Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Willingness to Reconsider Religious Arguments:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_05_29-2005_06_04.shtml#1117658863
Reader Cathy Fasano put the point so colorfully that I thought I'd
quote it:
You can certainly disagree with . . . [any] conclusion[s] that
moral theologians of whatever faith come up with in gazillions of
particular cases. But . . . [f]orests worth of trees have been
felled, herds of sheep slaughtered, great pits of clay have been
quarried, all so that several millenia of humans can write down
their reconsiderations of deific decrees. Up until a few hundred
years ago, theology was more or less the only intellectual
discipline out there. . . .
I'm not terribly interested in most theological arguments myself; they
don't speak to me and my concerns. But I imagine that many deeply
religious people feel the same way about utilitarianism or objectivism
or a wide range of other secular moral philosophies. (Naturally, not
all -- there are surely religious thinkers who are intellectually
interested in secular philosophies, and vice versa, whether out of
intellectual curiosity, a desire to borrow from other philosophies, or
just a desire to better understand others' views.) One doesn't have to
agree with theological debates, though, to recognize that religious
people spend a lot of time trying to get others, both within their
traditions and outside thos traditions, to reconsider their
understandings of divine decrees -- and in many instances succeed.
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