i have only recently come across your blog and i look forward to reading your past entries with regard to Sufism (and Barcelona . your most recent entry happens to touch on things i have been wondering myself and more specifically with regard to a book i am currently reading. i am not a masochist but now and then i do try to read up on what people who think differently from me are saying. hence, i recently picked up “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” by Sam Harris and am still trudging through it. its from the perspective of an atheist who makes plain his vitriolic disdain for religious faith and severely attacks Islam in particular. have you come across this book, and if so, what do you make of it? please do not mind this question from an absolute stranger. i just thought this might be a book that may have passed under your radar. thanks
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quite right, that seems to be a modus operandi for those who wish to take this method.  Truth and falsehood are quite easy to find, but, as you say, the bigger picture? Why bother?

It is a shame really, we have all these benfits of each sphere, western sciences, eastern and occidental spirituality, ect, and instead of trying to incorporate the the good and useable aspects of each one, we instead throw the baby out with the bath water.

Perhaps it is the fruits of not wanting to acknwledge the limits of human knowledge.

selam alaykum

It seems to me that there is a further attribute common to fundamentalist thinking: completely ignoring metaphysics of any kind.

The fundamentalist Christian view is essentially the same as the atheist’s worldview, except there are “bonus levels” (heaven and hell), which are conceived of as actual places. I’ve sat in sermons where the preacher claimed that we would all be literally BODILY resurrected, which seems to be a most unbiblical position to me, just read Paul. A “miracle” to them is just a break (caused by God) in the continuity of ordinary causal relations.

Anything “metaphysical” is simply imagined to be some level of physicality that hasn’t been reached at this point, for both the materialist scientist and the fundamentalist Christian. “Spirit” is just an abstract word to someone like this, with no immediate relevance.

Perhaps it is the fruits of not wanting to acknwledge the limits of human knowledge.
I think that this is very astute.

Holy moly - good exegesis for my own internal unease with Dawkins criticisms of the ID movement.  Part of the problem is that the fundamentalist argument forces everyone into a corner.  Fundamentalism creates a closed system from which to argue.  Anyone who wants to engage must enter the semi-permeable membrane (impermeable to anyone with views inconsistent with the closed system) and play by its rules.  Dawkin’s failure, and by extension the rest of the Brights like Dennett, is to create a parallel closed system.  It allows modern thinkers some comfort to express secular ideals without “persecution”, but backfires in its elimination of the very horizon line which has defined science for the modern period.  The certainty that Dawkins and others overassert is a retreat from the curiosity and flexible thinking that drove discovery in the last 3 millennia.

Excellent post.  Fundamentalism (of any stripe) is a great simplifier.  Let Dawkins be sure of himself.  Let him rail on and on against “superstition” until he begins to sound as shrill as a rural Bible thumper in America. 

I believe Eliade once wrote that modern man accepts the decrees of scientists (and other “official secular sources” like Dawkins) with the same lack of critical judgment and discernment as the poorest ancient man did the decrees of his village shaman.  Things never change.  Belief acts in mankind as it always has…

Keep up the good work!

If one visits certain newsgroups that deal with politics or news (any such newsgroup in fact) one will soon hear the view expressed (more or less in these terms) that Islam equals terrorism.

Have you ever tried to debate the issue at the FFI forums?
Faith Freedom International: Faith Freedom.org

The people there are pretty well informed and not all are atheists.

Does anyone know of a good (or better) forum where these issues are debated? Maybe we all fall into dogmatic traps because every forum I’ve tried has been either intransigently pro-Islam or intransigently con-Islam. Where is the middle ground?

In the light of the recent controversy on cartoons published in Danish papers about Islam do you think that “Freedom of Speech” is itself a false god.