Yes but why bother? goes one argument we get a lot of. What’s the point? You’re never going to convince anyone. Religion is never going to go away. So why all this disagreement? Anthony Flew calls this the ‘But-those-people-will-never-agree Diversion.’ (How to Think Straight p. 61)

If one is trying to thrash out some generally acceptable working compromise on how things are to be run, then one must consider the various sticking points of all concerned. But if instead you are inquiring into what is in fact the case and why, then that someone refuses to accept that this or that is true is neither here nor there.

Just so. And that is the question we’re looking at: the … Read the rest

And some more serendipitous reading that makes the same point I’ve been making. I happened to pick up a collection of essays by Richard Rorty and found ‘Religion as Conversation-stopper.’ Just so – my point exactly. And Rorty takes issue with Stephen Carter’s The Culture of Disbelief.

The main reason religion needs to be privatized is that, in political discussion with those outside the relevant religious community, it is a conversation-stopper. Carter is right when he says: ‘One good way to end a conversation – or start an argument – is to tell a group of well-educated professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography) because it is required

The discussion continues. Norm Geras continued it with a post yesterday.

Twice during recent years I tried to engage people I know well, and whom I also like and respect, in a discussion about religion – this with a view, not to challenging their beliefs, but to trying to see if my own assumptions about the way in which they held them were even half-way right. Both conversations ran, pretty well immediately, into the ground…I don’t report this as proving that all conversations between the religious and the irreligious must go the same way. I hope not, in fact. My own reason for embarking on these two conversations was to explore what levels of mutual understanding are possible across the

I’ve just received a bit of Spam email that really should have been sent to OB, so I’m reproducing it here.

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I wonder what’s involved in performing forgiveness of sins?… Read the rest

One side effect of all this blathering I do at B&W is that I get a lot of correspondence, and get tangled up in protracted email discussions and debates. In fact, having said that, I’m reminded that Jerry S told me that would happen, a couple of years ago, after he’d thought of B&W and invited me to participate but long before he’d created it. There was an interval of a few months when B&W was an Idea but not yet a Reality – and sometime during that interval he had an amusing exchange with some indignant reader of TPM Online (someone in Prague, it seems to me, but that could be wrong – my memory isn’t up to much). … Read the rest