Tuesday, March 08, 2005
Moderate religion ? Why not NO religion ?
This letter has been sent to Time and Newsweek
Sirs,
Having lived 12 years in Saudi Arabia, I appreciate your repeated efforts to explain the various currents of Islam, ‘moderates’ against ‘fundamentalists’. But why stop mid-way? Why don’t you acknowledge that any religion, even moderate, is still a backward component for any 21st century humanism? Is it self censorship? I am sure that American reporters know better. You live in the country famous for free-speech, and it is an American, Sam Harris, a philosopher from Stanford, who just wrote and published a masterpiece [ The End of Faith : Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. By Sam Harris. Norton.] about the disastrous consequence of ‘moderate thinking’ in topics of faiths and religions. Most educated free-thinkers know the difference between philosophies (e.g.: the original messages of Socrates, Lao Tseu, Buddha, Jesus, and so many others) and religions (the esoteric societies organized around such philosophies, afterwards, by power hungry clerics or politicians). These educated people, teachers, scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, businessmen, all know that Man created ‘god’ (because our brains can’t encompass all the complexities of life, so we tend to call ‘god’ whatever overpass our intellect).
As a Belgian citizen, brought up in a Christian cultural background, I can witness that the vast majority of the most sincere and convinced Belgian Christians are, in fact, complete heretics: they do not accept the Pope’s conservative positions and they do act according with their own conscience and not with the church rules. But, being ‘moderates’ they do not claim it loud. Most of them think that they ‘respect’ the less educated people’s faith, next door and abroad.
Sam Harris shows that these religious moderates are constantly forced to re-interpret what their religion is telling them is just "The Truth", because they need to reconcile the faith they received from their upbringing with the reason they’ve developed through instruction and experience. He is right. And it is exactly the same as the conflict, in Islam, between the fundamentalists who preach to obey the Koran literally, and the intellectuals who, since the age of the prophet, devote all their efforts to "Ishtihad" , the exegesis or interpretation of the texts, at the light of society evolution and progresses.
Sam Harris argues that, although usually moderation means tolerance, in this case tolerance does encourage extremism. He writes: “By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”
It is now time that free-thinkers, also, do their ‘coming out’. In this century, to respect the faith of the simple people is not charity anymore, it is just crass condescendence and intellectual dishonesty. And it brings the world backwards.
In politics, not the least example, G.W. Bush and Bin Laden are sharing the same mistake. The religious basis of their thinking is trapping them inside the over-simplification of Manicheans: it is all black or white, good or evil. This way of seeing the world is almost illiteracy. It is in pure contradiction with all what humankind has learned about life: all is flowing movement, endless exchanges and transformation of balances, all is relative to our point of observation and each of our perceptions is always subjective.
In this age of 'coming out' by all kind of minorities, I am calling rationalist free-thinkers, journalists, scientists and other educated people: please come out of the closet, let us not encourage our children to grow in a backward tradition which despises the efforts of our best scientists and mimics the obscurantism of the medarsas, the Islamic schools where the untouchable text of the Koran is the only available basis for learning everything from mathematics to grammar and history.
Let us not promote fundamentalism by practising a tepid tolerance which is understood by others as mere weakness or insincerity.
Sirs,
Having lived 12 years in Saudi Arabia, I appreciate your repeated efforts to explain the various currents of Islam, ‘moderates’ against ‘fundamentalists’. But why stop mid-way? Why don’t you acknowledge that any religion, even moderate, is still a backward component for any 21st century humanism? Is it self censorship? I am sure that American reporters know better. You live in the country famous for free-speech, and it is an American, Sam Harris, a philosopher from Stanford, who just wrote and published a masterpiece [ The End of Faith : Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. By Sam Harris. Norton.] about the disastrous consequence of ‘moderate thinking’ in topics of faiths and religions. Most educated free-thinkers know the difference between philosophies (e.g.: the original messages of Socrates, Lao Tseu, Buddha, Jesus, and so many others) and religions (the esoteric societies organized around such philosophies, afterwards, by power hungry clerics or politicians). These educated people, teachers, scientists, philosophers, theologians, artists, businessmen, all know that Man created ‘god’ (because our brains can’t encompass all the complexities of life, so we tend to call ‘god’ whatever overpass our intellect).
As a Belgian citizen, brought up in a Christian cultural background, I can witness that the vast majority of the most sincere and convinced Belgian Christians are, in fact, complete heretics: they do not accept the Pope’s conservative positions and they do act according with their own conscience and not with the church rules. But, being ‘moderates’ they do not claim it loud. Most of them think that they ‘respect’ the less educated people’s faith, next door and abroad.
Sam Harris shows that these religious moderates are constantly forced to re-interpret what their religion is telling them is just "The Truth", because they need to reconcile the faith they received from their upbringing with the reason they’ve developed through instruction and experience. He is right. And it is exactly the same as the conflict, in Islam, between the fundamentalists who preach to obey the Koran literally, and the intellectuals who, since the age of the prophet, devote all their efforts to "Ishtihad" , the exegesis or interpretation of the texts, at the light of society evolution and progresses.
Sam Harris argues that, although usually moderation means tolerance, in this case tolerance does encourage extremism. He writes: “By failing to live by the letter of the texts, while tolerating the irrationality of those who do, religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.”
It is now time that free-thinkers, also, do their ‘coming out’. In this century, to respect the faith of the simple people is not charity anymore, it is just crass condescendence and intellectual dishonesty. And it brings the world backwards.
In politics, not the least example, G.W. Bush and Bin Laden are sharing the same mistake. The religious basis of their thinking is trapping them inside the over-simplification of Manicheans: it is all black or white, good or evil. This way of seeing the world is almost illiteracy. It is in pure contradiction with all what humankind has learned about life: all is flowing movement, endless exchanges and transformation of balances, all is relative to our point of observation and each of our perceptions is always subjective.
In this age of 'coming out' by all kind of minorities, I am calling rationalist free-thinkers, journalists, scientists and other educated people: please come out of the closet, let us not encourage our children to grow in a backward tradition which despises the efforts of our best scientists and mimics the obscurantism of the medarsas, the Islamic schools where the untouchable text of the Koran is the only available basis for learning everything from mathematics to grammar and history.
Let us not promote fundamentalism by practising a tepid tolerance which is understood by others as mere weakness or insincerity.
