I've been frustrated for years by 'pick-and-choose' religious folks, as it tends to offend my sense of intellectual honesty and seems little more than a rationalization for perpetuating archaic and outdated modes of thinking. That being said, honestly, those 'moderates' who do allow the doctrines in their infallible magic books written by omniscient absent Sky Daddies to be tempered and edited by their own morality - influenced by society at large and the evolving understanding of the world and culture - are actually a far better option than the fundamentalists who actually buy into the crazy. Or as Harris notes, "It’s not an especially honest endeavor, but it’s not all that harmful either." It still bugs me when people I know, whose intellect I respect for, have this huge blind spot for silly fairy tales.
Sam Harris: The ‘Salon’ Interview: Sam Harris: "...many people believe preposterous and divisive doctrines that come straight out of scripture—and these beliefs affect their behavior. Many people believe that changing one’s religion is wrong, even a killing offense. Many believe that Jesus will be returning to Earth to raise the dead and that he disapproves of masturbation in the meantime. Many believe in past and future lives and that you can be reborn in this world as an animal. These are not ideas that people are bringing to their holy books...
It’s true that people also take their values to their texts and purport to discover what they already value there. This is especially true of moderates and those who are in the process of losing their faith. When you talk to moderate Christians or Jews and ask them how they read the bible, you find yourself in the presence of people who are using their values to interpret (and effectively edit) their scripture. They believe in human rights and secular tolerance, and they’re making a heroic effort to ignore the barbarism in the Old Testament and to find the pearls of wisdom that can be salvaged. They ignore all the crazy prophecies about the end of the world. Clearly, their core values have come from a larger cultural conversation, and they are doing their best to find support for those values in their faith tradition. It’s not an especially honest endeavor, but it’s not all that harmful either...
When we’re talking about fundamentalists, however—those who read their religious books more or less literally—then we really are talking about pulling values and behavioral commitments directly out of the text. Here you find people thinking and saying and doing things that they would never endorse otherwise. It’s not an accident that millions of Muslims shun alcohol and bacon. It’s not an accident that they make pilgrimage to Mecca. It’s not an accident that they pray five times a day. And it’s not an accident that many of them despise Jews as the spawn of apes and pigs, treat women as second-class citizens, and answer the call to jihad. These beliefs and practices come right out of scripture...
...we shouldn’t lie about the zero-sum contest between reason and faith—and, therefore, between science and religion. Religious people do make claims about the nature of reality on the basis of their faith, and these claims conflict with both the methods and conclusions of science. If you believe that the historical Jesus was born of a virgin, resurrected, and will be coming back to Earth, you are a Christian. Indeed, it would be controversial to call oneself a Christian without believing these things. But each of these claims rests on terrible evidence and stands in contradiction to most of what we now know about the world. The odds are overwhelming that Jesus was neither born of a virgin, nor resurrected. And he didn’t ascend to some place in the sky where he could abide for thousands of years, in a form that leaves him free to use his powers of telepathy to eavesdrop upon the private thoughts of billions of people. Nor will he return from on high like a superhero, flying without the aid of technology, or magically raise his followers to meet him in the stratosphere for the Rapture. All of these expectations—which most Christians harbor in one form or another—entail claims about biology, history, physics, and the nature of the human mind, that defy the centuries of intellectual progress we’ve made on these topics. To believe any of these things is to ignore one’s commonsense and a dozen specific sciences at the same moment...
I regularly hear from people who have lived their entire lives under the shadow of a paralyzing fear of hell that was drummed into them by their parents. They were told that they would burn for eternity in fire if they doubted any of the preposterous claims that spilled into their lives each Sunday from the pulpit. And they accepted this, of course, because they had no choice at all in the matter. They were children. I have two daughters who are young enough to believe almost anything I tell them. If I told them that everyone they care for in this world is liable to be burned for eternity if we don’t do X, Y, and Z, there’s no question that they would believe me. And the growing struggle to maintain this faith in the face of every rational challenge would become a source of tremendous anxiety for them. I genuinely feel for people who are struggling against this form of indoctrination."
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