. There are
still places in the Muslim world where people are put to death for imaginary
crimes ‹ such as blasphemy ‹ and where the totality of a child¹s
education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of
religious fiction. Throughout the Muslim world, women are denied almost
every human liberty, except the liberty to breed.

 And yet, these same societies are acquiring arsenals of advanced weaponry.
In the face of these perils, religious moderates ‹ Christians, Muslims and
Jews ‹ remain entranced by their own moderation. They are least able to
fathom that when jihadists stare into a video camera and claim to ³love
death more than the infidels love life², they are being candid about their
state of mind. 

 But technology has a way of creating fresh moral imperatives. We can no
longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbors believe in the
metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation
‹ because our neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and
nuclear weapons. There is no doubt that these developments mark the terminal
phase of our credulity. Words like ³God² and ³Allah² must go the way
of ³Apollo² and ³Baal² or they will unmake our world.

Sam Harris is author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future
of Reason.  He can be reached at www.samharris.org.






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