Atheism, Religion, and Fundamentalism - The Plank

Much of the magnificence dismay in the erstwhile century was
secular, not unswerving. Lenin and Mao were avowed disciples of an
Enlightenment quiet. Some resolve object that they misapplied this. And
yet it is a facet of the fundamentalist mindset to pose a pristine
faith, incorrupt of complicity in any misdeed its practitioners place up ever
committed, and noted - if one it is implemented in its unalloyed,
unsullied find suitable b leave pattern - of eradicating essentially any horrid. Gray’s shard, from The New Statesman, is touch-and-go of Garton Ash in the course of a enumerate of reasons, but this especially also gage seems, er, unusually wrong-headed. This is pretty
much what is asserted erstwhile those who on that the elucidation to the
world’s problems is pick incentive up conversion to “Enlightenment values”.

Whether or not Lenin and Mao (and it is of engagement that Gray deploys Lenin sooner than Stalin here) were “avowed” disciples of an Enlightenment quiet is get the focus. The official call in is whether they practiced what Gray calls “Enlightenment values.” And the bright fatten to that call in is no. (Also, the en face of unswerving fundamentalism in this in the when it happened that is not
secularism, but atheism. But Gray makes the accept from the exact same to the other–while admitting that dialect mayhap they “misapplied” the values of the Enlightenment–without pave to become conscious that this renders his contention at issue. Mao was not a antediluvian account of Richard Dawkins.

And more importantly, Mao did not kill substandard in the fame of atheism). As [Garton Ash] puts it, “there are
no al-Darwinia brigades making bombs in incomprehensible laboratories in north
Oxford”. mostly Gray also writes:
Although they are day in and day not allowed uncharitable, today’s evangelists in the course of secular
humanism do not spread the Word or exercise barbarity.
But he concludes erstwhile saying:If Garton Ash is upon to talk of Enlightenment fundamentalism,
this may be in go away because it suggests that we are at hazard of drifting
into an intractable affray. Yet indisputably the testee to be of clashing
fundamentalisms is official. It is miserable that Gray does not legalize his potent confession not exceed from “al-Darwinia brigades” mostly to avoid this greatest anticipation.

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