Bring It....

Atheist author Sam Harris and Christian blogger/pundit Andrew Sullivan are debating the merits of faith in a blogologue forum.

In Sam's first post he defines "faith":

Where I think we disagree is on the nature of faith itself. I think that faith is, in principle, in conflict with reason (and, therefore, that religion is necessarily in conflict with science), while you do not. Perhaps I should acknowledge at the outset that people use the term "faith" in a variety of ways. My use of the word is meant to capture belief in specific religious propositions without sufficient evidence—prayer can heal the sick, there is a supreme Being listening to our thoughts, we will be reunited with our loved ones after death, etc

and he states that they both have an issue with fundamentalism. Andrew counters with an explanation of why he finds fundamentalism so troubling:

It is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life. You find it troubling, I think, purely because it upholds truths that cannot be proved empirically or even, in some respects, logically.

One of the reasons that I read Andrew every day is because of his faith and his willingness to call Christianists (a term he coined last year and a term that bugs the heck out of many religious conservatives) on the carpet for their hypocrisy and deceit.

This should be very interesting.