Religion
In reply to the discussion: The Problem with Religious Moderates [View all]trotsky
(49,533 posts)First, you insult Harris' intelligence - which is evidently some kind of knee-jerk reaction you have whenever one of the "New Atheists" is mentioned.
Second, you bog down in "analysis" picking over a Harris quote while ignoring the actual point of it. (Hint: it's contained in the latter part of the quote.)
Harris may indeed have passed along some silly fallacies, such as that an educated 14th century person might still believe the earth to be flat. But what did that educated 14th century Christian believe about his or her god? What progress has been made in theology that even begins to compare to the progress that arose from the state of science at that time? I agree with you that we should stand back and admire the scientific and engineering accomplishments of 14th century humans, because we only stand where we do today, technologically, because of a lot of hard work and logical thinking they did.
So where is the comparable theological progress? Surely given the resources the Christian church has had available to it for an equal length of time, we should expect much grander constructions of the nature of god and our role in its creation. Can you present those to us?