Rethinking Religion and Politics - Sam Harris on NPR

NPR's Talk of the Nation aired a program called Rethinking Religion and Politics a couple days ago (October 3, 2006) with two pastors, one liberal and the other conservative, both responding to Sam Harris' new book "Letter to a Christian Nation". You can hear the program by clicking on the link above. From there you can also surf your way to interviews with Harris and other info.

Overall I found Harris' arguments to be strawmen which in their inflammatory nature distracted from the few good points he was making. But rather than concentrate on that and get sidetracked into a "my belief is better than yours" debate, I thought I would address the one good point that Sam Harris was (rather badly) making: Since religion is in world and national politics so corrosive, we should keep it out of public discourse altogether.

The program on NPR ended up focusing on whether this means that people should leave their values and morals out of public life, which is of course absurd as the two pastors argued. I would like to raise a more subtle proposition: In a public discourse where there is diversity and disagreement an argument cannot be based on unquestioned authority (like "the Bible says so") because we do not all agree on those authority sources. Instead each proposition needs to be argued on its own merit in a public setting. This would mean not that religion does not play a role in public life, but that it is communicated in a way that is accessible to all people.

What I think Harris does not comprehend is that even Atheists have a set of values and assumptions of what is valued that they bring with them. For instance they may value human rights, or value human freedom. These are core values that they share with most of the Western world. Even if we would strip away the religious garb of all faiths and simply converse in the universal language of these values, we would still find that there are fundamental disagreements about these core values. For example the West would focus on human rights and freedom, while a fundamentalist Moslem may argue that the core value is neither of these but instead purity which is why women should be covered and thieves' hands chopped off. On a core level what we think is "self evident" about what is most important in life is in fundamental disagreement.

Removing the religious garb from this and presenting it in a "secularized" language may enable a more transparent discussion, but it will not remove the fundamental and profound disagreement that leads to wars and violence. So while I agree that it is valuable to learn to "translate" our values and beliefs into a language that is accessible to people who come from a different background, I think the "imagine there's no Heaven" approach to solving the world's problems is terribly naive because it fails to see the values of who we are and what life is about that lie at the heart of faith and instead focuses only on the superficial trappings. Abolishing religion would not solve anything because we would still have differing core beliefs and values about who we are, and about what matters in life that are at the root of all faiths (including Atheism and Secular beliefs systems). A world where no one has any values at all, would be peaceful, but it would also mean that everyone was lobotomized.