God
I'm completely enthralled by the Harris-Sullivan theological debate. What do you think about it? More interestingly, what do you think about God? I want to hear from atheists and true believers, and I want people to defend their positions. Let's talk big!
posted by Joshua @ 9:16 PM
21 Comments:
Short answer for parties: Agnostic, leaning heavily towards atheist.
Long answer for long, drunken summer night discussions: I think that if we are to look for "God," he is to be found in the fact that society is, does, and creates so much more than the sum of its parts. I think that faith and religion are human inventions to deal with a) the fact that our ancestors' rulers needed to have some sort of moral authority for their rule and their laws, and b) the undeniable human feeling that there's just... something out there greater than ourselves. I think the former of these reasons constitutes a need for religion and the second a need for faith. I think faith and belief are personal and the religion is social, and is too often used as a tool of oppression. In fact, I thnik it was always meant to be used this way.
I think that the law should be athiest, regardless of the truth of the matter. I think that people who would try through any means to force their belief systems or moral values thereof upon anyone else are insufferable and ignorant, but I also understand the instinct. If we're to love and believe in a God who wants things just so, then obviously we're to believe that priority is taken in what God so chooses. I understand the instinct, which is what makes me fear it all the more.
Religion was created as a way to use God to exploit and oppress society. I think God - a dualistic God, to be sure, but still God - is to be found in Society itself, and what it is yet to accomplish.
If you want to know what god is then go out at night and stare up at the sky. If you stare long enough for an instant the sky might stop being sky and turn into
some great unfathomable thing staring back at you and you'll feel it staring at you and you'll feel terrified and want to hide.
I read or saw somewhere (it might have been Stargate, I'll admit it)
that you can't predict an atom's course because the simple act of observing it changes the atom.
Ever wonder how an atom feels when you look at it? Think on that.
I'm sure at least of you will try to see what I'm saying.
For now, let me say that I basically agree with the Headmaster on this one. I'll have a much more elaborate comment later.
Four blind men grab an elephant. One grabs the trunk, one the, one the tail, and the last the leg. Each describes what they have and each insists the other three don't have the elephant as it's nothing like what they have.
I suppose I could go on about how the elephant left and the four spent their lives fighting over the spot where it stood, but that might be taking the metaphor a bit too far.
I have read Sam Harris's End of Faith and although I disagree with the ultimate argument of his book, that a critical examination of religious faith, if conducted in the spirit of complete honesty and governed by reason and common sense, necessarily produces atheism, I truly respect his main point, or rather his main question: Why do most people give religion a free pass when it comes to the common sense smell test? If I were to advocate that the interior of the Earth was inhabited by a highly intelligent race of mole men, no one would think twice to laugh me out of this forum. But if I were to advocate that more than two thousand years ago, an obscure deity of an obscure desert nomad tribe incarnated itself into a virgin woman and gave birth to the savior of all mankind, or, to bring it closer to home for my religious outlook, if the Gautama Buddha's star disciple Maudgalyayana one day pushed a monastery building filled with lazy monks with nothing but his big toe and caused it tremble and quake, I would get a free pass simply because these things are one's religious beliefs and are exempt somehow from rigorous, scientific examination.
I gave the 20-odd page debate between them a good read and found it fascinating, not only for the questions they raised but also for the ways they talk right past each other (Sullivan seems to miss Harris's point more so than vice versa). I'm going to re-read the "blogalogue" [the very act of saying that word has defiled me] tonight and give a much more detailed comment, but suffice it to say I side far more with Harris than with Sullivan, although in the end equation, I utterly disagree with Harris on the utility and harm of the moderate religious.
Hipster:
Blind men can't see the elephant in front of them, but if they are sufficiently honest and curious and not afraid to let their hands wander past the parts which initially touched, they can have a much better map of what this thing they are touching is. Maybe they can compare notes and find out, lo and behold, it was the same damn thing all along.
Let me turn the tables a bit: would you want to subject absolutely everything to rigorous, scientific scrutiny? I say this not to be facietious or sophistic, but because this is Sullivan's essential point and a good one. Can love be reduced to quantifiable constituent parts so easily?
But speaking of examining. My religious beliefs - such as they are - are basically puritan. I am in this regard totally insufferable. I also believe in Original Sin. I don't just mean I pay lip service to the idea - namely that we need a Savior to free us from sin - because it wraps my theology in a nice little bow.
