APOLARITY

There’s an interesting debate going on at beliefnet between Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, and Andrew Sullivan, blogger extraordinaire and author of The Conservative Soul.

View the entire dialogue here. Harris believes “that religion itself–not its more extreme forms–is to blame” for violent religious fundamentalism, while Sullivan, a Catholic, tries to articulate a moderate Christian faith.

One thing I find strange is that beliefnet is posting the entire contents of Sam Harris’ comments, but only excerpts of Andrew Sullivan’s replies (as well as links to the full text at his blog).

From Sullivan:

The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling …is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life. You find it troubling, I think, purely because it upholds truths that cannot be proved empirically or even, in some respects, logically. In that sense, of course, I think you have no reason to dislike or oppose it any more than you would oppose my kind of faith.

…I do not see reason as somehow in conflict with faith – since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.

From Harris:

Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

Link.

Interesting stuff. Do check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2007 at 2:17 pm and is filed under religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.