Lord Jonathan Sacks appeared on NPR to promote his latest book, Not In God's Name. The broadcast is really worth listening to, not the least for Sack's elegant British accent. But the transcript is provided below.

I enjoyed Sacks' tolerant views of other religions and especially his much more nuanced reading of the stories in the Bible and insistence on the importance of moral complexity that cannot be based on arbitrary religious denomination or (I would add) lack of belief in God.

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/08/446980200 ... rent-voice

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his new book about religious violence, writes a great deal about the book of Genesis. All the major figures of the first book of the Hebrew Bible are complex characters. The best have their faults, he writes. The worst have their virtues. And Sacks insists on the importance of that moral complexity. He writes this. Dividing the world into saints and sinners, the saved and the damned, the children of God and the children of the devil, is the first step down the road to violence in the name of God. Rabbi Sacks joins us from London. Thanks for joining us today.

JONATHAN SACKS: Good to be with you.

SIEGEL: We should note that most of the political violence of the last century was the work of secular movements - Nazism, communism. How important is religion to violence in the world today?

SACKS: I think it's absolutely fundamental, certainly in the Middle East, certainly in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and certainly in parts of Asia. And nobody expected this because for the last three centuries, every self-respecting Western intellectual has been predicting that religion was in intensive care and soon to leave humanity altogether. So this is really unexpected. But what we are seeing is, after a set of failed secular ideologies and, in the Middle East, secular nationalisms, a set of religious counterrevolutions that are combining religion with politics in the most destructive way.

SIEGEL: And you observe that the future is - could be more of that because demographics favor the religious.

SACKS: There is no doubt that demographically, the 21st century is going to be more religious than the 20th century because the more religious you are, the larger the family you have. And that's happening throughout the world. So even if the religious do not persuade a single skeptic or atheist, they're nonetheless going to be much more in evidence throughout the world. And I don't think people have really anticipated this.

SIEGEL: You've set out to demonstrate in the book that one can and should acknowledge the validity of another faith within the framework of one's own faith, something that I think many nonreligious people and quite a few ultra-religious people would dispute. I want you to get rabbinical for us and give us an example of a story in Genesis that's typically misunderstood and that really says you should love the other guy.

SACKS: Well, you know, Genesis is structured around a series of sibling rivalries - Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers and the two sisters, Leah and Rachel. And what I've argued is, a superficial reading of those stories always says there's a chosen one and a rejected one. But actually, it's not hard to see if you, without any preconceptions, read the story.

For instance, of the birth of Isaac, when Sarah says to Abraham, send away that slave woman and her son, Ishmael and we see Hagar and her child, Ishmael, going out into the desert in the midday sun - their water supply runs out. They're both about to die. Hagar can't bear to see her son, Ishmael, about to die. And there is no way that you can read that story without your heart going out to Hagar and to Ishmael.

In other words, our sympathies are enlisted not for the chosen but for the other, the apparently rejected one. And you can see that in all those stories. So what you are seeing is that on the surface, these are stories of God choosing X and rejecting Y. But read seriously from a position of some maturity, we can see that God's choice is not like that. His love is not like that. To love X, he doesn't have to hate Y. To choose X, he doesn't have to reject Y. In other words, the very theologies that Judaism, Christianity and Islam have at their roots and that, of course, such violence between them through the centuries may actually be the wrong way of reading those texts.

SIEGEL: I was thinking, though, in reading "Not In God's Name" that - here you're a Cambridge-educated rabbi. You're the former chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom. You start from a position of tolerance in a tolerant society. How does this reach out to young Muslim men in Iraq and Syria who are decapitating people in the name of their faith? What's the connection?

SACKS: I did not write this book to convince jihadists in the Middle East to sit down and read a book and change their view of the world. I think I might've realized that was a fairly quixotic thing to do. My audience here is actually young Muslims who are living or being educated in the West who really are appalled by what is being done in God's name, in the name of Islam, in the Middle East, in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere and who want to hear a different voice. And oddly enough, the warmest responses to the book have come from young Muslims.

