Transparency Is Messy

Andrew sullivan has been posting e-mails in response to his blog-a-logue with Sam Harris about faith. None of which have been in his favor lately.

The best:

[your argument boils down to] let’s pass out the security blankets, pick the one you want, and we don’t care what’s really true.

Example: God created man out of dirt? The female gender of the human species was created from a bone? Please. You know the list of these types of Christian idiocies is long indeed. Christians must take responsibility for what their holy book specifically claims is the truth. You seem quite happy to pick and choose what you want to take literally (the stuff that specifically makes you feel good), and what you want to believe is just metaphor (all the ridiculous stuff that no right-thinking person could ever believe). How can the Christian religion be said to embody any kind of integrity when all of their followers indulge in these personal pick-and-choose shenanigans?

Also, this nebulous 'God is Love' argument is old and well-worn, and doesn't mesh with the specific claims made by Christianity. I don’t disagree with the statement, but I am saying that Christianity is claiming much more than just that, a lot more.

I think it is time to end this debate between you and Sam. It has ended up where it was always been headed: in the inability of the believer to rationally answer even very basic and glaringly obvious rational questions about their faith, and instead, to descriptively wallow in their personal love affair with their particular belief system despite all the irrationality, obscenity, and contradictory evidence offered by their magic holy book.

A bit more civility from this reader:

I do believe that your ultimate defense of your faith, which was to say I believe it because I have never doubted it, and since I did not gain it by rational debate, I cannot lose it by rational debate, completely eliminates any credible ability to criticize the beliefs of dangerous fundamentalists on rational grounds. That little formulation that you use to extend a protective bubble around your belief in God can, in principle be extended around any set of beliefs that go with belief in God.

Unlike Harris, I do not believe this makes you in any way responsible or complicit with dangerous fundamentalism, but I do think it is a fair point for Sam to make that the urge to defend a belief in that way really is a part of the problem.