Month: April 2007

Blogging and Writing

For some, it’s win-win:

"To be perfectly honest, when I started this blog I was a shaky little literary neophyte, and over the course of almost three years, blogging has taught me more about good books and good writing than I (honestly) think I could have gotten in most colleges. Moreover, it’s given me a level of self-respect for my writing that I couldn’t have bought anywhere."

Fundamentalism and Freedom

A reader writes:

I read almost all of your debate with Sam. As a Christian turned atheist I have to say that I resonated mostly with Sam’s arguments. It was a very interesting discussion, but I think that in the end you lent support to one of his main assertions.

His case is that moderates lend comfort to fundamentalists by not challenging "silly beliefs". In some ways I think this lending comfort argument is a bit silly, since I don’t believe for a second that religious moderates can talk fundamentalists out of whatever beliefs are undesirable, so in one sense it does not matter what you believe or how you defend it.

However, 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.

As a religious experience, I respect fundamentalism, as I hope is clear from my book. This may frustrate or enrage many secularists, but the point about spiritual humility is precisely not to dismiss others' sincere religious journeys. I am therefore deeply resistant to Sam's project to remove religious discourse from what he regards as rational debate, because he may be removing the truth from rational debate. I can no more dismiss the fundamentalist's faith than I can dismiss Sam's reason, with respect to the ultimate truth about the universe.

But it's not as if we don't already have a solution to the political and cultural problem Sam is rightly concerned with. The solution to the problem of fundamentalism as a political issue is classical liberalism. No one will succeed or should succeed in banishing faith from the face of the earth. What we can do is construct political orders that keep the totalist claims of fundamentalism at bay, bracketing them in the private sphere. We can and have built and maintained polities that strongly defend religious liberty while just as strongly keeping the government religiously-neutral, which is another word for secular. In my view, Sam's response to a real political threat is both politically utopian and cosmically too cramped. Spinoza and Hobbes and Locke and the founders saw a better way. The American constitution is the solution, which is why the battle to insulate it from the fundamentalist forces unleashed by Bush and company is so vital. And we need believers to defend secularism, if it is to survive.

The Bloggers’ Code of Conduct

Here’s a very helpful fisking of the whole concept. Couldn’t agree more. Some have argued that I’m a hypocrite on this because I don’t have a comments section for each post. The reason in the past is that I didn’t have time to moderate it and I was afraid that it would fill up soon with some of the more charming material I receive by emails. Increasingly, though, I realize that not monitoring a comments section at all may be the only way not to censor it. Which has made me consider adding one. The major drawback from my point of view is that readers may be less inclined to write me their own emails, which are often the highlight of a day’s blogging. In a sense, by airing a few emails and selecting them personally and responding to them at times I already have a very tightly managed high-quality comments section. But, strictly speaking, you could do that as well as adding comments for those who see fit. I’m of two minds on this. But if I do decide to add comments, I don’t think heavy monitoring is in the cards.

Progressives, Blacks and Gays

Jeff Goldstein posits an inconvenient truth:

Progressives are loath to risk losing an important constituency by overplaying the gay rights angle within the black community. So while they give plenty of lip service to support of gay marriage, for instance, they consistently vote to defend ‘traditional’ marriage.

I disagree with Jeff that the right to a civil marriage license is not a civil rights issue. But I agree with him about the very awkward stance many mainstream Democrats have on the issue of marriage rights. It’s nothing new. Progressives have long failed to confront the deadly homophobia in many black churches, for example, churches that have enabled the deaths of tens of thousands by their bigotry and silence on black homosexuality, HIV and AIDS. Even ACT-UP was too scared to tackle the bigotry of many African-American pastors – and the closet in the black church that sustains it. In general, gay groups like HRC go along with Democratic inconsistency as well. They are part of a Democratic coalition that requires acquiescence in some black anti-gay bigotry to endure. If they have to put gay issues on a back-burner to sit at the table, that’s fine by them. And it’s fine by the Democrats, as long as the gays keep sending in the money. Which they do.