So I was going to write a big ranty blogpost about how this article is totally dumb and they’re all wrong. But they’re not. I mean, sure, they generalize about things that are too ill-defined to be usefully discussed in a three-page Newsweek article — that “faith” and “reason” can’t go hand in hand, or the supposition that Christians are all creationists, or Biblical fundamentalists, or any number of other things.

On the other hand, I have to call bullshit on two of the “arguments” used against religion in general, and specifically in this article.

1) “So much evil has been done in the name of religion!” Okay, yes: religion has been used as a scapegoat for war, racism, and any number of hateful evils. But so have many other things: conflicting desires for land, drugs, alcohol, oil… So don’t you get it? People — all people — have the capacity for great evils, and for corrupting instruments of good to ill purposes. That’s the nature of mankind. Furthermore, this can’t be used as an argument against religion and FOR science. Look at what science has given us: nuclear war, teratogens, pollution, and oh yeah, drugs! Heroin was invented as a way to get people off of morphine addiction, but wow, that was throwing the baby out with the bath water, wasn’t it? Religion as institution is dangerous, but so are cars, and we still drive them. It’s dangerous because it’s powerful, and that’s also why it’s useful at all.

2) There is a discussion of how many Americans believe in God, and how many would elect an Atheist president, and so on. As if that is an argument against Harris! Whatever your idea of God may be, he cannot be reduced to numbers, and he is not Tinkerbell: if he exists, it is not because we believe in him, but because he simply… exists. The only thing that has value because we think it does is money.

All that said, I sympathize with y’all Atheists. There is a ravenous horde of Bible-thumping, intellect-devouring Christians out there, and they’re not just dreamt up by the media, they do exist. But please bear with us in the knowledge, or at least the hope, that not all Christians are that way. Some of us try very hard to make this world make sense in the light of a belief that we cannot refute because it would be as fruitless as a gay man trying to be straight.

To pretend we do not see that which has been present in our daily world our whole lives long would be hypocrisy; troubles arise, though, when we assume (and who does not, when they are so familiar with such a thing) that others can see it or be made to see it. It is like trying to teach someone from a foreign country your language: frustrating, utterly useless when you have no common ground to work with, and so much more difficult when you don’t give the slightest attempt to learn theirs.