If you are a Christian and you think certain actions are immoral, then you are very likely to hear the following retort: Christians are allowed to hold Christian beliefs. But it is wrong for Christians to impose those beliefs on other people. The sentiment is reflected much of the current debates over the significance of genitalia in determining gender, the scope of possible marriage partners, and the moral status of the entity living inside the womb of a pregnant woman. Presumably, the beliefs in question are those beliefs that lead to laws of countries. Such beliefs might include: it is morally wrong to take the life of a child in…
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Why We Should Argue About Worldview: A Reply to Jonathan Merritt.
Conservative Christians keep losing at culture wars. So argues Johnathan Merritt. Merritt thinks he knows why. They are obsessed with arguing about worldview. Consequently, Conservative Christians are failing to persuade people: They focus on ideology while ignoring people: When Christians talk about [x], they often frame it as a clash of worldviews or ideologies…Those who have a more progressive view… use concrete language and share specific stories. They talk about real… people with real struggles who experience real oppression. Narrative framing usually wins in public debates because it touches listeners’ hearts. Whether or not Merritt is right about convincing people is hard to tell. What I would like to quibble…
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God and Government
“we are obedient to a power that is not only higher than the current government, but a power that was the basis of our government” (Mike Huckabee) Tony Blair was most forceful on this point: I don’t do God, he said. Lately, western governments have followed suit. Talking about God and government is just too messy. For a start, there are too many divinities and they all say slightly different things. And then there are militant atheists for whom the mention of anything that has a whiff of divinity is likely to get you trolled and it certainly diminishes your chances of getting their vote. So what’s a god to…
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Equality plus Evil equals Confusion
George Marsden once wrote: “The sensibilities of Christians toward the poor and the weak have been dulled by the very success of the assimilation of these same sensibilities by the wider Western culture and lately world culture.” (George Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, p. 93). In other words, they are taking your stuff and you are letting them. Consider the fantastically trendy value: equality. Christians, who once stood at the forefront of championing equality, are now suspicious of it. The problem is not with equality itself, but with what it is mixed with. Equality has been rent from its theological mornings and now lies at the heart of a dangerous,…
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Prescriptive Pluralism
John Hick Religious Pluralism is either descriptive or prescriptive. The descriptive version is merely the observation that there are many different religions. It is hard to imagine anyone disagreeing with this premise. However, prescriptive pluralism is what appears to be implied by such an observation. Since there is so much disagreement between religions an explanation must be provided for such diversity of opinion. Either one group are correct and everyone else is mistaken or something else is going on. Given the apparent parity between the religions (all religions are made up of human beings who claim to have some truth about god or gods and ground such beliefs in religious…
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Ducks and Democracy
The life of one of TV’s most successful shows lies in the balance. Phil has backers and antagonists. But the reaction of the culture to his words brings to light a contemporary issue: the transforming idea of liberal society. The problem facing a so called liberal society is this: liberal society, always priding itself on the liberty of its citizens, is threatened by the very tolerance it sought to defend. Liberal society has, up to now, focused on universalizing the rights of the people, but now it talks about sex. A lot. The first question is: why? What changed? Jonathan Chaplin argues that what was in the background, civil society,…
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Thinking in Movie Clips
In our technology laden world the mind is taught to think in new ways. For example, there was a substantial period of time in which I thought in status updates. It was not that I actually posted many, but my mind became conditioned to track my progress through the day in witty 40 or so character quips. While this mental phase appears to have ceased, another has come to the fore. I now think in movie clips (see an example here). A subject is greatly illuminated, and made far less serious, by ascribing a scene from a movie. For me, the movies my subconscious brings me are all eighties classics. For…
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Politics or Theology?
Levi Bryant Secularization has left a void, argues philosopher, Levi Bryant, and what does one fill that void with? Bryant writes: “I find myself thinking that politics is what came to fill the void opened by the collapse of theology. Where the humanities used to be organized around theology and knowledge of God and advancement of his glory, the humanities encountered a void in the movement towards secularization. Something was needed to function as a telos or justification of our work. Politics became that replacement.” (read the full article here) My first reaction is that politics is a poor replacement for the glory of God. Anyone watching the debates must at least…