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From time to time, I find intense gratification when people whose opinions I respect overlap with mine. An author or musician or public figure who I admire will come out and say something that I agree with completely. Obviously it’s no accident that the people I admire will largely share my opinions on things, but when someone like John Legend makes a salient point about race, or Roger Ebert goes outside of film critique to say something I’m down with, I get a little tingle in my lobes.

So you can understand how depressing it is to see the nearly-universal negative reaction to CFI’s statement about the “Ground Zero Mosque” – truly there has never been a dumber name. I don’t need to re-hash either the content of the complaint, nor summarize the reactions to it. You can just scroll down the page and see it all over this site (or just click here). I’m fine with the people here at Canadian Atheist disagreeing with me – I don’t think we’ve agreed on anything yet. It seems that this site is structured primarily as an exercise in opposing viewpoints; a frustrating but I suppose ultimately useful exercise.

But Orac? Et tu, man?

I never thought I’d ever be aiming a heapin’ helpin’ of not-so-Respectful Insolence at the Center For Inquiry (CFI), one of the premier secularist organizations in existence, but yesterday I found in my e-mail a mind-meltingly moronic press release that came from an organization that should never, ever produce anything this mind-meltingly moronic.

I read Orac’s blog, Respectful Insolence daily. As someone who works in the field of health care, I find the discussion of alt-med woo and critique of medical studies interesting. Nothing puts a smirk on my face quite like reading another well-crafted takedown of this anti-vax loon or that homeopathic quack. That’s why this piece was such a let-down to me. For those of you who don’t want to read it, I’ll summarize it for you briefly:

Waah, waah, not all religious people are evil. Waah, waah, CFI is mean to the faithful. Waah, waah, you can’t condemn religion but stand up for religious freedom.

It’s a poorly-kept secret that the man behind Orac is a practicing Catholic Crommunist will present any old rumour he reads on the internet as though it were fact (sorry Orac :P). I will save any criticism of the level of compartmentalization and mental gymnastics it requires to be a well-published skeptic but also be a religious believer. There are authors on this site who fit that description who will probably do a more judicious (and polite) job of describing the intricacies of cognitive dissonance than I can. Most of the time, Orac doesn’t talk about religion, and his beliefs are not related in any way to his blogging. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt here and assume that he’s not just griping because someone took a swat at him as a Christian [or not, as the case may be].

But he is parroting a largely vacuous argument that I see cropping up all over the place: that CFI’s statement equates religious people with terrorists. I read the statement after reading the reaction to it. I read it again, many times, looking for the sentence (or even the single word) that states that religious people are evil, or terrorists, or that adherents to a faith-based doctrine are going to blow stuff up. It isn’t there.

I am baffled again and again by the inability of people who I otherwise think are fairly intelligent to see the distinction between the idea and the person. I have a well-established hate-on for conservatism. I think it’s a largely unvarnished, un-nuanced, overly-simplistic philosophical doctrine that neglects to take into account very important information about the world, preferring instead to argue about what ought rather than what is. That being said, it is child’s play for me to be friends with a conservative person, by merely recognizing that my beef is with their ideas, not with them as a person. If they do something I disagree with, I say so, and we move on. Some of my close friends here in Vancouver are religious, some are alt-med, some are into supernatural woo-woo of all kinds. Big deal – we disagree, I say so, and we move on.

CFI’s statement was simply that – faith is a bad thing. Faith doesn’t make people good, but it is used as a justification for a great deal of evil. Respect for faith-based anything grants an undue amount of privilege to a philosophy that is basically “I believe in it, therefore it is so.” As a skeptic of any type, you simply must reject that kind of belief out of hand. It is faith that gives fuel and credibility to child-touching priests, to soul-sucking leeches like John Edward, and to terrorist groups. When we say that faith is something to be encouraged, we are granting implicit license to those actions that are based on faith – the good and the bad.

The CFI statement was a recognition of this. Faith spurred the terrorist attacks. Any encouragement of faith rather than reason is a betrayal of people who were the victims of this faith-based initiative. Does this mean that religious people are terrorists? Does CFI think that churches should be razed to the ground? Only in crazy-town, which is where these posts seem to be originating, based on a quick IP-check of those posting. What CFI has said is that the encouragement of faith is bad, not that people who have faith are bad; misguided, perhaps, or poorly-informed. You simply cannot deny that the most religiously-pious and rigidly faithful people who died on September 11th, 2001 were those hijacking the plane (well you can, but you’d be wrong). Building any monument to faith is granting prestige and license to all of the outcomes of faith, even the ones we deplore.

Now it will come as literally zero surprise to me when every other author here (and most of the readers) jump on my head about this. All I can say is go back and re-read the release. If you still disagree with me, say so, and we’ll move on.