One of the central points Maher tries to make in Religulous is that, when the people in charge think the end of the world is coming, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At best, they'll half-ass any attempts to stop it, and at worst, they'll actively push to bring it about.
Isn't this basically what Harris says, minus additionally blaming religious moderates for putting up with it?
I meant to say Hitchens; I've fixed the original post.
What Jesus really preached was to put kindness and compassion in your heart, and, when times are difficult, to associate with like-minded people for support and community while you tough it out.
Maher acknowledges this (though he also refers to religion as a mental disorder). Early on, he talks to truckers at a truck-stop church and asks their views and shares his. They're not receptive and don't seem to actually understand the things he's saying; one of them seems like he's about to threaten physical violence but leaves instead. The rest, while they don't see eye-to-eye, listen politely; at the end, he says, okay, you've listened to my beliefs, now I'm ready to accept yours; go ahead and pray for me. And then he thanks them for being Christ-like instead of merely Christian.
Out of curiosity, how often do those members who are atheist or agnostic actually experience some body personally making an issue of your beliefs? I mean how often does some body try to convert you in an aggressive way?
Directly? Seldom. The Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses who come to my door are polite and leave when I ask them to. (I had a couple guys representing something called the Church of God the Mother or somesuch thing drop by the other day; basically they were preaching Christianity with the twist that God has both a male and female aspect. I chatted with them awhile and found what they had to say interesting; I told them I'm not a believer and they're not going to change that, but I like the idea of emphasizing a feminine nature to God since religion is so commonly used as an excuse for female oppression.) There HAVE been times when people have been aggressive or gotten in my face -- when I went to the Seal Beach con, I regaled them with the tale of a man bothering my family on that very pier a decade previously and not leaving until Dad threatened to call the police -- but you make a good point, that's not the norm.
That said, someone doesn't have to be directly in front of me being physically aggressive to violate my rights. As I said, we've got a government full of evangelicals, and their effect on the country and the world is a very negative one.
My main issue with religion is evangelical right wing Christianity and oppressive Muslim regimes, but population wise these groups are a small portion of the religious people on the planet.
Agreed, and that's a point I tried to make earlier. Moderate religious folks are our natural allies, not our enemies; they want the same things we do.
So yeah, religion should stay the hell out of government policy. And, at its core, it wants to stay the hell out. The troubles we have come from human cowardice and hypocrisy, and those wouldn't go away even if everyone in the world became atheist overnight.
The main problem with the evangelicals is that you could take away their Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Shinto or what-have-you and it wouldn't slow them down for a second. The religion is what they say they are about, but it is not what they are about. These are people who will latch onto an idea - any idea - to ground themselves in a world they may simply not have the capacity to understand, and from there will attempt to function according to that idea while at the same time trying to force their immediate universe to fit their model of it, first and foremost by coercing any people surrounding them to accept the same model and to eliminate any idea that challenges or contradicts it. Conformity is all they really care about. Christianity, while popular in America, could be replaced by Buddhism, Rationalism, Agnosticism or whatever else you prefer, and it would still become something innocently poisonous as more and more people started to use it as their only, inarguable means of understanding the world.
The real challenge will always be the struggle against entropy and the tendency for things to always slide off to extremes.
But how can you be an extremist if your core belief is "Nothing is certain, and we must remain skeptical of even our most firmly-held beliefs"?
I suppose that's like asking how you can be an extremist if your core belief is "Love thy neighbor." Somewhere, the message is going to get subverted and the ethical code will no longer be about what it says it is.
I continue to think the answer is better education. Curiosity, asking "Why?", is part of our fundamental nature as children; that needs to be encouraged, made into a trait that we never lose.
