Distilling the espresso religion

I'm increasingly getting the impression of very similar language used to describe "religious extremism." As an easily available example, let me pick on an excerpt from Sam Harris' End of Faith, The Problem with Religious Moderates (emphasis mine):

Religious moderates seem to believe that what we need is not radical insight and innovation in these areas but a mere dilution of Iron Age philosophy.

This must mean that by being a moderate, you're being less strong than you could be. I'm inclined to blame this on Harris being an American who equates violence with strength, but this sort of language is generally quite common, isn't it?

I wonder if this isn't a case of taking at face value the fundamentalists' own claim that they're a return to the "foundation" of faith, to the roots, the essence: an image of anything not "literalist" as watered-out coffee — and fundamentalism, strong espresso. As someone who'll have no truck with the concept of Platonic ideals I find this quite nonsensical, of course. But. When you keep using this metaphorical image, you're basically reinforcing the literalists' own bullshit, confirming the stereotype that feeds their cause: that they have greater religious authority because they follow "the" dogma "to the letter."

"To the letter." The existence of multiple "hard core" belief-mutations around the same holy book should be enough to expose the ridiculousness of literalisms. Even if all the copies of the particular holy documents are letter-for-letter identical, meaning does not lie in the printed words alone: it arises in the interaction between the person and the words, in the interpretation that is unavoidable for any human being. Every person being different, it's impossible to have no variation in meaning: the only way to get an unambiguous result from it would be to feed the words to something controlled by a deterministic computer program. (Turing-complete holy code, anyone?)

And yet, we reinforce this myth of the "most literal" interpretation where fundamentalism is the espresso from which weaker cappuccinos and lattes are derived. Stop it, please. Stop helping these bastards that are making the world unsafe for tea.

[Technorati Sam Harris atheism atheist dodgy metaphors espresso religion essence of hogwash framing fundamentalism hard core literalism memetics rhetorics stop helping unspeak violence is strength]