Ross writes:
I understand that atheists and agnostics have a vested interest in arguing that all religious beliefs are equally absurd - that there's no difference between believing n the God of Abraham and the flying spaghetti monster, say, or between a belief in the possibility of miracles and the belief that the Genesis account is literally true; and that the only reason the Book of Mormon looks more implausible than the New Testament is because the New Testament is older, and so forth. But serious Christians should reject that view (for reasons that I think should be self-evident, though I'm sure I'll have reason to elaborate on them at a later date), and within Christendom there's a pretty big distinction between the faith-and-reason crowd and the kind of fideism that Huckabee seemed to be gesturing at last night.
In an utterly sincere way, I would like him -- or possibly Stephen? -- to elaborate on those reasons. The flying spaghetti monster and what-have-you are clearly not belief systems with the demonstrated resiliency or applicability of Christianity, but my crude understanding of the way faith works in all this doesn't provide much illumination as to how certain religions justify their worthiness for faith, as opposed to a sort of for-the-good-of-society adherence. Buddhism, for its part, has always sought to sidestep this question by arguing that it's an empirically provable system, while Judaism appears to have largely reconciled itself with a great mass of members who aren't necessarily believers, but think financially supporting synagogues and the state of Israel remains important. It's almost as if group identity has overtaken the religion, a state of affairs I find unsettling. I get that the Christian approach differs from those attempts to protect religion from skepticism, but how it goes about this quest remains, to me, mysterious.
