Tony Blair og Chistopher Hitchens debatterer i Canada her til aften. Endnu er videoen ikke online, men Roger Scruton og Christina Patterson har skrevet en forhåndsomtale:
Blair vs Hitchens: The dress rehearsal
Is religion a force for good? That’s the subject of a long-awaited debate tonight between the former PM and one of the world’s leading secularists. We asked two leading writers to set out the rival arguments in advance
Citatet herunder er taget et godt stykke nede i artiklen:
Roger Scruton: The Blair argument
Just as there are bad people with religious beliefs, so there are good people without them. So what does religion add to morality and why is the addition good? The first thing that religion adds is the idea of the sacred. This idea is a strange sediment in human consciousness; it might have an evolutionary cause, but the cause does not tell us what it means. The second thing that religion adds is communion.
The rituals of religion are shared and those who participate in them are drawn into another kind of relationship with their neighbours than those that prevail in the world of “getting and spending”. People hunger for this kind of membership and the power of religion resides in its ability to provide it. In the rituals of a religion all worldly differences are overcome: the Sultan bows in submission beside his subjects and the good-natured fool takes communion beside the crook who cheated him. The ritual shines on both of them from a place beyond their ordinary experience and includes them in a community whose home is in some way not of this world. And in the Christian case the ritual records a primeval sacrifice, born of love.
Mere HER i The Independent.
Via Richard Dawkins.
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