After reading the introduction the question I have to pose is this: what doubts have you struggled through/are struggling through regarding the Christian faith? If you haven’t had any doubts, why do think that is?
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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.