“I plainly and genuinely think it’s far better to be intellectually engaged with the big questions of faith and meaning, and not to be indifferent to them”
There is a third alternative. One may be intellectually and emotinally engaged with such issues, but not impressed by sledgehammer rhetoric, and unoonvinced by simplistic arguments. You seem to assume that anyone who either believes or disbelieves should be writing books or shouting from the rooftops.

More broadly though — and here we get back to Keizer’s observation — it may be that most people involved in church or formal religion just don’t much care about these things. …
Well…yeah…
It takes a certain type of personality to be stridently passionate about things that can’t be proven, only argued about. Seems to me this is doubly true when the arguments are about things that have no practical value whatsoever, such as the filoque clause or the authority of Tradition as compared to the authority of Scripture.
Yes, those once were argued passionately amongst the general population, but in those days, the questions were associated with practical things like which group of people would be controlling Church revenues and influencing secular politics.
Once religious authority is separated from political power, then theological arguments devolve to the status of an intellectual hobby.

It’s debates like this that make Macintyre’s idea of the “rationality of traditions” (which he drew from Newman’s description of the development of doctrine) so important. On the surface level, it seems attractive to lay out all the reasons for our beliefs in a neat order. Yet, that is not how the human mind works and there can be profound wisdom in inherited ways of doing things. That’s why traditions should be viewed as conversations between the living and the dead. As conversations, traditions should be rational, but as anyone knows, a good conversation is more than a series of logical statements. Nevertheless, traditions can evolve into cul-de-sacs, dead ends where they’ve ceased to be fruitful or even coherent. There comes a time when people need to abandon large portions of the tradition in which they were brought up. I think contemporary Episcopalians have reached this point.

Re: Seems to me this is doubly true when the arguments are about things that have no practical value whatsoever, such as the filoque clause or the authority of Tradition as compared to the authority of Scripture.
Except that they do have practical value. Some would say that the question of whether the Eucharist is really the Body and Blood of Christ, or just a symbol of Christ, is the classic example of a question with no practical import. But they would be wrong. The question of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist ultimately boils down to whether things have an essence separate from their accidents, or whether the essence of a thing is simply reducible to its accidents, and it’s no accident that within a couple of centuries after people started denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they went on to deny the existence of anything that could not be tangibly perceived by the senses (i.e. to embrace materialism). Similarly, to believe that God the Son merely appeared to be human, as opposed to actually taking on a human body and human life, is to diminish the love that God had for us; it takes more love to actually die for someone else than to simply appear to die. Simply put, theology matters. Leaving aside the main point- if you believe that Christ is really present in the Eucharist, then it’s monumentally disrespectful to Him to treat the sacrament as a mere symbol.

I agree about how not everything is political. One thing I always liked about political scientists is that they don’t seem to think that their subject is some kind of unified field theory of human nature like sociologists or feminists.

The idea of staying or leaving is interesting. You know it is what most interested Heidegger. In his “On the Essence and Concepts of Nature, History and the State” he refers to the “Semitic nomads” whose “specific knowledge” has engendered in them a different relationship with the nature of their land than a “Slavic people”. So to Heidigger the most stiff necked in their beliefs- that is the ones with “that level of committment” to belief- are the ones who move.
By that theory, in today’s world with its transcience, you would expect alot of dogged atheism and religion.
Heidigger is noted to be a dark thinker. Simultaneously, being a Louisianian recently is synomymous with being under a dark cloud.
However, that doesn’t correlate to a tempest in a teapot. Like Louisiana’s recent oil spill, the belief/unbelief issue has broad implications.

