God forbade...must reading!

Reasoning




  Just as we may not share common starting points, we may not share common reasoning methods either. The idea that we share either common points or common forms of reasoning from our starting points may be no more than a pleasant fantasy. Nevertheless, with all the different reasoning methods people use, its only the forms dictated by religious traditions that liberalism rules out of bounds.



    Richard Baer of Cornell University warns that teaching respect for all religions has a nice democratic ring to it. It could, if taken literally, lead to intolerable consequences for those who take seriously the truth claims of the Christian gospel. Baer worries that a requirement of objectivity would make it illegitimate for teachers to criticize any religion, including Satanism, fanatical apocalypticism or snake handling.



   Rationalism has its problems and contradictions. Jeffrey Stout asks whether the many critics of Western philosophy have been so successful that not only is God not available as a justification for knowledge, nothing else is either. After all, a rule for how knowledge is justified is knowledge, too, and it, too, must be justified, as must its justification, and so on. Stout worries about the possibility of an infinite regress of justifications needing justification. An epistemology, a study of knowledge, that finally swallows itself.





     There is an economy about religious belief- an economy and a tendency toward evolution. Over the centuries religious traditions tend to abandon what is useless and preserve what is useful. Sociologists suggest religious traditions that lack any relevance to human experience are likely to whither over time. This evolution matters because it suggests for a religion to survive it must include some kernel of moral truth that resonates with broader human understandings. Sometimes these resonances seem trivial. Most established religious traditions in America preach against extramarital sex. Americans overwhelmingly agree extramarital sex is wrong. Sociologist Peter Berger argues it may be that churches select their moral teachings because they resonate with what parishioners already believe.





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