friedrich braun
09-22-2004, 10:24 PM
LOL this is funny
(From The Raving Atheist Blog http://ravingatheist.com/ )
His mystical Buddhism aside, Sam Harris makes some salient points about the drawbacks of religious tolerance and moderation in The End of Faith. He rejects as a “terrible dogma” the notion “that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.” Moreover, he contends, “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” These three points alone make the book well worth reading:
(1) Religious moderates fail to recognize that harmony is ultimately impossible between adherents of irrational, incompatible beliefs.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
(2) Religious moderates don’t even respect their own faith.
Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged.
(3) Religious moderates don’t want an honest discussion of 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 do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps 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 currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
...
Religious fundamentalists have been put in a strange bind by Sam Harris’ new book, The End of Faith. On the one hand, it calls for the eradication of all faith, of all religion, and of all belief in God -- plainly a demand they reject. On the other hand, Harris’ plan would necessarily eradicate all of the faiths, religions and Gods with which the fundamentalists disagree -- a result they embrace.
So it’s amusing to read the rather cagey review of Harris’ work by R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (Expanded commentary on his radio program). He agrees with Harris that non-literalist religious moderates, who ignore most of their own canons, are intellectually dishonest, and concurs that the religious left is simply atheistic. So much of Mohler’s review is a mere repetition, sometimes gleeful, of Harris’ arguments against mushy modern theology.
But what to do about Harris’ attacks on non-Christian fundamentalism? As an evangelical, of course, Mohler rejects as false orthodox Islam, Judaism, Hinduism -- and even Christian fundamentalism that differs in any material respect from his own. But the True Believers of those faiths adhere to the literal word of their own insane, bloodthirsty scriptures, so their methodology can’t be dismissed as disingenuous postmodern relativism.
The honest thing to do would be to present the case for the authenticity of his own Holy Book (and interpretation thereof) and explain how the remaining infidels, however sincere, went wrong. But Mohler apparently realizes that there would be little to convincingly distinguish his arguments from those in support of the Koran of the Book of Mormon, and that he’d just find himself embroiled in an inconclusive He said/ He said match. So instead, he faults Harris for religious intolerance. “So much for the myth of liberal tolerance,” he snorts, outraged at Harris’ rejection of the notion “that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.” He concludes that Harris’ book is “a wake-up call . . . to the true character of aggressive secularism and the true agenda of its proponents.”
It’s more than a little ridiculous, given that the last thing evangelicals believe in is multiculturalist “liberal tolerance” or the notion that “every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.” It’s precisely the sort of ideological relativism that Mohler finds so abhorrent in the Religious Middle. And Mohler himself is regularly defending his sect’s efforts to covert Jews to the Christian God, an enterprise every bit as aggressive as Harris’ secularist crusade. But when it comes to defending his faith against an atheism as evangelical as his own beliefs, he abandons truth in favor of moderation.
http://ravingatheist.com/archives/2004/09/moderate_fundamentalism.php
(From The Raving Atheist Blog http://ravingatheist.com/ )
His mystical Buddhism aside, Sam Harris makes some salient points about the drawbacks of religious tolerance and moderation in The End of Faith. He rejects as a “terrible dogma” the notion “that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.” Moreover, he contends, “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.” These three points alone make the book well worth reading:
(1) Religious moderates fail to recognize that harmony is ultimately impossible between adherents of irrational, incompatible beliefs.
Many religious moderates have taken the apparent high road of pluralism, asserting the equal validity of all faiths, but in doing so they neglect to notice the irredeemably sectarian truth claims of each. As long as a Christian believes that only his baptized brethren will be saved on the Day of Judgment, he cannot possibly “respect” the beliefs of others, for he knows that the flames of hell have been stoked by these very ideas and await their adherents even now. Muslims and Jews generally take the same arrogant view of their own enterprises and have spent millennia passionately reiterating the errors of other faiths. It should go without saying that these rival belief systems are all equally uncontaminated by evidence.
(2) Religious moderates don’t even respect their own faith.
Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world. No doubt an obscure truth of economics is at work here: societies appear to become considerably less productive whenever large numbers of people stop making widgets and begin killing their customers and creditors for heresy. The first thing to observe about the moderate’s retreat from scriptural literalism is that it draws its inspiration not from scripture but from cultural developments that have rendered many of God’s utterances difficult to accept as written. In America, religious moderation is further enforced by the fact that most Christians and Jews do not read the Bible in its entirety and consequently have no idea just how vigorously the God of Abraham wants heresy expunged.
(3) Religious moderates don’t want an honest discussion of 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 do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps 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 currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
...
Religious fundamentalists have been put in a strange bind by Sam Harris’ new book, The End of Faith. On the one hand, it calls for the eradication of all faith, of all religion, and of all belief in God -- plainly a demand they reject. On the other hand, Harris’ plan would necessarily eradicate all of the faiths, religions and Gods with which the fundamentalists disagree -- a result they embrace.
So it’s amusing to read the rather cagey review of Harris’ work by R. Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. (Expanded commentary on his radio program). He agrees with Harris that non-literalist religious moderates, who ignore most of their own canons, are intellectually dishonest, and concurs that the religious left is simply atheistic. So much of Mohler’s review is a mere repetition, sometimes gleeful, of Harris’ arguments against mushy modern theology.
But what to do about Harris’ attacks on non-Christian fundamentalism? As an evangelical, of course, Mohler rejects as false orthodox Islam, Judaism, Hinduism -- and even Christian fundamentalism that differs in any material respect from his own. But the True Believers of those faiths adhere to the literal word of their own insane, bloodthirsty scriptures, so their methodology can’t be dismissed as disingenuous postmodern relativism.
The honest thing to do would be to present the case for the authenticity of his own Holy Book (and interpretation thereof) and explain how the remaining infidels, however sincere, went wrong. But Mohler apparently realizes that there would be little to convincingly distinguish his arguments from those in support of the Koran of the Book of Mormon, and that he’d just find himself embroiled in an inconclusive He said/ He said match. So instead, he faults Harris for religious intolerance. “So much for the myth of liberal tolerance,” he snorts, outraged at Harris’ rejection of the notion “that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.” He concludes that Harris’ book is “a wake-up call . . . to the true character of aggressive secularism and the true agenda of its proponents.”
It’s more than a little ridiculous, given that the last thing evangelicals believe in is multiculturalist “liberal tolerance” or the notion that “every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God.” It’s precisely the sort of ideological relativism that Mohler finds so abhorrent in the Religious Middle. And Mohler himself is regularly defending his sect’s efforts to covert Jews to the Christian God, an enterprise every bit as aggressive as Harris’ secularist crusade. But when it comes to defending his faith against an atheism as evangelical as his own beliefs, he abandons truth in favor of moderation.
http://ravingatheist.com/archives/2004/09/moderate_fundamentalism.php