You don’t have to be a theist to see that Hector is right, and that John E. hasn’t thought the thing through. Richard Weaver wrote a famous book, “Ideas Have Consequences,” in which he discussed how the entire history of the West turned on the defeat of Scholasticism and its transcendentalism by nominalism in the High Middle Ages. Why? Because that radically changed epistemology — that is, how we know what we know. Because of the outcome of that debate, empiricism, science, Protestantism and indeed modernity issued forth in time. The history of ideas, even those that seem inconsequential to us at the moment, can be seen as like making a slight degree of direction change. If you turn two degrees to the right instead of staying on course, you may not see much difference in your course for the first mile or two, but in 20, 30, 300 miles, you’ll arrive in a very different place than where you started. It’s like that with ideas, too. I think both engaged atheists and engaged theists understand the importance of these ideas more than most people do. But it’s also the case that the engages of both sides can lose sight of the fact that people are not the same thing as ideas. In the end, the man standing in front of you is more than simply the bearer of a Bad or Incorrect Idea; he is a human being who has a claim on your respect, and in some sense your love, no matter how wrong he is about God, or right and wrong. That is a very difficult thing to see sometimes — I struggle with it often, and often fail — but I think it’s at the heart of, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

I’d like to give a slightly different British perspective on this question.
Regular Christian church attendance in the US is, according to Wikipedia, 42%. In the UK the figure is certainly no higher than 10%, and probably lower. There are no Christian universities in Britain. We have no equivalent – in terms of funding, size or influence – of something like Focus on the Family. The “culture wars” in Britain have, to all intents and purposes, been a rout for the conservative side.
So what I am getting at is this: In Britain, intellectual disputation about religion really matters, if Christianity is to survive as a going concern on these shores. It matters because the very reasonableness of Christianity as a way of life is under near constant assault. It matters because our churches are empty while our abortion clinics and our drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities are full. It matters because Christians’ freedom of speech and thought is under threat. It matters because Christians are ridiculed and despised by almost every arbiter of cultural fashion.

I agree wholeheartedly with the contention. I consider myself to be agnostic. I don’t believe in any religion, but I don’t rule out the possibility of a higher being or power. There is much that is unknown and we really only have theories on the how and the why of humanity and our planet.
The stridency of both sides, theist and atheist drives me nuts. If you believe, fine. If you don’t believe, fine too. Having an argument of whether or not God exists is like having an argument about the existence of UFOs. You can’t prove or disprove either way. You just have to have faith or believe in things without concrete proof to be a theist. To be an atheist, you don’t believe the so-called proof and you move on. You can’t disprove God any more than you can prove him. Therefore, argument is quite silly.

I think temperment also plays a part here. Not everyone is interested in any ideas. Most people are not intellectuals. I think this is easy to forget if you spend any time on blogs engaging with public intellectuals like Rod, or if you work in a field that requires grappling with ideas, or if you spend your free time engaging with ideas generally. It’s easy to believe “everyone is like me” but it’s not actually true. Most people are busy getting through the day-to-day work of living, and just aren’t interested in the Big Questions.
I think about this every time I change a diaper (one of my kids is a toddler) — the Big Questions seem a bit less important when you are elbow deep in, well, you know. And I think that some people just are wired to grapple with ideas. I suspect the percentage of a population that *is* interested in ideas varies. I’ve always been under the impression that Europeans are generally more interested in ideas than Americans. Any place that has a cafe culture (like, say Buenos Aires), strikes me as having many people interested in ideas.
Captcha: stub firebombs. What the??

Good call, Helen: there are some people who are simply more inclined to discuss and dispute over ideas. The thing is, however, many of those who are disinclined to think about, much less dispute, ideas are often susceptible to having their own character, and the direction of their lives, formed by the outcome of these disputes than they realize. I don’t understand indifference to the question of God’s existence, but I think many people are — even people who profess religion. In the end, that functional indifference is going to have an effect, perhaps not on them, but certainly on their children, one way or another.

and it’s no accident that within a couple of centuries after people started denying the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they went on to deny the existence of anything that could not be tangibly perceived by the senses (i.e. to embrace materialism).
If there is no way to demonstrate a Real Presence, if there is no way to show an essence distinct from ‘accidents’, or what I would call a things physical characteristics, then the argument is not about what is objectively real, but about what people believe to be real.
In a situation like that, where claims cannot be demonstrated through physical examination, the winner of that debate ultimately depends on who can exert the most effective force to silence or destroy those of the other opinion.
Since this generally results in Bad Things, I submit that our society is better off now that questions of theology are relegated to the status of an intellectual hobby and are of little concern to the population at large – even religious folks.

