Ultima sesiune la Iris a fost despre Creștinul secolului XXI și celelalte credințe: dragoste sau toleranță?

Iată ceva vitamine pentru minte. Doi oameni bine cultivați în ale Scripturilor și nu numai vorbind despre subiectul care ne-a interesat.

De asemenea, trebuie să adaug neapărat o erată. Am postat imediat scuzele după conferință pe pagina mea de facebook. În textul pe care îl aveam în față în timpul prelegerii scria: ”așa cum așteptăm ca alții să știe că noi avem patru evanghelii, tot așa trebuie să știm cîți stîlpi are în minte un muslim”. Eram stresat că nu mă va ține vocea. Eram foarte răcit și o pățisem deja dimineață. M-am grăbit și am spus ”trebuie să știm că Islamul are patru stîlpi” și asta în contextul în care recomandam informare corectă asupra celorlalte credințe. Are cinci de fapt! Mea maxima culpa!

I-am rugat pe băieții de la video să editeze prostioara! Inadmisibil din partea mea!

Dar să îi ascultăm pe cei care nu spun prostii:

Every culture, without exception, has tolerance worked in somewhere, even in the most dictatorial regime. There is always the question of what can people be allowed to get away with? How much deviation can you allow? And, whatever the deviation that is allowed without physical coercion is tolerance. And every culture has intolerant somewhere, even in our culture. For example, we don’t allow, let’s say, pedophilia. We’re intolerant of that and there are sanctions, court sanctions, because of it. But, on the other hand, how much tolerance is allowed, how much deviation is allowed has varied enormously from culture to culture, and one of the tracts that is fed into contemporary understandings of culture, up until about fifty years ago, has been Christian understanding. That’s not been the only stream, but one of the streams that is fed into the notion of culture that was offered up until about fifty years ago was Christian understanding that views of God should not be coerced. The state should not be appealed to, to back up Christian understandings of theology and that presupposes some sort of difference between church and state, a refusal to identify the two parties. But in all of that sort of discussion of tolerance, that kind of tolerance presupposed that I could really dislike the ideas I was hearing, but I would defend to the death the right of the opponents to articulate them. That was still tolerance and that left me the freedom to say, “I think you’re ideas are ridiculous for the following fourteen reasons.” And they could say the same to me. So, tolerance did not mean that everybody was pretending to say the same thing; it meant that there were no public coercive powers that were exerted to force people to be in line as to what they thought and what they taught in public. But for all kinds of complex reasons, increasingly tolerance means that in a variety of domains you mustn’t say that somebody else is wrong. You might even go so far as to say that they’re all equally right, and if you criticize anybody for anything, then you are intrinsically intolerant.

Now that’s a massive change and it becomes actually publicly dishonest. It induces an inability to talk about ideas openly because if you say that somebody is wrong on another religion or homosexuality or whatever, then you’re a bigot. You’re right-wing. You’re narrow-minded. You’re intolerant. Which means it’s really difficult to engage with ideas. In the area of evangelism, which is where I first started facing it because I still do university missions, if you try to give all of the best reasons why you really ought to see that Christ did historically rise from the dead, the first question that would come back under the new tolerance would be: “Yeah, but what about all the Hindus?” And so, instead of engaging with the ideas, what is presented is intolerance as a kind of defeater belief. A defeater belief is a belief which, if you hold to it, defeats other beliefs. So if in our culture we have a whole lot of people who think that it is wrong to say that there is only one way to God, if you hold that very strongly then that defeats all sort of Christian witness that you present because it’s already ruled out of court. It’s automatically inadmissible because it’s too narrow. It’s an intolerant frame of mind and intolerance is intrinsically bad.

Continuarea AICI

Există și varianta audio și transcriptul deopotrivă!