Science and Religion Forum
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.
Technorati Tags: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Chrsitianity, Islam, Judaism, Religion, KKK, agnostics, atheists