While it's impossible to get pithier (or funnier) than Bob Wright in this clip, Ross Douthat's long, long wind-up to his question about the limits of liberal theology can be summed up like this: Wasn't Flannery O'Connor onto something when she said, of the Eucharist, 'Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it'?
UPDATE: From The Revealer's review of the book defining and condemning Moralistic Therapeutic Deism:
While adults may have found a way to articulate their beliefs in a way that sounds convincingly Christian (or Jewish or Mormon or Muslim, etc., etc.), what the authors have found is that the teens can't really talk about faith. (Perhaps they are simply too young to make sense, or rationalize, between one moral system that emphasizes self-sacrifice and another that emphasizes self-esteem.) Yet, teenage inarticulacy, the authors argue, is not a matter of mere adolescent bumbling, or the result of nerves brought on by interviews with a stuffy sociologist in the study room of the public library. In interviews (with those same stuffy sociologists in those same study rooms), teens were able to speak with real fluency on other matters of ethical, cultural and social significance -- from the impact of HIV/AIDS, drug use, and drunk driving, to "television characters and pop stars." Nor are teenage episodes of verbal faltering harmless. Referring to Charles Taylor's arguments that "inarticulacy undermines the possibilities of reality," the authors warn that "religious faith, practice, and commitment can be no more than vaguely real when people cannot talk much about them."
In other words, the more abstract and non-specific religious belief is, the less effect it has on the lives people actually live.
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Cecelia, I agree that a lot of the immediate conflict in a place like Northern Ireland is a clash of tribes, and that it has little if any doctrinal content. But those tribes trace their roots back to the 17th century, when religious wars were still raging. I'll bet if you checked the DNA of Orangemen and IRA members, you'd find there's virtually no actual ethnic difference between them. But they came to conceive of themselves as Loyalists and Republicans at a time when national groups were being defined on religious lines, and when it still seemed really, really important whether your group answered to the Pope or not.
If anything, I think what the Northern Ireland situation tells us is that once serious religious conflict takes hold, it can create divisions that take generations or centuries to get past. And I am with you in seeing this as raising the question of how we deal with the negative side of religious "specificity" -- an issue that I gather has not yet occurred to Ross Douthat or Rod Dreher, who I think too easily assume that peaceful coexistence among different religious groups (such as we mostly have in America today) is easily achieved when it's actually the hard-won aftermath of a whole lot of fighting.
In other words, the more abstract and non-specific religious belief is, the less effect it has on the lives people actually live.
God hates shrimp.
Nixon is lord.
Let us proclaim the Mystery of Nixon Faith: He's tan; he's rested; he's ready.
Now for 18 1/2 minutes of silence. Rosemary....
Brain science has found that the portion of the brain controlling judgment does not mature untill between 23-25 years you can expect actions and beliefs that differ from mature adults. My beliefs have not change since I was 19.
Unless your discussion is based on these eternal truths which are available to all, it and you are lost:
1.) There is A (one) Creator God.
2.) He describes Himself and His plans for the universe and us in the Hebrew Bible (Tanach/"Old Testament").
3.) The proof of these assertions is in the ELS codes (Equidistant Letter Sequences) found in the Tanach and nowhere else.
4.) These ELS codes (names, context-related messages) are so many orders of magnitude in complexity beyond the computational abilities of even the most powerful of today's supercomputers, that no one, statisticians included, can even describe them mathematically.
5.) These ELS codes persist from one Book of the Old Testament to the next, overlap and run in both directions, and diagonally, at untold numbers of different letter spacings. (See works of Yacov Rambsel)
6.) These codes cannot be used to predict the future, although many have tried. They apparently exist solely as a kind of "signature" of the spiritual Author of the Old Testament, Who calls Himself YHVH Elohim.
7.) In this Book, He offers any who will listen eternal life.
8.) The rest is history, and prophecy.
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