But, I won't give in to that because the explicit purpose of this site, laid out in the site guidelines, is to enable dialogue and strategizing on what to do about a growing politico-religious movement within the US which - call it the "Christian Right", the "Christian theocratic right",  "Theocratic Christianity", "Christian supremacy" ( or whatever ) -  is opposed to religious pluralism and pluralistic democracy.

Now, theological discussion is sometimes relevant here, yes, insofar as such discussion furthers our understanding of that movement. But theological debate per se is discouraged because it leads nowhere : if theology, and scriptural interpretation, were self evident to all... well, the World would likely have become happily monotheistic centuries or millenia ago. But, scripture, and theology - as with language - cannot be reduced to unambiguously rigorous logical propositions. There is disagreement, conflict over interpretation. That is a timeless truth.

Ultimately, this site is political in nature and so theological debate doesn't serve its ends. Let me put it this way : long before the advent of Christianity, the Greek Skeptics had coined an argumentative style similar to and about as fruitful as theological debate ( at least for the purposes of this site ) -

To sum that up, try to disprove my following assertion ( actually don't - just contemplate the pointlessness of trying to do so ) :

"When I enter my house and shut the front door, the world outside winks out of existence. That is my steadfast belief, a point of deepest faith."  Though we all would agree ( I would hope anyway ) that proposition is absurd, it cannot actually be disproven. As with the increasingly convoluted pre-Copernican orreries that sought to model the geocentric universe, I can always invent clever conditions to innoculate such a belief against any and all logical objections.

Theology can be like that.  Politics - on the other hand - demands shared assumptions and shared actions, not interminable debates over what is unprovable territory. That is simply the nature of the beast.

by Bruce Wilson on Mon Dec 26, 2005 at 03:25:16 PM EST
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