I don’t understand indifference to the question of God’s existence, but I think many people are –
As I’ve said before, if God exists, He could, being Omnipotent, demonstrate his existence to me incontrovertibly.
Since He hasn’t, despite me asking nicely, I can only conclude that He doesn’t exist, or is indifferent to whether or not I believe in His existence.
Or is playing head games with me.

There are levels, and as we learned in “Shrek”, layers like an onion (not a parfait!).
Rod’s citation of early modern history is key. What he leaves out is an evolutionary pressure that drives both the ideas and their debate, and while no single pressure is definitive, the one that stands out is literacy.
Before literacy began to grow, oral tradition was the primary (and by far most successful) mode of conveyance from one generation to the next. If we are to also cite migratory groups, the one that gives us the most high-profile example is the Celts. Trace their movements over the centuries, from eastern Europe to the Isles, and you will see two things: A nearly perfect oral tradition (one that had an explicit priority in the culture) and an unsurpassed level of adaptability. I see this in the relatively trivial and mundane area of music, that being my personal passion, but it can be seen in their artifacts (being an oral tradition, that being the extent of the evidence we have to examine).
The mode is the limit (McLuhan later broadened that in his medium/message ideas). Oral traditions are by definition local. Unless there is a strong mechanism of communication amongst diverse groups (with the Celts, it was the druid and bard classes), divergence happens rather quickly. With literacy, and with the advent of the printing press, written tradition just out-paced oral and never looked back.
I’ll end this long post with that last comparison point and our modern dilemma: Oral tradition is a living one. We obtain “wisdom” form the mouths of people, who mix a commitment to origin and contemporary culture (that adaptability aspect). Written tradition is fixed (so long as the literature remains available), and there is a strong pressure to maintain it as-is. Thus do we have (in my view) the difference between folk wisdom that seems to keep a fresh value in contemporary contexts, and dogma and doctrine that carries age as an arbitrary value and feeds opposition to adaptability… that last trait being the primary strength of our species, I so opine and further submit that it is quod erat demonstrandum. Oral tradition is interactive, and debate is with the living, breathing repository of ideas. Written tradition is a static target, with the authors’ frequently (I imagine) spinning in their graves as one generation after the next gets their motivations just plain wrong. Adaptability is a process, thrives on dynamic forces.

Some would say that the question of whether the Eucharist is really the Body and Blood of Christ, or just a symbol of Christ, is the classic example of a question with no practical import. But they would be wrong.
Hector, it might be useful to differentiate between important questions and provable questions.
I submit that if a question is not provable, there is little point in debating the question. In the end, one will believe or not, depending on how comfortable one is with taking various unprovable assertions as axioms.
As in my case – well it just looks like a piece of bread to which some folk have attributed undemonstratable qualities.

John’s stoic agnostic stance (just informing relative newcomers of the source of the abbreviations after your name, and are they interchangeable?), while an attractive foil in this debate, offers only part of the picture: There are plenty of non-Christian theists around (myself amongst them) who debate a different choice. We are believers, as devout as they come, but we do not believe in a personal (or species) savior, nor is our image of deity at all like the patriarchal triad.
That’s intended to agree with Rod’s support of Hector’s position. We argue/debate the ideas in our belief systems, some with the same dogmatic fervor I usually criticize in the Western monotheisms. We also have relationships and children, and we carry the same degree of concern for those aspects of our lives.

The thing is, however, many of those who are disinclined to think about, much less dispute, ideas are often susceptible to having their own character, and the direction of their lives, formed by the outcome of these disputes than they realize.
This brings to mind the scene from The Devil Wears Prada where Meryl Streep’s character ridicules her young assistant’s belief that she (the assistant) makes her own fashion choices without regard to trends. Streep’s character lays out the line from haute couture to the blue pull-over sweater from The Gap that the assistant is wearing. She asserts that the assistant’s so-called “personal” taste in clothing has been dictated by the high-fashion industry even if she never picked up a fashion magazine or saw a fashion show. Thought provoking — and uncomfortable for people like me — on several levels.

