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In reply to the discussion: How the liberal left loses the argument. Ceding criticism of Islam to the Right. [View all]cali
(114,904 posts)and it excuses religion of virtually everything. She cherry picks, she skirts questions and she makes some downright untrue and rather bizarre claims. Here's a rather good comment:
Sam Harris is a fascist and Richard Dawkins is a sexist. As personalities, I'm not a huge fan of either man. But Armstrong is an apologist for religion, despite her discomfort with that term, and she routinely ignores or downplays the dangers of faith. She states that it is best to hold rational beliefs wherever possible, then immediately backtracks on the basis that we can't ever be perfectly rational in order to give religious claims a free pass.
I can sympathize with her desire to avoid demonizing or overly disparaging religious believers, but she goes too far the other way and ignores the real harm caused by belief in superstition. Religion may not be the cause of all the world's problems, but it is a big one. As a psychological coping mechanism, faith fails to properly teach people to address problems in their lives with actual solutions, and so leaves people in a state of desperate anxiety. This perpetual fear causes people to cling neurotically to the comfort of ritual and the certainty of religious dogma.
Obviously, this type of religious dependance cannot be "purged" from society, but it is the kind of thing which can be reduced through education and economic assistance. People turn to religion when they have nowhere else to go. If we want to live in a healthy, rational society, then it behooves us all to elimin