Quote of the day: Starting tonight, Bill Moyers is back on TV, and he's out to show that faith and reason can coexist—and we can talk about it

"We have to find a different way of talking about religion than the right wing."
—Bill Moyers, yesterday to Thom Hartman, who's currently filling in for (briefly vacationing) Rachel Maddow on Air America Radio

In my secular world Bill Moyers is about as close as it comes to sainthood. At this point, I would watch anything he puts on the air. So I have no intention of missing tonight's first installment of his new seven-part series for PBS, Bill Moyers on Faith and Reason.

The inspiration was PEN World Voices' April 2006 New York Festival of International Literature on the subject "Faith and Reason." Each show features an interview with a distinguished participant, listed in tactful alphabetical order on the PBS website (with brief bios plus links for more info): Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood, Mary Gordon, David Grossman, Colin McGinn, Anne Provoost, Richard Rodriguez, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson.

Moyers is blunt about fundamentalists and dogma generally. That adds up to closed minds, people who can't be talked to and so are beyond the reach of reason. When those people carry their dogma into politics, he's been saying at every opportunity, they have to be defeated at the polls.

So what kind of discussion should we be having, can we be having, about religion and the Big Questions it was invented to help us deal with?

In an interview with David Ian Miller in the June 19 SF Gate, Moyers was asked what he learned while doing the interviews for the show. He answered in part:

"I came away deeply impressed with writers, storytellers, who follow a thought or argument through all its twists and turns, who examine paradox and contradiction and reach their own conclusion as to the meaning of it all. Their respect for language—and their respect for one another—was something to behold.

"I heard believers say that without doubt religion becomes just nostalgia or an addiction. And I heard skeptics, agnostics and atheists say that you can dismiss religion without disrespecting the believer or dismissing the mystery of human experience.

"I heard a rich, layered, complex conversation that was informative and inspiring, and I wanted to put it on the air because it is important for people to hear not only what they say but how they say it. We can learn to talk differently if only we see people doing it well."