Norm has a post on religion and Hitchens and the vexed subject of ‘contempt for religious believers and what they believe’ that I have – however reluctantly! however ashen with misgivings, trembling with nerves, tottering with distress, quaking with anxiety, keening with regret – disagreed with him about in the past.

It might be suggested on Hitch’s behalf that, whether it meets such needs or not, because religious belief isn’t substantively true, all it merits is contempt from atheists and humanists; and its adherents, likewise, only deserve disrespect in one or another mode. But that religion isn’t true cannot be a sufficient reason for this; it is quite standard in democratic and pluralist societies to disagree in a tolerant

All right, we’ve made this separation; we’ve put the veracity or epistemic question on one side of the line, and the consequentialist question on the other. We’ve further said that the epistemic question comes first: that is, that for the sake of clarity, it ought to. So then what happens on the other side of the line? How does that discussion go?

One way it goes is to say that even if there is no good reason to think religion is true (unless religion is defined so thinly that it bears no resemblance to what most people mean by the word), it still doesn’t do to say so, because saying so would (to put it somewhat hyperbolically, as people occasionally … Read the rest

There are many ways one can divide up religion and arguments for religion in order to discuss or analyze them, many ways one can draw a line down the middle of the room and put all the Xs on one side and all the Ys on the other. (And then draw another line and sort the Ys, and then draw another line and sort their progeny, and so on, until everyone goes mad and the game is over.) One way is to separate questions about veracity from questions that leave veracity aside. To separate the epistemic issues from the moral and aesthetic and emotional, one might say. So on this side of the tavern we argue about whether there is … Read the rest