Last night I chaired a discussion, very admirably organised by Dialogue with Islam and London Humanists, between a Muslim, Andreas Tzortzis, and a humanist, Nigel Warburton, on whether religion is good or evil.
Some less than edifying comments were aired - 'I can't think of anything more evil than filling the heads of people so that they'd fly planes into the sides of buildings' or 'Liberalism sanctions homosexuality in one generation and will sanction paedophilia in the next' - though at least such thoughts, when out, could be addressed head on. (After, I found out that the latter comment wasn't so much against homosexuality, as was a clumsy way of expressing the concern that liberalism doesn't have objective grounds for moral assertions. That's worth knowing.)
But good points were made too - good as in clarifying things, rather than necessarily establishing common ground. After all, if you believe religion encourages dangerous habits of submission to authorities, you are hardly likely to endorse it; and if you believe a godless world is an essentially fragmented, individualist world, likewise.
I felt that the strongest point from Nigel's 'side' was this: liberalism recognises that people will have differing beliefs, and will encourage people who differ to live well together. In other words, some form of liberal spirit is a prerequisite for a flourishing plural society. I suppose you could say that Islam has been marked by periods of tolerance too; and note that liberalism's tolerance clearly has it's limits, not least for some Muslims; and agree that it carries risks of atomisation by minimising the common good. However, no other ideology seems quite so successfully to have embraced pluralism as liberalism.
From Andreas' 'side', there was a comment from the floor which challenged the humanist conception of evil pretty thoroughly. Evil had been defined thus: as activity that brings about unnecessary suffering on sentient beings. So, asked the questioner, what if a man and a child agree to 'abuse' each other and each says it causes no suffering. Is that act still evil? I suppose you could argue that such a scenario is highly unlikely and that the child is hardly in a position to make such a judgement. However, that empirical approach to maintaining the definition doesn't seem up to the reality of evil: you need a way of fundamentally affirming such an act would be a perversion of love.
I found Andreas interesting on how Muslims read the Koran. He affirmed that there is room for some interpretation, since the text positively excites a desire to engage with it. But it does so within well defined limits, to keep you headed in the right direction, as it were.
I wondered whether all Muslims read the Koran in that way, especially when one lady made the rather beautiful point, via an Islamic concept, that human beings are like lenses when it comes to seeing the truth: we must keep refining and polishing ourselves if we are to see it more clearly.
