Beyond Belief

There are two sorts of religious people, the imaginative and the unimaginative. The first group would usually have little to fear from any cost-benefit analysis, but the latter are a genuine scourge, and sadly probably also the larger fraction.

A lack of imagination rather than religious belief per se is probably the deeper personality deficiency these people suffer from i.e. they are just as likely to be prone to errors of judgement in matters that require no filtration through the funnel of faith.

The Holy ObersturmbannFather has consistently alerted the faithful to the threat posed by voguish liberal-Marxist relativists, but relativism is simply the tolerance of the unimaginative. Real tolerance is actually a thoroughly imaginative and very Christian virtue. (Hence atheism can be just as unpleasant when it emanates from an unimaginative mind.)

For these reasons I have some strong sympathies with the view of Justin Cartwright, as expressed in Beyond Belief last Saturday's Guardian: that by keeping up the appearance of respect for other people's nonsense we undermine the overall quality of discussion in our society.

However there's a telling contradiction in the way that liberal democracy "values process over ideology" also tokens its vulnerability in a world of imagination-challenged fundamentalists. And whilst Isaiah Berlin was surely the most significant OP of the past century, the comfort he took in the meaninglessness of things derived from a view that "things are what they are", a state of affairs that the more imaginative scientific minds around us today would be unlikely to endorse without significant caveats.