A Faith Debate: Andrew Sullivan vs. Sam Harris

I'm still in the midst of reading the whole thing, but I wanted to get the link up before I forgot to do so.

Sullivan is one of my favourite writers, but his Catholicism (even more than his initial support for the war in Iraq) has always been irksome to me. From what I see here he gets thrashed pretty hard by the atheist Harris.

Oh. So. Good.

Here is Sam's salvo against 'moderate religion';

"But there are several problems with such a defense of moderate religion. First, many moderates assume that religious “extremism” is rare and therefore not all that consequential. Happily, you are not in this camp, but I would venture that you are in a minority among religious moderates. As you and I both know, religious extremism is not rare, and it is hugely consequential. Forty-four percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead sometime in the next fifty years. This idea is extreme in almost every sense—extremely silly, extremely dangerous, extremely worthy of denigration—but it is not extreme in the sense of being rare."