Proportionality @BHAHumanists #WHC2014

Interesting piece by Samira Ahmed, actually a summary of one of the sessions at WHC2014 I referred to here, but primarily making the plea against the misguided aggressive atheist stance that moderate religious expression should be attacked just as hard for simply being “cover” for barbaric fundamentalist forms.

Politics and management of the complex depend on levels of hypocrisy, and knowing who your allies are in any given battle is rational common sense. Mustn’t confuse values, aims, policies, strategies and tactics, they’re all quite distinct.

And it’s not simply a matter of Machiavellian cunning, cynical pragmatism or Sun-Tzu / Clausewitz on campaigns of war, it’s about working with your (potential) allies to uncover valuable common ground – you both learn and win friends. Doing something constructive rather than lazily invoking your knee-jerk “right” to criticise.

As I said at the time:

Tactical Aggression — [rather than] – the old misguided idea that benign expressions of religion are merely cover for militant and inhuman kinds and therefore to be challenged as aggressively as any.

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