The book we're reading together!
Hello everyone!
Merry Christmas Eve! I hope that you all are really enjoying relaxing and spending time with your loved ones!
WELCOME to the new blog for New Church Berkeley, College Life! My apologies for the late start on the blog; I know it’s been 5 days since the semester ended, and all of you are eager to start reading and discussing our selection for the book club! If you don’t already know, the text for our winter break online book club is The Reason for God by the eloquent Timothy Keller! If you haven’t already procured for yourself a copy, you can borrow one for free at your local library, order a really cheap used one from Amazon, or get yourself a shiny new copy from any bookstore.
We’re praying that reading and discussing this book together will help us learn together, grow in Christ, and become better encouragers of each other (and it will help keep us in touch over the winter break, too). So create yourself a WordPress account, and get ready to publish your own thoughts in our discussion to this very blog! Below you will find a reading schedule based on the four weeks of break! Soon, the administrators will be posting several prompts to get your neural synapses and your heartstrings going. Feel free to pose any questions for discussion in your own blog posts as well! Alright, hope you guys are excited to share as we dig into this book!
Online Book Club Reading Schedule
Week 1: Dec. 19-26, 2009
Chapters 1-4 (Pages 3-67), and the Introduction if you like!
Week 2: Dec. 27, 2009-Jan. 2, 2010
Ch. 4-7 (Pgs 68-123)
Week 3: Jan 3-9, 2010
Ch. 8-11 (Pgs 127-185)
Week 4: Jan 10-16, 2010
Ch. 12-Epilogue (Pgs 186-240)
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January 17, 2010 at 3:37 am
bkpark
Well, this passage (in “3. Keep religion completely private”) got me thinking:
If secularism is such an epitome of open-mindedness (as scientists must be, in approaching experimental results (and sometimes theories) with as little personal bias as possible), why should any topic be taboo and why is anything a “conversation stopper”?
I think their argument would be that religion involves assumptions that some, i.e. secularists, are not willing to accept, so they want to reject any arguments involving those assumptions out of hand. I think that’s a form of argumentum ad logicam and, well, lazy thinking on the part of secularists.
Even if they do not want to directly tackle the religious assumptions (e.g. Does God exist or not? Does Bible set a moral standard for us to follow or not?) directly, that does not mean they (and hence we) are limited to supporting or criticizing public policy from a nonreligious standpoint, if such exists at all. For one, they can consider the internal consistency: are there other religious doctrines which would contradict a particular stance?
Refusal to explore such arguments which doesn’t require them to accept or reject the religious assumptions at all, in particular, dropping the debate altogether the moment God is mentioned, seems to me to be the prime example of closed-mindedness. And intellectual laziness—not only they are not willing to believe, they are not even willing to study what the belief entails and what the consequences would be.
As an aside, many believers are already practicing … this sense of open-mindedness. As far as I know, Christians don’t simply drop a subject the moment they cannot discuss the subject from a biblical standpoint (although if they are honest, they don’t pretend that their point of view is somehow supported by the Bible, in these cases), and as I joke sometimes, I employ godless techniques of the scientific method daily at my job—even though physical theories do not involve God explicitly, I still consider them topics worth studying. All that the believers would be asking for, in considering arguments based on religious beliefs, is some reciprocity in open-mindedness.