Franklin — I didn’t mean that folks with kids aren’t interested in ideas! To the contrary. I have always been interested in ideas — just my temperment — and that didn’t change when my two little ones came along. What I meant was actually two points, I guess. One is that a lot of people are not intellectuals — that is to say, a lot of people just are not interested in ideas, by their temperments. Also, day-to-day living can be hard, especially when the kids are young, or you have older or disabled folks to care for, or resources are scarce. It’s hard to focus on the Big Questions when you are making sure the toddler doesn’t fall down the stairs. One other thing I would say, picking up on John’s point — sometimes taking one’s passionate beliefs to the logical conclusion would mean going to war with those who disagree. There’s an awful lot of history to support the idea that too much religious passion, untempered by tolerance and respect for others’ beliefs, is not a good thing.
Captcha: albania aid. Why yes, Captcha AI, Albania is a good example of my last point.

Helen: I think temperment also plays a part here. Not everyone is interested in any ideas (emphasis added)
I think this is more accurate than John E.’s assertion about “things that can’t be proven”. Much scientific debate, for example, is passionate within scientific circles, but would hold less interest than a rodent’s posterior to the average person.
Rod: The thing is, however, many of those who are disinclined to think about, much less dispute, ideas are often susceptible to having their own character, and the direction of their lives, formed by the outcome of these disputes than they realize.
Well, sounds like most of human history to me! At the risk of sounding like an elitist 18th-Century philosophe issuing lordly dismissals of the gibbering, unwashed masses, the elitist 18th-Century philosophes did have a point. Just look, e.g., at any mass political movement on either end of the spectrum.
Rod: I don’t understand indifference to the question of God’s existence….
This gets back to what I’ve said on many threads of late, that there has to be some temperamental basis. People are really hardwired differently, to use a metaphor. Given this fact, and that God must be author of said hardware, this is why I tend toward universalism.
Rod: I have to confess that it would probably be difficult and unpleasant to live in a society in which everyone, atheists and theists, were as engaged as partisans on both sides.
One of the early Church Fathers, I forget who, describes 4th Century society in Constantinople as being exactly like this in a famous piece in which he describes going to the baths and having the attendant pronounce on the Persons of the Trinity, or going to market and having the grocer discourse on the relationship between Divine and Human in Christ. As to what it’s like to live in such a society…
John E.: In a situation like that, where claims cannot be demonstrated through physical examination, the winner of that debate ultimately depends on who can exert the most effective force to silence or destroy those of the other opinion.
I’ve recently read the excellent Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkins, in which he discusses the early Church Councils, and I’ve gotta say that I’m inclined to agree with John on this. While as a Christian I think what one believes about one’s religion is important, Jenkins’s book reminds one of the barbarity, the military action, the exilings, the murders, the street mobs (often led by monks!), and other nastiness involved in the process of determining Christian doctrine. In many cases it wasn’t even really doctrinal, but a matter of misunderstandings of nuances in different languages (Aramaic, Latin, Greek, and Coptic) and the ambitions of many patriarchs and Popes. I believe in the Nicene Creed, but the way it got there was, to say the least, God writing straight with very crooked lines, and one wonders if it could have been done more peacefully and non-politically had the people of the time been a little less passionate.
Thus, to the question of whether it’s better to have a society passionately concerned about these issues or one that doesn’t give a fig, while it’s tempting for a believer to prefer the former, I think (and I’m agreeing with John E. here) it’s probably better (and safer) to be in the latter.
Helen: I think about this every time I change a diaper (one of my kids is a toddler) — the Big Questions seem a bit less important when you are elbow deep in, well, you know.
While I do have the temperament to be passionately interested in ideas (theological or otherwise), the older I get the more I tend to agree with Helen here. When I was younger, whether certain ideas were “right” or “wrong” seemed very clear and of vital importance. You get to a stage, though, where, while not dismissing right and wrong, or their importance, you see that there’s a lot more gray involved. Also, for me at least (and I suspect I’m not alone in this), passion for ideas was in many ways a substitute for living life and doing things that really had direct effects in the world. Getting older, marrying, and having children changes one’s perspective there, too. Yes, the ideas are important, and I’ll never not be apathetic to them; but there is also wisdom in the Zen notion of enlightenment in the homely tasks of “chopping wood and carrying water”.
Can I get an “om”?
CAPTCHA: life inns
Idea: Rod, you should write down a list of CAPTCHAs, then put on a black turtleneck with shades and a beret, then recite them as Beat poetry. I think we’d all enjoy that. Or heck, one of us could to it…or even better, William Shatner (dare we hope?).

