"That may sound like crude or facetious shorthand, but I believe it contains a genuine insight. Given that I clearly belong to one of these tribes (you get only one guess), it's entirely likely that I will mischaracterize the other one. Such is the nature of the epistemological division. When I say that one side is primarily concerned with facts and the other with narrative, or that one side understands the world primarily in subjective, experiential and relativistic terms while the other focuses on objective and quantifiable phenomena and binary true-false questions, that may help us frame the profound mutual misunderstanding at work. Harris' conception of religion as bad science, which seems like a ludicrous misreading to those who understand religion as a mythic force that shapes community and collective meaning, is a classic example. One side insists that the only important question is whether the truth-claims of religion are actually true; the other side says that question doesn't even matter, and then wonders what 'truth' is, anyway. It's the overly literal-minded versus the hopelessly vague."
Andrew O'Hehir in Salon considers liberals and religion.
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