I mean that I actually think the human capacity for sin is well-nigh unsurmountable. Not even think. I feel it. Is this altogether logical? Well, I can't say for sure. But the world furnishes me with evidence on a daily basis that, at the very least, I'm not insane to feel it.
Where I differ with orthodoxy, or rather where I have a fundamental problem with people's views on religion and God is that there seems to be a prevalent mindset at work: "I want to feel good about myself."
So you get a lot of spiritually unfit people - Jesus called them hypocrites! - feeling good about themselves because they made an outward show of piety or some such. But if God and Truth are the same, this is completely ridiculous: you shouldn't feel good about yourself! Nor, should you feel bad about yourself, I should add.
The purpose of the religious exercise is more to feel, how can I phrase it... accurately about yourself. To be able to see your human nature as it is - fallen, corrupted, imperfect - and not as you'd imagine it or wish it. Only when you understand yourself can you do anything about anything. The religious discipline - and that's definitely the way to think of it - is there to guide you and provide you with a mean on how to go about reaching a better understanding.
Why the discipline? Well, absent it, you're just left with yourself talking to yourself. Possibly even deluding yourself. The discipline itself can take many forms, of course, not just in terms of different religions themselves, but different aspects of each religion. Here I think Hipster's elephant metaphor is really useful. Everyone's going to encounter the truth differently. The truth is big enough to handle that.
Interestingly enough, it is precisely because I believe these things - and can't recall a time when I didn't - that I do not wish them imposed on anyone else. If I admit that my own understanding is inherently flawed, corrupted, and fallen, why would I dare inflict my specific outlook on other people, and in doing so, set myself back from my own path? It just doesn't make sense. It leads to the worst kind of hypocrisy.
On a related point, however, I disagree with Pascal's Bookie. I don't think the law should be atheist so much as it should be non-sectarian. I think there's a crucial distinction to be made between admitting that something is (in its totality) beyond our natures and therefore beyond the public sphere, and stating that there is no "something."
Tacitean:
Let me turn the tables a bit: would you want to subject absolutely everything to rigorous, scientific scrutiny?
A very good question to ask, but unfortunately I do not say that everything should be subject to "rigorous, scientific scrutiny". If this were the case I'm afraid my rather fanatical love of U2 would fall short of being scientifically air-tight. No, what I asked was why religion specifically should be given a free pass, especially since it plays such an integral part of our debate on ethics, morality and policy.
Fair enough, fair enough. "Non-sectarian" is a much better choice of words. I mention it because, in my life, the concept of "God" comes up most often in government. This bothers me because, at least in our western, monotheistic view, morality is defined by the nature of God. Then, lo and behold, the nature of God becomes defined by the nature of the person speaking. This is how it became common belief among a significant subsection of our country that the will of Jesus is for America to force the rest of the world into a democratic system similar to our own, through war if necessary.
"God" tends to be made in the image of the teller, and thus becomes irrefutable because you can't argue against "God." So yes, I'd like Him out of the political conversation altogether.
I'll start this out with my own personal account. I believe in God and am a proud member of the United Methodist Church. My family was not overly religious when I was growing up; we would attend services on Christmas and Easter, but not so much in between. I suppose you could attribute that to my dad's sporadic work schedule, but we certainly could have gone in his absence. My parents went so far as to not baptize us as children so that we would not be beholden to any particular religious group. Their intent was for us to decide as adults where our faiths lie.
Our spotty church attendance was exactly the opposite of my mother's upbringing. My grandmother was the organist of her UMC in Michigan, and my mom loves to tell stories about how she learned to read from tagging along to choir practice and following along in the hymnals. When I was in high school, I started getting involved with the music ministry of my church as a member of the orchestra and handbell choirs. As a musician, these seemed like perfect outlets for my talents, and it was a way for me to become part of a church family. Bit by bit I became more involved in the church, and it all culminated in my baptism at age 17.
Now to the curious part. I am a mathematician. Everything I do with this "language of the universe" involves reasoning and logic. Many scientists try to apply that "rigorous, scientific scrutiny" to find a reason for everything and to prove the existence of God. So far no one has been able to use pure reason to prove such existence. Yet as I learn more mathematics and apply similar scrutiny to my subject, I find remarkable relations and connections that seem to defy logic. (Who would imagine that the Monster Group in abstract algebra would have any relation to string theory?)
