#religious moderates

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"They never admit how they have come to stop taking it literally. You have all these people criticizing us for our crass literalism – we’re as fundamentalist as the fundamentalists – and yet these moderates don’t admit how they have come to be moderate. What does moderation consist of? It consists of having lost faith in all of these propositions, or half of them, because of the hammer blows of science and secular politics.

Religion has lost its mandate on a thousand questions, and moderates argue that this is somehow a triumph of faith – that faith is somehow self-enlightening. Whereas it’s been enlightened from the outside; it’s been intruded upon by science."

-- Sam Harris, "The Four Horsemen"

Moderate religionists love to forget that it's only thanks to a decades and a few centuries of erosion of the scripture that they don't live in a world that for hundreds and even thousands of years held these assertions to be literally true.

Your god didn't tame your religion. Your religion didn't even tame itself. Believers tamed their own religion, but only once it became impossible for them deny what we figured out to be true.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Most religious folk will swear up and down that their religion, their Holy Book, does not condone atrocity, that any savagery committed is by crazies and hard-liners who follow the faith literally.

Tell me this: If your religion is that damned mean and nasty down deep inside, and you're having to make excuses for it, shouldn't that tell you something?”

Moderates do not represent the nature of a religion’s or ideology’s doctrine because, by definition, they occupy a middle ground between that doctrine and secular values and ethics. They view the doctrine through modern secular values (e.g. “it’s a metaphor!”), and vice versa (”morality comes from god”).

Next time you’re told that the “true” meaning of the doctrine is something nice and fluffy, say something like “oh, so you’re a fundamentalist?” And then watch them say “of course not!” and fail to grasp the problem.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”

-- Sam Harris

Believers think their gods are nicer, more loving, more moral than they’re depicted in their own doctrine. Because they haven’t read it.

When you tell them, they think you’re lying.

When you show them, they insist it’s taken out of context - despite not knowing it was there at all a moment prior - or that it’s a “metaphor” - despite not being able to explain what it’s a metaphor for. Not to mention, other characters thinking it’s literally true (e.g. Jesus thinks Noah’s Ark and the Garden of Eden literally happened, and the bible gives genealogies from Adam to Jesus).

Generation after generation, the gods look less and less like their canonical incarnations, because believers make them look more like themselves.

“Most humans are more moral than the scriptures they hold sacred.”

-- Alishba Zarmeen

... or have never read.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

“Of course, I know there are moderate Muslims.

The problem is that there is no theological basis for their views.”

-- Sam Harris

You can be a good person or you can be a good Muslim. You can’t be both.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Instructions from their metaphorical god.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

You’re already editing, correcting and covering for your god. Why not just give him an F- and expel him?

[thegodlessage]

[skepticalavenger]

Although this may be controversial, I don't think I can NOT share this.  I also however feel I must share one of the comments in the comments section:

This is obviously a conference about Islam. Therefore, the attendees cannot be construed as representative of Muslims. They're a selected subset of Muslims who are fervent enough to go and attend a special conference beyond their regular religious practice. So of course... among such an audience, the speaker could be certain in advance to find a disproportionate amount of islamofascists and achieve unanimity. <nickst0ne>

Nevertheless, I still find this profoundly disturbing.