SIEGEL: A few years ago when you wrote things like, no one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth and, God has spoken to mankind in many languages through Judaism to Jews, Christianity to Christians, Islam to Muslims, some orthodox Rabbis in Britain came down on you as a potential heretic. If that is the reality of religious discourse in the United Kingdom, what can we expect of the Sunni Muslim Al-Azhar University in Cairo or the Shiite holy city of Qum in Iraq? It seems you're pushing the rock uphill here.

SACKS: (Laughter) I tried to explain to people at the time that when extremists call you a heretic, that's their way of giving you an honorary doctorate. So you know, I was very relaxed about that.

SIEGEL: It's claimed by some that you've retracted some of the statements.

SACKS: I toned down several of the sentences because the truth is, if you're going to be a leader, lead at a speed that people can follow. And I just think I was trying to do too much too fast. Don't forget that book was written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and was published on the first anniversary of 9/11. And in the end, I said, this is going to be my first word on the subject, not my last. So I deliberately toned down just a few phrases, and that was enough.

But the truth is that this book is dedicated to religious people. It is written as a religious book. So much of the critique of Islam today comes from a secular perspective. So much of the criticism of religion has come from fundamentalist atheists who are every bit as angry as some of their religious extremist counterparts. I'm not saying they commit acts of violence, but they do regard everyone who disagrees with them as less than fully sane. And what I've tried to do is to speak in a religious language to show people that tolerance is not a matter of religious compromise. If we read our sacred texts correctly, that is what God is calling us to do.

SIEGEL: Rabbi Sacks, thanks for talking with us today.

SACKS: Robert, thank you.

SIEGEL: Rabbi Sacks' book is called "Not In God's Name: Confronting Religious Violence."

Why are you so anxious about expunging atrocities comitted by men like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, who are on record as self declared atheists that spread atheistic propaganda?

What is it in your past that wants so desperately to spin any overt instances of atheist ideology?

This is actually one interesting aspect about you, Geo.
Is there no such thing as atheist ideology?
Were they not true atheists?
Are men like Dawkins and Hitchens true atheists?
Is it just bad politics when atheists like Stalin seek out theists to murder?

Lets clear this foul air.

ant wrote:Why are you so anxious about expunging atrocities comitted by men like Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, who are on record as self declared atheists that spread atheistic propaganda?

What is it in your past that wants so desperately to spin any overt instances of atheist ideology?

This is actually one interesting aspect about you, Geo.
Is there no such thing as atheist ideology?
Were they not true atheists?
Are men like Dawkins and Hitchens true atheists?
Is it just bad politics when atheists like Stalin seek out theists to murder?

Lets clear this foul air.

Ant, I honestly just don't understand where you're coming from most of the time. You are constantly trying to lump atheists with the political ideologies of Mao and Stalin, but the vast majority of atheists are as appalled by such violence as I would assume you are. Everything else you say follows this strawman kind of thinking. I have no idea what you mean by "true atheists" like Dawkins and Harris. I have said numerous times that I disagree with the tone of some of these hard atheists. And I quite frankly don't understand your obsession with them.

The interviewer here acknowledges the political violence from secular ideologies in the beginning of this interview. Did you even bother to read the article? Because your comments here on already way off topic.

No thats not true.
Actually, it's mostly new atheists that lump theism with irrationality.
Youve done this yourself several times here on BT.
But it irks you when I do somethig similar with athiesm, doesnt it?

My point is and has been that atheism can and has turned into a religious-like ideology in the past, and can stew at any time as long as you have idiots like Dawkins preaching religious bigotry.
That's atheism for you.
If it's not Atheism, you must denounce men like Dawkins for not embodying true atheism.
But then you'd be committing the no true Scotsman fallacy.

Do I think the core atheists here condone Stalin and Mao's atheism? Of course not. Thats a stupid question.
But what you have condoned in the past is depicting theism, Christianity in particular, in the most brutishly vulgar and patronizing way possible. It's an assault on good men of religion (or at least I consider it to be) each and every time you've done it, and then brush it off as harmless rhetoric by pasting that stupid pictorial propaganda of Hitchins "peacefully" writing on his desk with an accompanying picture of some r3ligious extremist committing a crime against humanity.
That is a cowardly act on your part, my friend.

ant wrote: Do I think the core atheists here condone Stalin and Mao's atheism?

Small point. I don't think it is their atheism that "core atheists here" do not condone. One is about beliefs, the other is about methods and values (or lack thereof).