I am unabashedly Platonist in my view of mathematics, and I see these connections as part of an overarching framework of the universe. There is nothing spontaneous about the nature of this structure. To do mathematics is to believe in God. With every new mathematical discovery, we gain more insight into the awesome wonder. So much of mathematics is built on faith to begin with -- you either accept the Axiom of Choice or you don't -- so it really isn't much of a stretch to extend that faith to a higher power, the creator of the mathematical structures.
So I married a Platonist! Who knew?
In all seriousness, I think you've hit upon an excellent point: is there an inherent order to the universe? If so, what is its nature? Does it extend beyond the mere physical mechanics of the universe? If so, is there something (whatever you wish to call it) behind this order? Where we fall on this question determines how comfortable we are with the idea of religion.
As for the Platonic ideas, I'd love to hear what Socratic has to say about them. This Aristotle-lover will keep quiet throughout!
Thank you Boudicca for your post. It is good to have someone who is working in the field of science and mathematics to contribute to this forum. Firstly I will address the point you made regarding the phrasing rigorous, scientific scrutiny , then move on to a short (okay, maybe no so short) description of my religious background, and then tackle Tacitean's question on whether the universe has some sort of inherent order. I should be able to get to at least my first two points in this post, but forgive me if I return to Tacitean's question in a later post.
Boudicca:
You stated that Many scientists try to apply that "rigorous, scientific scrutiny" to find a reason for everything and to prove the existence of God. So far no one has been able to use pure reason to prove such existence. This is undoubtedly correct. From my point of view, this is correct mainly because I am 99.9999999999% certain that God as He/She/It is described in the majority of the religious traditions in human history does not actually exist. In my opinion, those thinkers who try to approach God through reason are like those scientists at the turn of the 20th century who were trying to finally, definitively prove their theories on the existence of the universal luminiferous Aether medium through which light and objects of mass moved with all the scientific tools at their possession. They failed, and what is more important, the scientific community acknowledged their failure and were open to a different and far more accurate description of reality, namely Einstein's theories of special relativity, hence overturning Newton's accepted notions of absolute space and time. This is the type of scientific openness and honest scrutiny I want from religions, without recourse to "Well, He said so, in this book right here" or "Because it's natural and obvious to me". I think this is what Sam Harris wants from Andrew Sullivan in this debate.
I think this would be a good time to interject with my religious background. I was raised in a Christian environment. My grandparents on my mother side were converts to Christianity, and to the Calvinist conservative Dutch Reformed Church to boot. I went to church every Sunday until I left for college. I was enrolled in Sunday school. I played Fuzzy the Bear in the church musical one time, opposite Psalty the Psalm Book. Until I left for college I had no doubt about the existence of God, even if I did distrust the literal creation account of Genesis. To be more accurate, I never even had the preconception to doubt God's existence. It would have been like doubting whether or not I was breathing air.
Now, I am an atheistic Buddhist. There was no conversion moment for me, and yes, I admit it, I wanted to be a cool, badass Zen Master dispensing nuggets of koan-inspired wisdom to the unenlightened and benighted, showering them with my compassion and understanding of the Dharma. Hopefully I've outgrown this selfish desire in the past five years, or more realistically, have at least become more aware of it working inside of me.
So, what do I believe now in reference to God? I do not believe the universe was created, or if it did, that it's creator would have anything to do with a species of relatively furless apes orbiting an unremarkable star in a completely unremarkable region of a fairly ordinary galaxy. In any event, that argument does not really touch on the human reality of suffering and impermanence, and how to end or cope with such suffering and impermanence. As a matter of fact, the Buddha discouraged talk amongst his disciples regarding cosmology and speculation about God and not-God and even karma and rebirth, because they only distracted from the work of analyzing and seeing for oneself the reality of one's suffering and the effect of impermanence, and the more mundane effort to live correctly and treat fellow living beings decently. He would not be very happy with me right now, but I'm do not follow Buddhism to make him happy.
Needless to say, with all the above rejected, I've come to reject original sin, virgin birth, Muhammad receiving instruction from Gabriel, the Rapture, coming of the Madhi, the Thousand-year reign of the righteous, etc. I still read the Bible, but for wisdom, not revelation, because when all is said and done, a great deal of the Bible is still written by seekers trying to understand the great big cluster-fuck that's this universe. Just because the writer of the book of Job didn't know the value of Pi doesn't mean he didn't know the value of suffering and the universe's monumental indifference to it. Furthermore, I do not have 100% surety about anything I have just said, and probably will not until the day I die, because my knowledge, reasoning, understanding, memory is imperfect. I also take it for granted that a society that has allowed me to make such a 180 degree turn about my religious beliefs, and has allowed me to come what I currently can say with some confidence is the truth from something which is in all probability not true, is probably doing something right, and the freedom that has allowed my journey so far should be preserved for all those wish to use this road.
