Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are back in the news again. At a recent forum in La Jolla, California, attended primarily by agnostics and atheists (several Christian invitees declined to attend), both men were, at one point, labeled by one fellow non-believer as “remarkably apt mirror images of the extremists on the other side…”.
There’s no doubt that both Dawkins and Harris are extremists compared to some of the others who participated. But the question must be asked, if a person believes that religion is harmful to society and to the future of mankind, can he take a moderate position? Moderate agnostics and atheists say that science does not preclude belief in God. They believe that people who need that sort of comfort should be able to have it. They claim that the sometimes acerbic Dawkins does more harm than good, turning people off from science and reality.
While I do agree that Dawkins, and sometimes Harris, can be rather insulting with his views (i.e. if you follow religion in this modern, intellectual world of ours, you must be an idiot), I do believe that there can be no middle ground. Religion is either bad for us, or it isn’t. If you believe that religion is not harmful, then it would be okay to accept the idea that science and religion can go hand-in-hand. But we need look no further than CNN to see that such a belief is not a reflection of reality. Muslim extremists kill in the name of Allah. Christian fundamentalists want to deny homosexuals the right to marry because the Bible tells them it’s wrong. Members of the modern KKK, one of the most militant anti-everything groups in history, are conservative Protestants. Jews in Israel displaced thousands of Palestinians a few decades ago and war with them today based on a belief that they are the Chosen of God, that the Holy Land was promised to them in the Old Testament. How many died in Ireland in the Catholic-Protestant conflict there? How many were slaughtered during the period of the Crusades? To believe that religion is not harmful to society really is to be an idiot. History and our own time have shown us repeatedly that religion is a killer.
Dawkins and Harris are not extreme. They are right.
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[…] This is related to my last post, where I mentioned that Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were criticized for their extreme views of religion. Dawkins defends his position in an article published online at beliefnet, Why I Am Hostile Toward Religion. In the article, he aims to explain why he is not the mirror-opposite of religious fundamentalists: I might retort that such hostility as I or other atheists occasionally voice toward religion is limited to words. I am not going to bomb anybody, behead them, stone them, burn them at the stake, crucify them, or fly planes into their skyscrapers, just because of a theological disagreement. But my interlocutor usually doesn’t leave it at that. He may go on to say something like this: “Doesn’t your hostility mark you out as a fundamentalist atheist, just as fundamentalist in your own way as the wingnuts of the Bible Belt in theirs?” I need to dispose of this accusation of fundamentalism, for it is distressingly common. […]
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