Sam Harris — “The problem I have with religion…

Sam Harris — “The problem I have with religion from every point on the spectrum from moderate to extreme is that it stands as a permanent denial of the possibility of developing a truly rational modern open ended discussion about the nature of our subjectivity, about he possibility of ethics and spirituality truly in conformity with our rationality as it exists now. Every religious person committed to still being a Christian of a Jew or a Buddhist is essentially giving tacit endorsement to the religious divisions in our world and essentially saying that we need some measure of mythology, we need some measure of fairy tail, we need to pretend on some occasions that we know things we do do not know, and its simply untrue.”

To the best of my recollection I have never heard Sam Harris recite this passage of text before but it sounds like he is talking about his his 2005 book: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

From the book:—”While moderation in religion may seem a reasonable position to stake out, in light of all that we have (and have not) learned about the universe, it offers no bulwark against religious extremism and religious violence. From the perspective of those seeking to live by the letter of the texts, the religious moderate is nothing more than a failed fundamentalist. He is, in all likelihood, going to wind up in hell with the rest of the unbelievers. The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don’t like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance—and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on par with fundamentalism. The texts themselves are unequivocal: they are perfect in all their parts. By their light, religious moderation appears to be nothing more than an unwillingness to fully submit to God’s law. 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. Unless the core dogmas of faith are called into question—i.e., that we know there is a God, and that we know what he wants from us—religious moderation will do nothing to lead us out of the wilderness.”—