Too much to say, not enough time (until tuesday, when my appellate brief is done). So I will briefly sketch some ideas and responses and come back later to fill them in.
Responses:
@ Bookie: "I think that the law should be athiest, regardless of the truth of the matter." I would be careful with this one. I understand your impulse here and it is a good one for a liberal and free society, but I think it leads to some problems you don't want. First unless you only mean that the Law cannot require outward, substantial affirmations of a specific religion, then you are going to run into trouble as soon as you reach any law based on a policy decision (which is pretty much all of them). We have laws that murder is wrong. That's a moral judgment written into our laws. You and I come at it from a pragmatic or intuitive moral sense, others see it as a religious truth. But either way, we MUST have a law concerning the taking of lives, and that law will not tolerate a religion (or lack thereof) which condones killing. This is a moral/policy judgment and it is being enforced on everyone.
But to take a less universally excepting example, look at tax law. Our entire tax and entitlement system is based on many assumptions which force a certain moral judgment (and the policies flowing therefrom)on everyone by operation of law. If I were a hard core Calvanist and thought there were predestined "chosen", perhaps I wouldn't be so keen on resdistributing wealth to the damned. Anyway, the point here is that our laws all involve policy choices (mandatory vaccination, sex ed, rent control etc) and for many of the people who make and follow those laws, those priorities and policies are rooted in their religious beliefs.
Okay, see, this is why I don't post often. Every time I try and make a little point it ends up being a 20 minute paragraph. I'm running out of time, and Boudica and AsianSmiths' comments have provoked a lot of ideas and deserve a more thorough (and well edited) response. So I'll just give a brief account of my own beliefs.
I'm in Pascal's camp of officially agnostic, but aetheist for all practical concerns (except for the, dare I day, "religious" certainty in the NON existence of God that many self proclaimed atheists seem to have). I was raised going to chruch fairly regularly, but as my family moved abroad for a number of years "church" meant a protestant but generally non-denominational group of american expatriates who met in rented space rather than actual church buildings. My parents were more like Boudicca's in that they didn't ever push my brother or myself to be any more involved than we wanted to be, nor did they talk much about their own faith unless questioned on it. I had a sort of vaguely undefined fear that I had to "believe" the correct things or I was in "trouble" which faded to more of a mild guilt when I didn't go to church very often in high school. but I still made an effort to "believe" and pray when at church. Somewhere near the end of high school or the beginning of college, it occurred to me that this was all wrong and that I was going through the motions because I'd picked up the notion that it was expected (but oddly, I couldn't say by who, certainly not my parents). I decided that it was disrespectful to attend church services and go through the motions without sharing the actual belief of the others there, so I stopped entirely.
Anyway, long story short, it seems fairly obvious to me that the specific religious traditions from around the world were shaped by a mix of inherent human needs and the historical and cultural forces in play when and where they started. That doesn't mean that religion has no value however. Like any set of ideas it has the power to help order people's lives and makes (when it is not being corrupted) them govern themselves and their interactions with others civilly and humanely. As for faith, i don't call myself an atheist because I think it is arrogant to assume there is no possible future experience that could change my mind. That being said, the current sum of my experience leads me to conclude that I have no need of a belief in god and that such a belief is not a necessary part of whatever understanding of the world I am capable of.
So, SO much more to say, and NO time in the next week. Please keep this thread going so I can get back to it with the bulk of my thoughts when I have time.
This, my friends, is why we started Optimates in the first place! What a fantastic discussion we're having. At the risk of sullying it with begging, I urge all of you to get at least one other person to come to the site and get involved in this discussion.
Out of necessity I must keep this short, but I'd like to direct everyone to Sullivan's latest. It's quite lengthy, but it touches on all of these themes and then some.
AsianSmiths, I suspect that we are coming at this issue much the same way, but through different contingencies, as Sullivan would call them. I am absolutely certain that I am not absolutely certain. And I think that many honest and pious people would admit that these are their own views. But our relative uncertainty - that is, about the doctrines of a particular faith, as you say - need not be an absolute uncertainty.
