We all like to think of ourselves as ‘tolerant’…tolerant in our actions (or lack of) if not in our thoughts and attitudes. But tolerance can be a two sided sword. It is at the point where thoughts and words become action that we must let go of religious ‘tolerance’ and instead assert the right to conscience and public good: secularism.
‘Religious Tolerance’ is a term most people view as favorable; a needed guidepost to navigate between the scary waters of dangerous religious fanaticism, and the party pooper skeptics. However, on close examination the ‘moderation’ may appear instead to be ‘enabling’.
Before I get all twelve steppy..let me quote those more learned than myself. Sam Harris writes extensively on this topic:
“The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that 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 that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God.”
This view is new for Liberal secularists..namely, that we should not tolerate religious fundamentalism. It is not enough to simply opt out: we must not capitulate to irrational religious dogma in the name of ‘tolerance’. To illustrate: the recent Danish cartoon controversy, where Muslims were demanding ‘apologies’, and went on homicidal rampages to prove how peaceful their religion is. Make no mistake: I want no ten commandments in public places, and No sharia law..I have an equal dislike for all types of religious fundamentalist intrusion on public life. Religious moderates put us all in danger by pretending all these ideas are acceptable, and apologies should be made to angry imaginary friends. Why pretend these are not all man-made interpretations and insanities? Would people take me equally as seriously if I insisted the pink horsies were sacred and the illustrator of my little pony should die for creating the image? Before you laugh off the comparison, the only real difference is not the available evidence, but the amount of people who believe it. Give me a few thousand years, and my pink horsey cult would grow….
Astoundingly, the first response of the secular and western community during the cartoon controversy was to apologize the crazed, angry religious lunatics for “offending” them. This is roughly equivalent to me apologizing to the drunkard who has just broken down my door….for just being in the way.
If someone came into my house drunk, and started to tear the place up, should I give him a drink to calm him down? Just so he won’t be mad at me? Nope.
Both Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens have gone far in pointing out that we give quarter to behavior done in the name of religion that we would think intolerable under any other circumstance.
We talk now as if it was ridiculous ever to suspect Roman Catholics of anything but the highest motives, yet by the time John F. Kennedy was breaking the unspoken taboo on the election of a Catholic as president, the Vatican had just begun to consider making public atonement for centuries of Jew-hatred and a more recent sympathy for fascism. Even today, many lay Catholics are appalled at the Vatican’s protection of men who are sought for questioning in one of the gravest of all crimes: the organized rape of children. It is generally agreed that the church’s behavior and autonomy need to be modified to take account both of American law and American moral outrage. So much for the naive invocation of “free exercise.”
Let’s stop enabling. Let’s not let perpetrators of great crime and hideous acts hide behind religion, and let’s make it impossible for them to do so.
“Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy. Rather than bring the full force of our creativity and rationality to bear on the problems of ethics, social cohesion, and even spiritual experience, moderates merely ask that we relax our standards of adherence to ancient superstitions and taboos, while otherwise maintaining a belief system that was passed down to us from men and women whose lives were simply ravaged by their basic ignorance about the world. In what other sphere of life is such subservience to tradition acceptable? Medicine? Engineering? Not even politics suffers the anachronism that still dominates our thinking about ethical values and spiritual experience.”
