Religious Extremists Make Way More Sense Than Moderates

One in three Americans believe that the Bible is the literal word of god. These are the people who put prayer in, and take evolution out of, our schools, brutalize homosexuals, oppose stem cell research, practice faith healing, and every other thing you've heard of horrible fundamentalists doing. These people are (rightly so) usually the target of Richard Dawkins' wrath. You seem them on full display in Bill Maher's movie Religulous.

These people are crazy, they are deluding themselves, and they are dangerous. But they're not deluding themselves nearly as much as religious moderates.

Being a biblical literalist takes one leap of faith: the Bible is true. It's quite a leap, but it's a single leap. Once a person believes that, all kind of crazy behavior is consistent with that belief. Contrast that to the religious moderate. A religious moderate has to make 10 leaps of faith before getting up in the morning. Everyone's belief system is different, but a lot of American moderates share certain beliefs, such as:

a) god exists, and he resembles the god described in the Bible
b) he loves everyone
c) he loves me personally
d) he chooses not to give us evidence of his existence
e) only the parts of the Bible that I like are true. The rest was made up or misinterpreted by writers or translators.
f) god wants me to do, coincidentally, what I'm already doing now, or something similar.

There are many more, but I think you get the point. Since there is no source a person can point to and say "that is true," every individual belief is a new leap of faith. It's a new willful suspension of rationality.

A person who really believes that the Bible was written by the holy spirit should be a complete ass. He should prostheletyze relentlessly. What's an annoying afternoon compared to eternal damnation? He should attempt to stop anything (science, acceptance of homosexuality, etc.) that causes people to disbelieve the Bible. And he should use any method permitted by the Bible. Moderates tend to look down on these people, but extremists are simply living up to their beliefs.

Moderates tend to invent their own belief systems based on what they wish was true. They can clearly see that parts of the Bible can't be true. But instead of admitting that the Bible is not a credible source of information, and refusing to believe it, they just excise the parts they don't like, which tends to be most of it. They keep the broad outlines, cherry-pick a verse or two that they saw on a bumper-sticker, and fill in the rest with whatever makes them feel good. As usual, Sam Harris puts it best:

[Religious moderates] perpetuate the myth that a person must believe things on insufficient evidence in order to have an ethical and spiritual life. While religious moderates don't fly planes into buildings, or organize their lives around apocalyptic prophecy, they refuse to deeply question the preposterous ideas of those who do. Moderates neither submit to the real demands of scripture nor draw fully honest inferences from the growing testimony of science. In attempting to find a middle ground between religious dogmatism and intellectual honesty, it seems to me that religious moderates betray faith and reason equally.

Making a leap of faith, I can understand. It (unfortunately) happens to the best of us. But making that many? All the time? That is what seems really crazy to me.