Ms Armstrong states that a Buddhist or Confucian would be very offended to hear that he or she was not practicing a religion. It might surprise her, then, that no less a personage than the Dalai Lama as entered into a discussion of the very subject, without taking offense. I do apologize, I do not have the text at hand or I would cite it.

Perhaps I should have said, in my earlier letter, that all "monotheist" religions are by definition authoritarian. Why? Well, they derive from and cannot exist without that authority. To deny that authority is not to believe. Thus, reverence for outside authority - god, allah, yahweh - predisposes believers to authoritarianism.

Ms. Armstrong's absudly inclusive definition of religion renders the term meaningless. By her lights my son, who worships his Nissan 240GX, is spiritual and religious.

It is also a red herring used to distract readers from the inescapable fact that the so-called religions of the book are the real issue in any discussion of religion and society today. Their petulant, jealous, vengeful gods are the source of many, if not all, of the world's problems.

Also, to name science a religion is absurd. Science - based on free inquiry - is open-ended, self-revising and neither begins nor ends with any final authority. It is a method for thinking, not a way of being.

In the end, there is no discussion possible with those of faith, for their faith itself precludes free and open conversation.

messig@mac.com

You seem to think I said many things I didn't say.

You say you don't want me to tell you that prayer and meditation provide evidence for the existence of an omnipotent superbeing. That's good, since I didn't. And in passing, I'll note that it seems to never take an atheist long to revealwhat they think is the nature of the god in which they do not believe. As for me, I don't know the nature of god and it's long been one of the real problems I have with religion that the precise nature of god is assumed to be known in such detail. You know, long gray beard, doesn't like sex, votes for Bush, lives in the sky, etc.

But, having said that, do you notice that you conflate the notion of transcendence with that of solace? The two are not the same at all and I wrote about the former and you "responded" with the latter. I wonder why you did that. Do you actually have anything to say about what I was talking about? I'd be interested to read it if you do.

People whom Jesus called hypocrits, who make great public proclamations of their faith while ignoring the inner, meditative work necessary to find god, are easy targets. But direct your statements about masturbation and not taking responsibility for one's life and actions toward, say, the Dalai Lama, and they don't make much sense.

We agree on the Jerry Falwells of the world. What about Thich Nhat Hanh or the Dalai Lama or Thomas Merton or the countless other serious seekers after transcendence? Are you truly arrogant enough to disdain them too? I'm not.

I find that even as an agnostic--in the Huxleyan sense of "no knowledge without evidence"--I do find much in religious traditions to admire and that the search for the ineffable can be quite satisfying. I'm a great fan of Armstrong's and her books...but also a respectful critic of some of her thinking.

In general, I understand Armstrong's arguments about the relationship of logos and mythos, but I find that the stark divide between the two can be problematic. It's a common division that ends up functioning to excuse religion from intellectual and moral rigor. It also fundamentally misunderstands "meaning." John Dewey and George Herbert Mead argued that meaning is derived from the use of an idea; that is, you know what something (an event, an object, an idea) means by the way you interact with it. Science and Religion aren't two opposing systems giving us different aspects of life; they are two different ways of coming to understand (of interacting) with things. Human beings derive knowledge through interaction, be it scientific or religion knowledge. Religion and Science are different in quality, not in kind; therefore, it is not only legitimate, but essential that we compare them and criticize their relative strengths and weaknesses. In a shrinking world of dramatic cultural pluralism where ethno-religious violence is always bubbling, we can no longer afford Plato's (or more recently Stephen J. Gould's) categorical splitting of religion from science (Gould's "separate magesteria"...blech).

Armstrong's efforts to salvage religion from secular/scientific critique often slide into apology. Justifying the Koran's (or Bible's) brutality by interpreting the passage as a call to peace collapses the complexities of religious text and practice and paralyzes our ability to evaluate them, to produce moral judgments of the usefullness of a particular belief. Armstrong argues that those who say the Koran (or Bible) are violent texts merely misunderstand them. But the fact that millions of people believe and act in their religion counter to Armgstrong's "true" interpretation demonstrates that the text means different things to different people in different contexts. Again, the meaning of a religion (or a passage in a religious text) emerges from the way people interact with it and enact it in the world--the right interpretation isn't a thing that if we all look hard enough we'll all come to the same conclusion, especially not in a world where a single religious tradition is straddling thousands of different cultural, social and economic contexts.

A better tack would be to take the social scientific stance that religions are vastly complex--the major traditions are thousands of years old, they encompass millions of diverse people, their texts are internally inconsistent and contradictory, and they contain both the impetus to violence and the call to peace. This would open up to more nuanced and targeted critiques of the immoralities of religious meaning in practice. It would also enable the kinds of critiques that Daniel Dennett calls for in his most recent book, where we can make rational decisions about what needs to be excised from our religious traditions, what no longer "works" in the world as we experience it now, not least of which are those major aspects of Islam and Christianity which push to tight community isolation and violence to outsiders.