- Nov 25, 2001
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This article originally appeared in the January 2005 copy of Playboy. (Yes, I read the articles. Too. 
)
I thought it offered a unique two-prong perspective on ONE: how reason not faith is the glue that holds our civilization together, and TWO: how religious moderates are downright dangerous in light of our current War on Terror. I found it interesting and thought it might provoke some discussion . . .
(BTW, I have no link, I just copied/pasted the article from another board...)
) I thought it offered a unique two-prong perspective on ONE: how reason not faith is the glue that holds our civilization together, and TWO: how religious moderates are downright dangerous in light of our current War on Terror. I found it interesting and thought it might provoke some discussion . . .
(BTW, I have no link, I just copied/pasted the article from another board...)
Religious Moderation is a Dangerous Thing
From the January 2005 Issue of Playboy
by: Sam Harris
According to Gallup, 35% of Americans believe the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of the Creator of the Universe. Another 48% believe it is the "inspired" word of the same-still inerrant, though some of it's passages must be interpreted symbolically. Only 17% doubt that a personal God has authored this text, or for that matter, has created the earth, with it's 250,000 species of beetles. If polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe a book that shows neither unity of style nor internal consistency was created by an omniscient deity.
Given this situation, we might wonder what it means to be a religious moderate in America today. Many of us claim to be religious moderates, or course. The problem, however, is that moderation in religion is completely without intellectual or theological support. It offers us no bulwark against the threat of religious extremism and religious violence.
Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person knows more about certain matters than anyone did 2000 years ago, and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. Most of us, for example, no longer equate disease with demonic possession. About half of us find it impossible to take seriously the idea that the universe was created 6000 years ago. But such concessions to modernity haven't made faith compatible with reason. It's just that the utility of ignoring (or "reinterpreting") articles of faith is now overwhelming. Anyone who has flown to a distant city for heart bypass surgery must concede that we have learned a few things about physics, geography, engineering and medicine since the time of Moses.
The problem with religious moderation is that it doesn't permit anything critical to be said about religious literalism. By failing to live by the letter of the texts--while tolerating the irrationality of those who do--we betray faith and reason equally. We can't say fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief. We can't even say they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say as religious moderates is that we don't like the personal and social costs imposed on us by a full embrace of scripture.
Religious moderates have merely capitulated to a variety of all too human interests that have nothing in principle to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance. It has no credibility, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism. Each text is perfect in all its parts. By this light, moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to submit to the law of God. Unless the core dogmas of faith (ie:, there is a God, and we know what He wants from us) are questioned, religious moderation won't lead us out of the wilderness.
Insofar as it represents an atteot to hold on to what is still serviceable in orthodox religion, such moderation closes the door to more sophisticated approaches to human happiness. Rather than bring the force of creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion and spiritual experience, moderates ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions while we otherwise maintain a belief system passed down from men and women whose lives were ravaged by ignorance. Not even politics suffers from such anachronisms.
Moderates don't want to kill anyone in the name of God, of course. But they do want us to keep using the word God as though we knew what we were talking about. And they don't want anything critical to be said about people who believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak truthfully about the state of our world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contains reams of life-destroying gibberish--is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it.
Religious moderates can't fathom that when jihadists claim to "love death more than the infidels love life." they are being scrupulously honest about their state of mind. Consequently, moderates imagine that factors other than religious faith lie at the root of Muslim violence. They are especially beguiled by the dangerous euphemism "war on terror." It is ironic that we rely on our own religious dogmatists--men such as Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham--to publicy appreciate the threat Islam poses to the world, while our newspapers testify daily to the fact that religious affiliation is the greatest predictor of terrorist behavior.
The next time you see a 70 year old woman from Norway struggle to take off her shoes at airport security, realize that in a world of limited resources their misallocation almost always comes at a price. The political correctness that is now the soul of religious moderation may get many of us killed.
There are still places in the world where people get put to death for imaginary crimes such as blasphemy and where a child's education consists solely of learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty except the liberty to breed. And yet these same societies are acquiring arsenals of advanced weaponry. If we can't inspire the developing world, and the Muslim world in particular, to pursue ends compatible with a global civilization, a dark future awaits us all.
Nothing is more sacred than facts. Where we have reason, we don't need faith. Where we have no reason, we have lost both our connection to this world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our society, not in the halls of power. We should respect a person's desire for a better life in this world, not his certainty that one awaits him in the next.
But religious moderates imagine that the path to peace will be paved once we learn to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. This ideal of religious tolerance now drives us to the abyss. As every fundamentalist knows, the contest between our religions is zero-sum. Religious violence is still with us because our religions are intrinsically hostile to one another.
Where they appear otherwise, it is because secular interests have restrained the most lethal improprieties of faith. It is time that moderates recognize that reason, not faith, is the glue that holds our civilization together.
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