And as this last point implies, it is time to demand and apply a right for the rest of us to non-interference by religious persons and organisations - a right to be free of proselytisation and the efforts of self-selected minority groups to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who do not share their outlook.
Take that abolitionists and members of the civil rights movement, those nasty little self-selected minority groups (and a lot of them rather religious in their approach) who tried to impose their own choice of morality and practice on those who did not share their outlook! Everyone should have a right to be free of such people!
Setting aside its being an easy target for sarcasm due to his tendency to make extremely general claims that couldn't possibly taken seriously by any reasonable person without considerable qualification, Grayling's essay has a number of problems. I found this paragraph rather odd:
It is time to refuse to tip-toe around people who claim respect, consideration, special treatment, or any other kind of immunity, on the grounds that they have a religious faith, as if having faith were a privilege-endowing virtue, as if it were noble to believe in unsupported claims and ancient superstitions. It is neither. Faith is a commitment to belief contrary to evidence and reason, as between them Kierkegaard and the tale of Doubting Thomas are at pains to show; their example should lay to rest the endeavours of some (from the Pope to the Southern Baptists) who try to argue that faith is other than at least non-rational, given that for Kierkegaard its virtue precisely lies in its irrationality.
First of all, the reason religious faith is often regarded as 'intrinsically deserving of respect' (to use a phrase Grayling uses elsewhere), at least in liberal societies, is that it is an expression of conscience, and conscience is intrinsically deserving of respect; at least, it is if you think personal freedom is deserving of respect, since a great deal of that old liberal notion of liberty that has served us so well is tied up with respect for personal conscience as such. And there are, unless you are a statist, a lot of reasons to think that we should, at least to the extent possible, treat matters of conscience with kid gloves, shielding them with custom and, yes, even law. And that is, in fact, the old traditional way people in liberal democracies go about improving social life.
And the last part of the paragraph above doesn't even make any sense, being a backhanded appeal to the authority of Kierkegaard on Christian faith for the purpose of making a sweeping general claim about all religious faith that a lot of people (from the Pope to the Southern Baptists, I've heard) deny is true at all. Further, the interpretation of Kierkegaard isn't even right; Kierkegaard does not say that the virtue of faith lies in its irrationality. The Kierkegaardian position is that the virtue of faith lies in its 'absurdity', that is, in its not being the sort of thing that can be accurately or adequately characterized by labels like 'rational' or 'irrational', understood in particular as a concern with the universal. Faith, being concerned in Kierkegaard's view with what we might call the personal and particular as such, can't be categorized in either way. Or, to put it in yet another way: Faith is not rational (or irrational) if by 'rational' one means anything like what the Hegelians of Kierkegaard's time would have tended to call rational. But just as that in some sense says more about Hegelians and their deficiencies than about faith, so in some sense does Kierkegaard's admiration of the absurdity of faith say more about the fact that we tend not to characterize reason in such a way that it includes the purely personal -- sex, and love, and self-sacrifice and other things where we are dealing with this person, here and now, one-on-one in a personal way, somehow drop out -- than it says about faith. Now, it is true that there are a lot of twists and turns involved in interpreting Kierkegaard, and plenty of ways to go wrong, but I don't think the rough summary I've given here is that far off from where most Kierkegaard scholarship is; if anything, Kierkegaard scholars would tend to add more nuance to the picture, not less.
So, apparently, religious faith in general must be irrational because a crude and not very intelligible interpretation of Kierkegaard has Kierkegaard saying that the admirable thing about faith is irrational, even though if Kierkegaard says this, it makes him a member of a very tiny minority of people in one -- and only one -- of the religions of the world, which Grayling later on pointedly points out are many. A single ipse-dixit (and a story interpreted in a way it usually isn't) should 'lay to rest' whatever anyone else says on the subject. What sort of argument is this? Not what you would expect from someone who claims to do philosophy.
That's not the only problem with the argument from the essay. A number of problems arise, I think, because Grayling can't decide whether he wants to make a moral argument or a political one, and what can be taken seriously (and what can't) in his reasoning changes depending on which you take him to be trying to make. Still, it is not a total mess, because he does at least begin setting up an argument or two that could be taken more seriously for a narrower claim about the politics of civil discourse.