I think Hector provides a well-written defense of the importance of believing the Real Presence… except I am a member of Intellectual Hobby Reformed Church, and there are men in my tradition who would strenuously contend with this and say, no, _he_ is the one disrespecting Christ if he thinks that Christ is not permanently exalted in the heavens, or if his sacrifice needs to be re-enacted, etc etc and on and on. I’m with John A-S: I see little point in debating these matters, it makes no practical difference in daily Christian life, and especially there is no point in getting hot and bothered. People who do that actually I find scary.

At my nephew’s confirmation at the RC church where the Bishop slapped my face at my confirmation, his older sister was not participating. She is a senior in college and went through 12 years of RC education. She just sat there with a silly look on her face. As an Orthodox convert, I didn’t participate either. After the ceremony I asked her what was up. She told me she was an atheist and religion was for losers. I quickly learned after my conversion not to discuss religion with the children of my nine siblings, well eight because one is an RC priest. She learned all about The Enlightenment at her RC high school and took it to heart. I had the same experience at my RC high school. The religious seem to think that they need to prove how open minded they are.
My own 21 yr old son is now a 32nd degree Mason. He no longer goes to Divine Liturgy, but he still considers himself Orthodox. He even has an “all seeing eye” tat on his back. Better than a tribal cross with tribal scribble all over it. Kids today, jeez.
Captcha soldier’s tolerance. Yeah right

Ah, Helen, though our youngest (of three) is 17 going on 30 (ahem), I remember very well the up-to-the-elbows days.
The next generation is an implied core issue here, I submit. I mentioned children because they should be part of our discussion, because as parents we are (well, damn well should be) part and parcel of their development from in-the-moment little critters to abstract thinkers. The cusp, as you are or soon will be aware, is that point in the child’s development where the question “why?”* becomes an obsessive exercise.
We, parents and teachers all, have a difficult balance to maintain, and it never gets easy. We must judge in the moment which questions can validly only be answered with “because I know and you don’t (yet)” and equipping them with the tools and skill to use them to find their own answers. Hardest of all is stepping back and letting them make mistakes, that being the most effective goad to learning.
* Some call them the “terrible twos”, but my sister and I consider the “fearsome fours” marked by the incessant “why?” much more of a challenge.

I skipped reading the comments of others… because I knew I’d get exhausted and not want to go through them.
The author is right. There is a threshold after which intellectual engagement in any subject becomes onerous and tiring. It’s the reason I stopped reading your CrunchyCon blog for a while, Rod. Not because I disagreed with the opinions (I did but that’s besides the point) but because I burned out. Then I came back after a while.

For Al-Dhariyat, with empathy:
Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.
The Lord of the Rings
Treebeard, Chapter ‘Treebeard’.

Isn’t it the least bit interesting that John E. refers to God in the masculine. You can’t prove masculine by Rublev’s Trinity. And also that John E. has asked God nicely to prove God’s existence incontrovertibly. If the kingdom of heaven has keys, then asking nicely is not the point.

Sorry, tscott, but that’s an egregious stretch. How long would it take your average Christian, for example, to take offense — or at least become mortally confused — if I were to insist on referring to the Christian God as “She”? The masculine pronoun is the default usage in American English, and basing a rebuttal on that is, well, silly.

One of the most tiresome people I ever met was an academic feminist who was going on about how politically offensive some innocent phenomenon was, and I said, “You know, not everything is political.” She and her boyfriend shot back in unison, “No, everything is political!” They weren’t kidding.
Such thuggish, self-important and humorless pricks, always and everywhere the authors of their own troubles, are of that common human type, also found among movement conservatives, whose votaries would appear not to have taken a good scat in about forty years. In exiting the company of such clods instanter upon such unwitty self-revelations, I borrow from Daniel Tosh and Woody Allen, respectively: “Whatever, Queer…Right. Well, I have to – I have to go now, because I, I’m due back on the planet Earth.”
Then, as I moonwalk backward out of the room, smiling politely, “And when I come back, could you get me a beer and make me a sandwich?”
Then I laugh, and laugh, and laugh…

As Franklin points out, there are accepted grammatical conventions used in our shared social setting for referencing Deity in the abstract. That I follow those conventions is no more indicative of belief than would be my use of A.D. as a convention for referencing a year.
If the kingdom of heaven has keys, then asking nicely is not the point.
Matthew 7:7-8 seems to suggest otherwise:
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:
For every one that asks receives; and he that seeks finds; and to him that knocks it shall be opened.

