Today, the Pope’s visit to Ground Zero featured an “interfaith” prayer service with so many religious leaders that it bordered on satire. They all assured us that religiously inspired violence did not represent “true” religion. It was, at base, the usually assurance we get from moderates whenever some mob of religiously inspired psychopaths like Islamic State and Boko Haram commit their latest staggering barbarity. It was extravagantly staged, but it amounted to the same thing: yet another claim that fundamentalists do not represent the “true” Islam or whatever faith. The problem is that such assurances are meaningless.
If they had meaning at all, they would be wrong. Fundamentalists and extremists, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, have the backing of their defining texts. That might be why moderates are so often so damningly quiet. Why call attention to the fact that your canon promotes, celebrates, and demands violence, ignorance, hate, slavery, armed aggression, rape, murder, infanticide, and misogyny? Still, those texts carry no weight outside the cocoon of their respective religion, so, in the end, the plaintiff claim of a “true” religion is meaningless.
Religion has no objective reality. Once you decide that worshiping some supernatural, creator being for which there is no evidence is a reasonable thing, you give up your right to criticize someone for deciding to worship a different supernatural, creator being for which there is no evidence. Once you reject reason and logic, all is absurdity. Moderates have no more credibility than do fundamentalists and no greater claim to truth. They do, though, give a specious credibility to absurdity, and that allows fundamentalist to take it to their inhuman extreme. It’s time to stop pretending that religion itself is not the fault. The worshiping of absurdities endangers everyone.