I am very pleased with the things you have quoted Rabbi Sacks saying here. Being wise leads to listening to others, even fools. Being right leads to capacity for doing right. And doing right leads to understanding that others are part of who I am, most especially the others with whom I have tensions.

I love the second look at Genesis. Most probably the Hebrews originally saw themselves as the rejected and the outcast.

It is a matter of some controversy among scholars, but there is considerable evidence pointing to the Hebrews being the same as the "apiru" who were the "riff-raff" of the Late Bronze Age Fertile Crescent (George Mendenhall is my source). Some were bandits, many refused to bend the knee, like the wildlings of "Game of Thrones", and many seem to have been refugees from wars of the time.

They were conscious (to some extent) of being welded together by covenant rather than by ethnicity, and in that sense they were the "chosen of God" but at the same time were the "rejects". Sacks doesn't put it quite that way, but it is there in what he points out.

ant wrote: Is there no such thing as atheist ideology?
Were they not true atheists?
Are men like Dawkins and Hitchens true atheists?

According to you, no there isn't! Let's climb aboard the Booktalk time machine once again!

ant wrote:He said that atheism has the moral high ground.
Well, that is simply a false statement. Atheism simply means lack of belief in a deity or deities and nothing more. It is neither a moral system or a belief system.

You got it right once, when it served your argument. But you'll keep trying this line of attack, again, and again, and again.

Here's Sam Harris on atheism. I suppose he doesn't really believe his own use of the term, right? Maybe it's his subconscious daddy issues or something.

Atheism has no doctrines. It does not demand that a person do anything, or refrain from doing anything, on the basis of his unbelief. Consequently, to know that someone is an atheist is to know almost nothing about him—apart from the fact that he does not accept the unwarranted claims of any religion.

Atheism is simply the condition of not believing in Poseidon, Thor, or any of the thousands of dead gods that lie in the graveyard we call mythology. To that extent, everyone knows exactly what it is to be an atheist—he has simply added the god of Abraham to the list of the dead.

And another one:

In response to a common point of confusion:

Yes, atheists harbor all sorts of beliefs--ethical, political, scientific--but they don't get these beliefs from atheism. Rather, their atheism is itself the product of what they believe about science and about the merely human origin of all our books.

No rational atheist is dogmatically opposed to believing in God. It's just that the evidence for His existence is terrible. It would be trivially easy, in fact, for an omniscient Being to write (or inspire) a book that would remove all doubt about Him. Neither the Bible nor the Qur'an is that sort of book. For instance, if the Old Testament contained a single chapter that resolved the deepest questions of 21st century science--rather than merely telling us how to sacrifice goats and when to stone our daughters to death--I, too, would be a believer.

He said that atheism has the moral high ground. 
Well, that is simply a false statement. Atheism simply means lack of belief in a deity or deities and nothing more. It is neither a moral system or a belief system."


As I said before, the above comment in its proper context was intended as sarcastism.
The interviewer was just one examlle of a declared atheist who doesnt seem to be aware of the definition of atheism in its blandest form.

Dexter seems to think its a "gotcha" comment that contradicts what Ive stated above and several times before.

Stupidity doesnt age well, Dexter.

ant wrote:As I said before, the above comment in its proper context was intended as sarcastism.
The interviewer was just one examlle of a declared atheist who doesnt seem to be aware of the definition of atheism in its blandest form.

Dexter seems to think its a "gotcha" comment that contradicts what Ive stated above and several times before.

Stupidity doesnt age well, Dexter.
.

I'll let the reader decide. One does not have to read many of your posts to see piss-poor logic and strawman arguments all over the place, in the futile attempt to win a point.

But perhaps you can educate us on the "blandest" vs. other definitions of atheism. How can we be expected to follow your novel theories of atheism if you don't spell them out?

Harry Marks wrote:

ant wrote: Do I think the core atheists here condone Stalin and Mao's atheism?

Small point. I don't think it is their atheism that "core atheists here" do not condone. One is about beliefs, the other is about methods and values (or lack thereof).

Some atheist beliefs are;

God does not exist
No objective moral values exist (this is not the same as saying atheists can not live moral lives)
Speciesm
Science is the final arbiter of Truth