What is Reasonable?

Thanks to Democracy Lover for the original link to this interview(.pdf) with Sam Harris. I was going to leave Harris alone, but I found an article by New Testament Scholar Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite that I want to use for a contrast with the repugnant ideas Harris expresses. By "repugnant", I am not refering to his atheism (something to which he refuses to own up in the interview, for reasons to which we shall return) which is neither here nor there to me. What I find repugnant is his totalitarian insistence that his way is the only way. I also find it odd that someone who is so insistent on "evidence" would be so consistently factually inaccurate. To name just one, to claim as he does that Christians believe God wrote the Bible is simply wrong. Even the most die-hard fundamentalist does not say such a thing, and to claim that as a part of "religious dogma" is wrong. To claim that Judaism is a "cultural identity" rather than a "religious identity" is not only wrong, it buys into the worst stereotypes about Jews spread by the most vile anti-Smites. Finally, as a third example of factual inaccuracy, he says that "it would not be a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first century world that has ben shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas." What is inaccurate about that statement is this - when was the world ever a unified moral community without religious ideas playing any part whatsoever? As someone so concerned with evidence, when in human history has there ever been a time when all human beings, at all times and all places, believed the same thing, therefore sharing the same "moral community" and has the same or perhaps no religious beliefs? In other words, this line of argument is based upon a lie. Or perhaps ignorance. Or perhaps even prejudice against religion so strong it blinds him to how erroneous his argument is. In any case, this is a sign of a dangerous ideologue, I do not care how virtuous he claims he is (think George Bush without the cross necklace).

In seeking to justify his attack on religion, Harris says that "the problem with religion is that it is the only type of us/them thinking in which we posit a transcendental difference between the in-group and the out-group." Again, that is wrong. From 1933 to 1945, Germany was ruled by a man, a Party, and an ideology that saw "racial" identity (and, here, along with the "normal" races, there were the "made-up" races of the Aryans and thew Jews) as a qualitative distinction between human beings, transcendent to the extent that one race, that fake one called the Aryans, was so vastly superior to the others, especially that other made-up one called the Jews (be careful now; I am not saying Jews are fake; I am saying that to call Jews a "race" is fake), that their elimination was necessary to make the world safe. Six million Jews, another three to four million Slavs, and two to three million others "racially inferior people" like the Roma were efficiently, one might say (with Richard Rubenstein) rationally put to death because of that transcendent distinction.

Finally, there is his outrageous statement that he would rather rid the world of religion than rape. This is a person to be taken seriously? This is a person whose beef with religion is the danger it poses? While he dismisses it as untrue (why would he accept it?), he is a fundamentalist ideologue, convinced of his own correctness and virtue, and refusing to see the very human dimension in a variety of religious experiences. A factually-challenged, hateful person who insists that his way is the only way for the world to escape destruction is hardly the person we should be discussing serious matters with.

As a counter to Harris (of whom I have said all I plan on saying) I would like to consider some of the words of Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite. Of coure, Harris would discount anything she says as irrational; after all, not only is she a Christian, she has dedicated her professional life to a detailed study of the Bible, that holy book he finds so disgusting and violent, full of hate for other people. While noting that doctrinal differences between different branches of the Christian faith are real and not to be minimized, and that interreligious differences are very real, and also not to be minimized, she offers this:

[T]he best way to open the [inter-religious] conversation is thru doing good together and then looking each other in the eye and asking, "What in your faith motivates you to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and shelter the homeless?" That's when common ground stops being a metaphor and starts being a description of where people of faith can stand together to bring hope and healing to this world.

As false an argument as those I pointed out above? Professor Thistlethwaite points out that, in New Orleans after Katrina, fundamentalist Baptists and members of the Metropolitan Community Church worked side by side in relief efforts, and in doing so, learned from one another. A small example, I know, but one that offers hope - real hope - because it is an example of real people learning to live with differences that are real and substantive, yet not so much that they seek to destroy. Harris wants to rid the world of religion because he is afraid of difference. He sees difference as a source of conflict, something else which he fears so much that he refuses to publicly acknowledge that he is an atheist, not because he isn't, but because of the hostitlity such a claim engenders. If you believe something, or even claim it as a matter of fact rather than one of faith, at least have the courage to say so. I find such moral cowardice, coupled with intellectual dishonesty and more than a tendency towards totalitarinism far less attractive, and far more dangerous, than a person of faith offering the possibility - based in faith, but a faith steeped in the experiences of people of faith - of real human contact across all sorts of differences.

Who, then, is more reasonable?