We live in a time where there is a lot of debate about religion – is it a force for good, or for bad? Is belief in a supreme being fundamentally less enlightened than acceptance of the scientific consensus? And so on. But a lot of the arguments on both sides are poorly thought through, and make fundamental errors of logic, or simply overstate their case to get attention. I think a large part of the reason for this is that “religion” covers such a complex tapestry of ideas, that arguments that start following one thread in that tapestry get snarled up in other parts, where the original argument no longer makes sense.

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