Franklin Evans, you’re quite right (bloody well right). Some days, I’m quite happy to wade into the muck and mire of the debates. And they should be thought-provoking and involved which is why I keep coming back to the blog.
Other times, I just have to pass.

Turmarion,
Safer, certainly. But does safer necessarily mean ‘better’? Living in 4th century Constantinople would have been fabulously _interesting_ and _exciting_ for any theologically engaged Christian. How cool would it have been to walk out of your house and hear heated debates about whether the Son was of one being, or just of similar being, to the Father?
Re: While as a Christian I think what one believes about one’s religion is important, Jenkins’s book reminds one of the barbarity, the military action, the exilings, the murders, the street mobs (often led by monks!), and other nastiness involved in the process of determining Christian doctrine
Whereas nowadays we have wars about political ideology instead. And ever since the Cold War ended, we’ve had wars about whether people are going to be ruled by politicians who speak Georgian or Ossetian, by Tajik warlords or Pashtun warlords, or similarly weighty issues. I think it would be hard to argue that the twentieth century was more peaceful or less warlike than the fourth, and judging by the various wars going on around the world today, I don’t think we are in for a particularly peaceful 21st century either.

Hector, you should read L. Sprague de Camp’s “Lest Darkness Fall”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lest_Darkness_Fall

I think a big reason for the disinterested middle is that people are on average fairly pragmatic. They recognize that no universally accepted answer has come forward in all of recorded human history, so it is likely that no answers are likely in their lifetimes. So the debate is pointless unless you enjoy the debate.

At one pole, we have those whose rhythms of soul are pegged to each newly burning headline, Chicken Little Big Men for whom this guy is falling, always and everywhere, pre-laryngitic, forehoarse men of a couple lips now, excitable boys always with the-British-are-coming, or the demographic bugbears du jour, their hair always standing deliberately on end, as if manually lacquered so for effect. Signature utterance: “Things are never good/Things go from bad to weird” (Lou Reed, “Underneath the Bottle”). Soul brothers: Barney Fife, Ralph Furley.
At the other pole, those bottom-weighted like children’s punching dummies to bounce up after every epiphenomenal punch thrown by the outside world, who could not be more detached utterly from the 24-7 cable “news” cycle, the latest fabricated “culture” “wars” and viral Internet memes if they were Wendell Berry at muletime, people of infinitely suave and urbane modulations of the soul who, were they singers, would be Bing Crosby and Perry Como, and, were they sentences, would bear the copyright-stamp “J. Updike”, with enough historical consciousness to know that all cultural forms, being human artifacts, are born, ripen, decay and die no less than all their mortal artificers themselves, who know, with Rush’s Tom Sawyer, that changes aren’t permanent – but change is, and are determined, with REO Speedwagon, to roll with those changes, and profit from them, however stormy and cyclonic the civilizational feather warcast, people who see in Chairman Bill’s command to “stand athwart History, yelling Stop” the front-runner for Best Comic Line at the all-century Canute Awards. Signature lines: No use crying over spilled milk; Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.

Turmarion: “Much scientific debate, for example, is passionate within scientific circles, but would hold less interest than a rodent’s posterior to the average person.”
True! But can that scientific debate reach a conclusion? The Einstein- Bohr debate on quantum theory was unexpectedly ultimately settled in Bohr’s favor by John Bell’s inequality. This trickles down to those who are interested in the popular explanation of science.
“Given this fact, and that God must be author of said hardware, this is why I tend toward universalism.”
God must be the author of said hardware? Nope, that isn’t so. The natural world can be the author of said hardware.

OT, but Turmarion, I also vote for William Shatner. With a black turtleneck (slimming!), beret, and shades.
Captcha: “and hopped”

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