You’re right, I could have said a lot more. It was late!
The point of my response was that Matt was critiquing religion’s value by looking purely at scripture. Which, hey, is obviously important! But you can find a lot of strange things–or not find a lot of obviously true things–if you just open to a random page of the bible, or even just read every page but do so in a vacuum. The Christian bible (like the Hebrew bible before it) is the product of a historical community and lives within a larger tradition, which informs it and is informed by it. And it’s a story, not an instruction book. So, in the same way that I might say The Godfather has taught me something about families, even while giving primarily an example of a rotten one, scripture can be edifying as a whole in context without being always edifying in its details.
There IS a doctrine of special respect for human life in Christian doctrine–to use one of Matt’s critiques–and it does derive from the scriptures in large part, where the overriding message is that we are created by a God who made the world to be good, and that, when that human nature failed, it was sanctified by an act of love that was the incarnation of God into humanity in Jesus Christ. And we can trust that those truths can be our guidepost in life not just because they are supported by the story of scripture as a whole, but also because they are the truths that the Christian community has professed from essentially the very beginning.
Could that whole edifice of thought be wrong? Well, yeah, of course. It is self-supporting, in a certain way. Pull the plank of Church tradition out of it, and it can’t stand on just the strength of scriptural text alone, and vice versa. But this was my point about all various systems of value, whether we’re talking about religion, science, culture: They’re all just appeals to authority, informed by our personal experience, and glued together by faith. Faith is often described as some kind of anti-knowledge, but it is just a necessary thing in everyday life that props up the first three walls of our worldview until we can get the fourth put up and the house can stand on its own (until it takes a battering or two (hundred) from reality, and you find out just how stable it is).
Which is a good bridge to this question: Why does the below only apply to religious people?
I don’t know any religious person who is 100% sure about what they believe.
To go back to Matt’s points:
I don’t disagree with this. I wasn’t contrasting religion with Scott’s examples of history and science by saying religion brings us clear and pristine values on a silver platter while science, et al, bring us muddy, culturally conditioned ones. My point is that I don’t think science, for instance, can say anything about value at all! Or meaning. Science, by its nature, doesn’t answer “why” questions*. That’s not a condemnation of it; it does other great things very very well. But it seems to me you have to get to some kind of religious or pseudo-religious order of questioning (so-called “First Things”) to actually have a good sense of, for instance, how to responsibly apply scientific knowledge or how to judge historical figures and events.
* Well, I mean, it can answer why the sky is blue, but not WHY is the sky blue, if you get my drift.