To borrow from Boudicca's scientific discourse (and I'm delighted she put that on the table for discussion), while we may not observe in every instance that an object hits the ground in the exact same amount of time, we can agree that something is acting upon it to cause its fall. This is simply the nature of existence; there exists a force known to us as Gravity and it works in a certain fashion. As concerns our existence, this can't really be disputed, can it? At the very least, there can be no "absolute uncertainty" about the existence gravity that would not be immediately exposed as scientifically ludicrous.
Our mutual friend, Bono, once said that religion is what's left when God leaves the room. I think this is apt. We as humans aren't comfortable with the idea of atheism because it smacks of an absolute certainty about something we can't know. But we also sense an order to our universe and feel that, yes, God was once in this room.
Religion, then, so conceived, is nothing more than the mirror-image to science. The Greeks, as usual, were ahead of us: they called the twin poles mythos and logos. Religion and science both admit that there is an order to the universe. Science means to discover that order's functionings, to subject it to scrutiny, to classify it. But it presupposes an order of some kind, a consistency, if you will.
Religion's sphere is the more inscrutable. Given that there is existence, given that there is an order to it, how should we best align ourselves to that order? Here is where we must bring contingency and relative uncertainty back into the mix. Each person is different. So, then will each family grouping of persons, each clan grouping of families, and national grouping of clans. Humanity, from its outset, has divided into these different groups and so experienced reality differently. To say this is not true is to deny reality.
So each religion will be fundamentally contingent on its practioners. The worst sort of religion fails to recognize this contingency and declares that its contingent truths are applicable to everyone everywhere. They admit no possibility that other religions may have grasped some element of the truth as well. The best sort, on the other hand, realizes that there is variety amidst unity and unity amidst variety.
How is this different from the agnostic mindset? Well, it presupposes that religions can have an understanding of the Ultimate Reality, albeit in limited form. If one admits that at least one religion could be on to something, one is by definition not an agnostic.
This is where I must reiterate that we can no more exclude the idea of an Ultimate Existence from the political sphere than we can exclude the idea of lift from the study of aerodynamics. How one views the world and what should be done in it is inseparable from what one thinks of the nature of the world (and more) truly is. Just as we recognize that the fundamentalist is in error when he says that God and the Whole of the Law are in his hands, we should also look askance at the atheist who claims that there is no ultimate reality, and then - as Sam Harris does - imagines a world free of contingencies where we can all be the same sort of human. Such a world cannot exist.
I didn't keep that short at all, did I?
Thank you Tacitean, for your reply and alert that Andrew Sullivan has rejoined to Sam Harris. I was quite eagerly awaiting the next installment of the debate (the belief.net page where the debate is being hosted occupies one of my prized bookmark slots on my work browser, although the latest entry seems to have not yet been added). Unfortunately, I cannot yet make a full reply to your own comment, and though I would love to make some observations on Sullivan's post after further digesting his words, because of the sheer complexity of the topic debated by him and Harris, I will from here on comment solely to what has been posted on Optimates. Okay, one more observation then, before I quit: I've noticed that the quality of Sullivan's posts and his words have definitely gone up through-out the debate. Earlier in the debate (the 1/17/07 post), he stated "I have no fear of what science will tell us about the universe - since God is definitionally the Creator of such a universe; and the meaning of the universe cannot be in conflict with its Creator", for which Sam Harris quite correctly pointed out the tautological thinking at work in that statement. Regardless of the fact that I have no doubt neither party to this debate will be convinced by the other, the very fact that they are speaking more truly by having their words examined by the other speaks to the efficacy of cross-ecunmenical dialogue.
Tacitean:
I was in paragraph four of my "short" reply to you when I realized I've spent the past half hour writing and I've only said a third of what I needed to say. Since I most certainly do not have a snow day today (Goddamnit), I will save my full reply to you at a later time, perhaps tomorrow.
I would, however, like to point out an interesting observation about the religious background of the people who've posted. Of all of us, I'm actually the only "convert" here. Perhaps this explains my rather hardcore stance. I could see the same zeal in my grandfather who converted his entire family to Christianity. I cannot say if he harboured any doubts about the God he adopted, but my stance, pretty certain about being certain, is a lot closer to his stance than yours, which is absolute certainty in your absolute uncertainty. So, from this point on, I will be more aware of my convert's zeal, and I beg for more tolerance from everyone for my convert's zeal if and when I step over the line of polite debate, and your forgiveness, if it is warranted, as well.
