I accidently listened to this morning's Reith Lecture on Radio 4, and found it to be a wise and well-considered lecture, as you would hope for. Professor Sandel delivered a lecture worthy of the air time, and while I'm sure I'd have differing views from him on some issues, I appreciated his thoughts and openness.
What I appreciated much less was the blinkered and dismissive attitudes portrayed by some of the people asking questions at the end. I don't know if the questions will make it onto the podcast or not, but eminent people with a secularist mindset seemed aggressive in their desire to remove faith traditions from moral questions. Two questions stuck in my throat, one which claimed that the non-religious side (of whatever debate) were evidenced based rather than simply dogmatic fundamentalists (which is hard to reconcile with the prejudice faith based organisations regularly encounter in public life), and the other which said there should be no place for faith traditions in decisions of morality, but instead the zeitgeist should decide (I'm paraphrasing there). The irony is that the second questioner used the words, "I believe..." Rather than being evidence based the secularist questioner framed his question on his belief, his notion of how the world should be! Blind spot anyone?
I'm absolutely certain that I have blind spots too, but I hope I'm a little more gracious and evidence-based in my conversations...
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