Dionne writes:
While some Christians harbor doubts about Christ's actual physical resurrection, hundreds of millions believe devoutly that Jesus died and rose, thus redeeming a fallen world from sin. Are these people a threat to reason and even freedom?
It's a question that arises from a new vogue for what you might call neo-atheism. The new atheists -- the best known are writers Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins -- insist, as Harris puts it, that "certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one." That's why they think a belief in salvation through faith in God, no matter the religious tradition, is dangerous to an open society.
The neo-atheists, like their predecessors from a century ago, are given to a sometimes-charming ferociousness in their polemics against those they see as too weak-minded to give up faith in God.
. . . The problem with the neo-atheists is that they seem as dogmatic as the dogmatists they condemn. They are especially frustrated with religious "moderates" who don't fit their stereotypes. [Sam] Harris [writes] "I hope to show that 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. We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man."
. . . What's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. But as Novak argued -- in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism -- in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia."
But that is true, as the Red Heifer scripture demonstrates, only to a point. Some aspects, indeed, one could argue, the critical doctrines of religion, are placed beyond question and reason.
Atrios comments:
[T]he "dogmatism" Dionne discusses isn't limited to those normally characterized as fundamentalists or the Christian Right, it's there for even the new more lovable public face of Christianity, Rick Warren, who doesn't believe in evolution and believes Jews (and, presumably, most of the rest of the world) are going to Hell. He comes off pretty absurdly in this discussion with Sam Harris, and reminds me why discussing religion bores me to death.
I think that is right but I have never thought the problem with religion is its dogmatism, it is when religions try to impose their dogmatisms on society. This is precisely the concern our Founding Fathers had. The famous 1802 letter from Jefferson is the best example:
Jefferson's interpretation of the first amendment in a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association (January 1, 1802):
"Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."
I do not believe in arguing the merits of religion. Those are personal matters. I DO believe in argung vociferously for the separation of church and state.