Oops, you can access the belief.net thread by clicking here. Please ignore the bad link in the above comment (on a related note, how the hell do you edit a comment, if you can?)
Asiansmiths,
I think I may have mis-stated my case.
You describe my position as "...absolute certainty in your absolute uncertainty."
This is not what I meant to say, but I realize I was so opaque that anyone would think so.
I meant to say that one should not be absolutely certain in the particular doctrines and minutiae of a particular faith. How can one be truly, irrevocably certain that, say, the King James Bible or Qur'an is a perfectly inerrant document? No, independent thinking is needed here. And certainty in inerrant documents leads to trouble.
But as to whether there is a God and whether this God is the Ultimate Reality behind the universe, I am quite certain.
In my previous comment I warned against unlimited certainty in the particulars because I don't believe any faith has entirely encapsulated the idea of God. If that faith had, God would by definition be finite and therefore not God. I hope that clears it up.
For this discussion, I'll just throw in my favorite quote from Ba'ha'ula:
"Science without Faith is Materialism. Faith without Science is Superstition."
Firstly, apologies for my prolonged silence. It was Chinese New Years and with my father in town things got a little hectic.
Secondly, Sam Harris has replied to Sullivan on the belief.net page.
Thirdly:
Tacitean -
You state that "we...sense an order to our universe" and therefore "Religion, then, so conceived, is nothing more than the mirror-image to science.". I happen to reject that description of science and religion. In my opinion, their apparent similarity is shown to be illusory by the basic function of each: one discerns while one affirms. It is not science's goal to find "Order" in the universe. Science's goal is to discern how this universe works, on the basic presumptions that we can trust our senses to convey the truth of an event, and that if all things are equal, a cause will lead to the same effect if repeated. Religion is to affirm that our gut feeling that the there exists some independent human-like, rational or irrational agency responsible for the occurence of certain events. You are correct then to say that science "presupposes...a consistency, if you will", but whether or not there is an Order, with a capital O, is not something that science is concerned with. This I suspect is because what is meant by Order is so vague and nebulous that science can never pin it down and subject it to any meaningful scrutiny.
This, I think, leads to the basic disagreement between us. You feel that science cannot pin down this Order because it is not within science's power. I feel that science cannot pin down this Order because it simply doesn't exist. It's like trying to come to a consensus on the history of Atlantis or Lemuria. One can say it's impossible to arrive at such a consensus because we don't have enough historical evidence for a full picture, which is technically correct, but I'd say a simpler reason why we can't arrive at a consensus was because neither place existed and people are just making their own shit up.
Here, of course, we totally part ways, and in a very important way, show the polar opposites of our religious foundation. You are absolutely certain that this Order exists, that God exists, while I am pretty damn certain, but not completely 100% certain, that this Order does not exist. You have a problem with people paying too much attention to the details of the structure of religion, I have a problem with the entire building existing. Furthermore, while I yield that there is a very slim chance that I can be completely incorrect about all of this, you have no doubt whatsoever that I am just plain wrong.
Now, you fault Sam Harris for allegedly saying that he wants "...a world free of contingencies where we can all be the same sort of human.". Although I think he admirably replies to the misconception of his arguments by Sullivan which led to that conclusion, I will add that you, by your lack of doubt about the existence of Order in the universe, you already presuppose with impervious conviction that "God" or "Ultimate Reality" should be an integral part of the political sphere, and therefore free of the contingency where God doesn't exist, where we can be all the same sort of people who do not have doubts about the existence of an "Ultimate Reality", though we may disagree on the minutae of it amicably.
Asian Smiths,
You say the following about my argument:
...you already presuppose with impervious conviction that "God" or "Ultimate Reality" should be an integral part of the political sphere...
I think I may need a bit more from you on this before I answer honestly. I don't want to play Sullivan to your Harris and respond to a straw man or something you didn't actually say.
Are you saying that I have led you to believe I think the political sphere should be full of generic 'piety' and 'morality' and all that? Or that I have led you to believe I think the political sphere should be focused on specific religious goals? Either way, it's an excellent question and I want to do justice to it! So please do clarify!
Before I answer, let me also post this interesting comment by Clive James:
"This ugly fact [that is, of the efficacy of violence] should be kept in view when we catch ourselves nursing the comforting illusion that there is a natural order to which politics would revert if all contests of belief could be eliminated. There is such a natural order, but it is not benevolent."
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