How can religious moderates be said to enable hateful fundamentalists?

[LTX]

68. I agree for the most part with your statement that:

"Because of human nature and its offspring mores in current US society, religion has a protected, elevated status as a motivating factor in behavior, and is given a latitude far beyond any other influence."

I can't agree with the "far beyond" part, but I do agree that there is an elevated status granted to religious belief. I do not, however, agree with your statement that:

"Because liberal believers dare not or cannot challenge this, they indeed have some responsibility for the nefarious actions it permits in their less liberal co-believers."

This is just weird. You're suggesting here that because liberals hold religious beliefs, they "dare not or cannot" challenge nefarious uses of religious beliefs. Why not? And if that is true, then what on earth are all those liberal believers actually doing when they in fact (and in large numbers) challenge nefarious uses of religious beliefs? Why are you pretending that what we are doing is not, in fact, being done?

Liberal believers have a long tradition of opposing religious intrusion on secular prerogatives. There is a very vocal (and rather old) tradition of religious organizations supporting separation of church and state, and the fairly recent phenomenon of the "Christian right" in the US, with its radical intrusions on the secular province, is both decidedly minority in status and not at all reflective of the positions and beliefs of liberal believers or moderate theists. See, e.g.,

http://www.au.org/ (a consortium of religious and secular activists for separation of church and state)

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/surprising-support-for-separating-church-from-state

The suggestion here that liberal believers or moderate theists "enable" nefarious actions by other religious organizations is not at all dissimilar to a suggestion that liberal scientists "enable" nefarious actions by corporate scientists. After all, those liberal scientists share the same conceptual core (scientific methodology) as the corporate scientists, so without those pesky liberal scientists and their enabling practices, we wouldn't have the development and active corporate defense of (add in favorite target, e.g., fracking, oil refining, pesticides, herbicides, genetically altered crops, weapons, etc.). The obvious rebuttal to this is that liberal scientists object, often actively, to perceived misuses of science. But you suggest that that very same rebuttal is unavailable to liberal religious believers. Why?

Furthermore, your statement that "Human nature per se has no such status and no such willing defenders among the liberals who understand it" is also rather odd. It assumes (1) that liberal religious believers are in fact somehow defending nefarious actions by religious conservatives, and (2) that (I guess) psychology, sociology, social and human services, and rehabilitative studies and work just don't exist in the secular community, or if they do, they are so insignificant that there aren't even any defenders of these secular studies and services among liberals. Huh?


Frankly, the premise of this entire thread has taken a turn for the flat-out fanciful.