In a post of several years ago, I saluted Asma for saying universal disinterested love was impossible. He was focused on secular philosophers like Peter Singer, but I said his reasoning extended to Buddhism (and didn't think that it extended to Christianity's call to sanctified humans, too.)
Well, maybe there's a reason he didn't extend that to religions.
That's because he's an idiot about religion as a class. And, there's a whole book of his idiocy, with a puff review here by a theist and a piece by him.
His idiocy?
Asma, who claims to be an agnostic himself, says that religion has therapeutic value in emotional regulation. Reality?
It only does that as an occasional or sometime spandrel of what it really does.
The history of religion bloody red in tooth and claw, to riff on Matthew Arnold, is that religion often stimulates, even excites, emotions. The long legacy of crusades, jihads, other conversions at swordpoint by even the allegedly non-evangelist Jews, heresy trials, witch hunts, the persecution of Muslims in Burma by allegedly peaceful Buddhists and more all show that emotional stimulation, excitement or worse is what religion usually does. Emotion-laden visionary trances, speaking in tongues and more are other examples.
Also contra the puff reviewer, Asma's arguments for believing in religion are wholly utilitarian. And, since the evidentiary warrants for the argument are false, the argument is as fallacious of a utilitarian argument for religious belief as Pascal's Wager.
I'm not a Gnu Atheist, so contra Dawkins and others, I don't believe religion poisons everything it touches. But, since it is an "-ism," like other "-isms," it can damage a fair amount of what it contacts.
Finally, I reject No True Scotsman arguments for what constitutes "true religion," whether from Judeo-Christian scriptures or elsewhere.
Anyway, Asma sure doesn't seem like an agnostic. Massimo said that his peers have commented on this. Massimo also says he's touted pseudoscience before.
This shows that being a philosopher doesnt' guarantee intellectual acuity, despite the word's etymology.
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