re the arrogance of christians to what follows our moderator has already answered the charge of arrogance more ably that i could have done so so i will confine myself to answering the charge of illogic in a previous article eugene bigelow ebay sun com geno says if i don t think my belief is right and everyone else s belief is wrong then i don t have a belief this is simply what belief means unfortunatly this seems to be how christians are taught to think when it comes to their religion this is how everyone in the western intellectual tradition is or was taught to think it is the fundamental premis a is not not a if a thing is true then its converse is necessarilly false without this basic asumption theology and science as we know them are alike impossible we should distinguish the strong and weak meanings of the word believe however the weak sense means i am not sure i believe tom went to the library but he could have gone to the track the strong sense means i am so certain that i use it as a basis of thought i believe that nature operates according to certain fundamental laws despite the fact that nature appears capricious and unpredictable christian belief is of the strong kind though christians may well hold beliefs of the weak kind on any number of theological and ecclesiological topics some take it to the extreme and say that their religion is the only one and if you don t accept their teachings then you won t be saved note that these are two separate ideas most hold the first view but the majority do not hold the second is is again a matter of pure logic that if christanity is true then hinduism for example must necessarilly be false insofar as it contradicts or is incompatible with christaianity and as a matter of logic vice versa it takes quite a bit of arrogance to claim to know what god thinks wants it is arrogant to claim to know what anyone thinks or wants unless they have told you christians believe god has told us what he thinks and wants especially when it s based upon your interpretation of a book most christians do not base their belief on the bible but on the living tradition of the church established by christ and guided constantly by the holy spirit the bible is simply the written core of that tradition the logic in the above statement is faulty in that it assumes two people with differing beliefs can t both be correct if depends what you mean by differing if i believe tom is six feet tall and you believe he weighs pounds our beliefs differ but we may both be right if i believe tom is six feet tall and you beleive that he is four foot nine one of us at least must be wrong it s all about perception no two people are exactly alike no two people perceive everything in the same way i believe that there is one truth call it god s truth a universal truth or call it what you will i don t believe god presents this truth i think it is just there and it s up to you to look for and see it through prayer meditation inspir ation dreams or whatever just because people may perceive this truth differently it doesn t mean one is wrong and the other is right thus you believe that there is a single truth but that no human being can find it you assert that anyone who believe that we can find absolute truth is mistaken in short you believe that anyone who does not share your belief on this point is wrong qed as an example take the question is the glass half empty or half full you can have two different answers which are contradictory and yet both are correct so for your belief to be true does not require everyone else s belief to be wrong here i begin to suspect that your real difficulty is not with the knowability of truth but simply with language saying that the glass is half empty is not a contradiction of the statement that it is half full it is the same fact expressed in different words the whole point of this phrase is to illustrate the different ways the pessimist and the optimist express the same fact it is of course quite true that different people may express the same belief in different words it is also true that they may fail to understand each other s words as expressions of the same belief and may argue bitterly and believe that they are miles apart great scisms have occurred in just this way and much ecumenical work has been done simply in resolving differences in language which conceal agreement in belief this does not mean in any sense that all beliefs are equally valid since some of the beliefs people hold contradict some other beliefs that other people hold after all obfuscations of language and culture in the expression of those beliefs have been stripped away some of the beliefs that some people hold must necessarilly be false and it is neither arrogant nor illogical to say so if i believe x and you believe y we may both be correct but if y is equivalent to not x then one of us is wrong and as long as we hold our respective beliefs we must each regard the other as in error mark baker the task is not to cut down jungles but aa freenet carleton ca to irrigate deserts c s lewis
